Sad Girl Autumn - Revisiting The Grudge, 20 Years Later

A lone woman walks into a modern, lonely-looking house. There is nothing overtly sinister about this house, but the woman can’t help but notice that there are many corners, nooks, and crannies. The interior of the home appears disheveled, neglected. Something happened here, some time ago. The silence is oppressive. Then the unmistakable yowl of a cat. Then an indescribable, guttural noise that the woman feels in her ribs. The noise is human, full of pain, yet wholly unnatural. The woman looks up. Something is crawling down the stairs. 

These images and sounds play out many times over during the course of the Ju-On franchise. Sometimes the details change - a lone man entering the house instead of a woman. The specter of a ghostly little boy instead of the cat, or sometimes the boy and the cat. The Something crawling down the stairs is, at other times, The Something in the attic. The details change, but the oppressive atmosphere of despair and dread remain the same, and they form the recipe of the Ju-On films, helmed by Japanese horror stalwart Takashi Shimizu.

To attempt to describe the chronology and mythology of these famously nonlinear movies is to plunge headfirst into a thorny thicket of word salad. So, the short version: a husband drives himself to maniacal, jealous rage after discovering his wife’s obsessive love for another man, kills her, their son, the family cat, and then himself. The ghosts of the victims remain at the scene of the grisly crime, cursing anyone who enters with eventual death, almost moving like a haunting virus, jumping from person to person. 

This curse of familial betrayal and death fuels the breathless run of Ju-On films–from 2000 to 2003, we have Ju-On: The Curse, Ju-On: The Curse 2, Ju-On: The Grudge, and Ju-On-: The Grudge 2–all helmed by Shimizu, all maintaining a consistent level of quality, craftsmanship, and genuinely unsettling atmosphere. Critical and commercial esteem for these films grew exponentially by word of mouth wildfire. It wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. After the unexpected, era-defining success of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), a remake of Hideo Nakata’s beloved Japanese original Ringu (1998), American producers began tapping the heretofore overlooked and undervalued Asian horror scene for inspiration. One of those producers was Sam Raimi, riding high in the wake of Spider-Man’s success. A genuine admirer of Shimizu and the Ju-On installments, Raimi wisely tapped Shimizu for the American remake, now simply titled The Grudge. A post-Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar would star. The budget was modest, as was its barely 90-minute runtime. A release date was set for October 2004. 

Most American theatergoers buying a ticket to The Grudge were experiencing this cursed haunting for the first time. Meanwhile, Shimizu’s helming of the American remake marked his fifth time directing an installment of this franchise, and that’s not even counting his two 1998 short films that served as spiritual precursors to the Ju-On films. And it’s Shimizu’s well-oiled craft and calm confidence behind the camera that gives The Grudge its power, and why it successfully holds up two decades later. He knows this material inside and out and can focus on pure atmosphere. 

A seemingly simple but pivotal choice in this adaptation, credited to screenwriter Steven Susco: The Grudge doesn’t leave the Tokyo setting for the sake of its Western audience. Even The Ring transported its ghostly television set to an American setting. The Grudge takes a different approach, merely inventing new American transplant characters working and living in Japan, all of whom come into contact with the cursed house in different ways. This wisely retains the roots of the horror in Japanese folklore but also adds an extra layer of disorientated alienation to the proceedings, our American characters already anxiously navigating the cultural/language barriers of their adopted home well before the stress of dealing with vengeful specters.

This dynamic is most powerfully seen in the section involving Clea DuVall’s character, a jetlagged, lonely wife whose husband has unsuspectedly moved their family to the cursed house for work. Boxes remain unpacked, trips to the grocery store become fraught experiences when one doesn’t speak the language, and Duvall’s invalid mother-in-law (the great Grace Zabriske) seems to be losing her last remaining marbles. DuVall’s performance, in just a few brief scenes, offers a surprisingly aching glimpse of the disorientation, loneliness, and depression that can come after a huge move. It adds an emotional wellspring to the proceedings before this family is ultimately, mercilessly consumed by the housebound spirits.

If all this sounds pretty bleak, well, it is. There’s little hope in the universe of The Grudge and its Japanese source material, only despair and sadness. Ju-On: The Grudge memorably ends with a series of shots of empty, lonely Tokyo streets, as if the curse eventually wipes out the entire community, one lonely soul after another. The Grudge doesn’t go quite that far, but that sense of oppressive dread is retained, and I wonder if that wasn’t to what Western audiences responded so strongly as they made The Grudge and The Ring box office smashes. Sure, there were diminishing returns as the Hollywood glut of quickly-produced Asian horror remakes–often typified by wet-haired ghosts cornering their prey in increasingly ridiculous machinations–but at heart, these are chilly, achingly sad tragedies of how violence infects its perpetrators, victims, and innocent bystanders. In an era of American horror that was so often glib and quippy, the aesthetic chilliness and moral seriousness of these Japanese imports felt like a breath of fresh air, at least for a little while. 

In revisiting The Grudge for this piece, only one scene stands out as explicitly tailored for Western audiences: when Detective Nakagawa (genre favorite Ryo Ishibashi) solemnly explains to Gellar the concept of a ghostly curse emerging from a moment of horrible violence. No such scene, literally spelling out the why and how of a haunting, exists in the original Ju-Ons, presumably unnecessary for Japanese audiences well-versed in ghostly folklore. Nevertheless, if this is as dumbed down as it gets, we could do a lot worse, and at least the movie has the good sense to lean on Ishibashi to deliver the exposition dump. 

As American social worker Karen Davis, Sarah Michelle Gellar brings her trademark steely nerve and tender empathy to the narrative, grounding the jumbled chronology with a pivotal emotional throughline. If The Grudge doesn’t quite utilize the full reach of Gellar’s charisma as well as, say, I Know What You Did Last Summer, it nevertheless serves as a bittersweet reminder that her movie star career never quite took off as well as it could or should have. 

Shimizu would return for the obligatory sequel before returning to Japanese productions. 2006’s The Grudge 2 is the least of Shimizu’s directed efforts, although it doesn’t lack for his typical arresting images and atmosphere, nor an admirably bleak, pull-no-punches cameo from Gellar. 

To make sense of the many more sequels and permutations of the Ju-On/Grudge franchises - including reboots, mashups, and a Netflix series - would require another article. Like any long-running horror franchise, the peaks and valleys are numerous. But one will not go wrong in revisiting Shimizu’s directed efforts, up to and including his first American remake. Two decades on, the pure, uncomplicated, and at times even affecting thrills of The Grudge still pack a punch. 

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