Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

Any basic kid of my generation remembers the craze of Japanese ghost women haunting their dreams in the early 2000s. I distinctly remember getting rather pissed one time off at two friends who slept over, and kept wailing into the night about Samara coming to get them. Ju-On: The Grudge and Ringu were two Japanese horror movies that soon got American remakes and exploded onto the Western mainstream, and both spawned an obscene number of sequels et al. I enjoyed all such movies back in the day, and after more than ten years, I decided to revisit Ju-On: The Grudge.

The throaty croaking, the creaking woman with long black hair and cat screeches are so widely known of The Grudge, but what only fans will recognise it for is the episodic framing, eerie use of sweeping camera and minimal musical score, and overall excellence in creating suspense. For all the Scary Movie-style parody and social recognition that the franchise has attracted, Ju-On: The Grudge remains a quietly scary film that horror rookies will be scared by, and horror experts will be impressed by.

"Bubblegum!"

The story of Ju-On: The Grudge is centred on a particular house in suburban Japan. A typical Japanese family home with paper doors and minimal decoration, its boxy interiors capture the majority of the movie's action and fear. A catatonic old woman lives in the house, and very quickly, the family and acquaintances who set foot in the place are hunted down by a ghostly woman and disappear. What is essentially a basic setup is made more mysterious in its non-linear presentation, jumping around on the story's timeline to ultimately give us a complete jigsaw puzzle.

Get those nuts away from my face!

I've experienced a moderate body of Asian horror movies over the years, and would never claim to be an expert, or even an enthusiast, despite how highly I would recommend the movies I have seen and the genre they represent. I find Ju-On: The Grudge to be an easily watchable movie. I know of many people who really will not give their time to foreign movies, and I swear to God, if I had a nickel for every time I had heard, "If I wanted to read, I'd go to a library!" But I think that this movie is a fairly easy transition for a world cinema novice. Speech, of course, plays an important part, but a surprising amount of the movie is visual, and I believe transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries. Honestly, this could be a silent movie of the '20s with just a musical score and still work terrifically.

All this pussy and nobody's getting laid

As I said, I am no expert in Asian movies, and speak about three words of Japanese, but as an enthusiastic linguist of the English language, I can say that at times, the standard of acting is hard to judge due to the cadences of spoken Japanese. When compared to their corresponding subtitles, some regular spoken sequences can come across as over-acted to an English-speaking audience, but I understand that this could be due to the natural sound of the Japanese language. However, as I have observed with many a horror movie over the years, the actors are largely very convincing and engaging when acting frightened.


Director/writer Takashi Shimizu has fun within the visual and narrative boundaries he set for himself and his crew, and manages to communicate fear up-close and in long shots. Those iconic extreme close-ups of the faces of the ghosts' imminent victims are so well crafted and acted, and truly stand out as the highlights of the movie. The repeated sweeping tracking shots of victims as they succumb to the haunting are wonderfully simplistic while establishing key visual themes; by the third or fourth chapter of this chilling tale, we understand what is to come both visually and narratively, but that doesn't stop it from being absolutely terrifying when it arrives.

Helloooo? Avon calling!

As it happens, I did not find Ju-On: The Grudge as immediately terrifying as I either remembered or anticipated. I did not jump, and no scene gave me the chills or gave me trouble sleeping (as tall an order as that is for me these days), but as a film enthusiast, I really appreciate this picture. It clearly inspired enough tension and excitement in people to spew a whole gooey egg-nest from its cinematic loins, but the humility and understated charm of Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge is an entirely enjoyable and magnetic cinematic experience.