I’m on a J-horror kick this Halloween season. It’s a subgenre that I’ve been fascinated with for quite some time, but never really gotten around to doing a thorough deep dive. I’m a big admirer of the likes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Satoshi Kon, but I’m less familiar with filmmakers like Hideo Nakata, Kaneto Shindō and Takashi Shimizu. So I’m doing a lot of discovering this October and laying my eyes on a bunch of acclaimed international pictures I hadn’t seen before.
One of those new movies for me is Ju-on: The Grudge, a 2002 cryptic cult classic that is equal parts scary, eerie, and mysterious. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the American remakes of The Grudge from the couple decades since this movie became an international hit, but I had never seen any of the movie that began the craze for this franchise.
And I’ll say that I get why Ju-on: The Grudge has such a dedicated following. It’s one of the freakiest movies I’ve ever seen. While not overly reliant of the classic jump scare technique with jolting editing and sharp sonic cues, The Grudge still packs a hefty amount of scares because of the vivid imagery and haunting supernatural forces at the center of the story.
The Grudge tells the story of a haunted house harboring a violent past that refuses to go away. After a man kills his wife and son on suspicion of infidelity, the spirits of his family members remain in the house that the tragedy took place in.
Now, they wander the building and take the lives of anyone who resides in it. It’s a classic haunted house storyline, but told with enough dread and despair to make you feel empathetic for all parties involved, while still taking in the extreme costuming choices for the spirits, as well as the unsettling sound design always keeping you at the edge of your seat.
The Grudge is one of the better first-time watches for me in the month of October. I found it deeply unsettling, thanks to effective performances from Yuya Ozeki as the young spirit kid Toshio, and Megumi Okina as the social worker Rika, whose visit to the home at the center of the story becomes the engine for the film’s plot.
The movie’s nonlinear narrative arch becomes the one area I occasionally struggled with as I thought it cut the tension rather than reinforcing it. The Grudge isn’t necessarily a difficult film to follow, but the edit in this regard muddies up the plot.
But even with those few flaws I found along the way, Ju-on: The Grudge remains one of the better Japanese horror movies ever made, and a tentpole release for the genre. It has supremely worthwhile images that will be seared into your brain and a mystery at the center that will keep you invested.
Score: 7/10
- Cast: Megumi Okina, Misa Uehara, Yoji Tanaka, Misaki Itō, Kanji Tsuda, Yuya Ozeki
- Crew: Takashi Shimizu, Tokushô Kikumura, Nobuyuki Takahashi, Shiro Sato
- Genre: Horror
- Runtime: 92 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: October 18, 2002
- Read about Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) on Wikipedia and IMDb
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