The Grudge 1998

[Taneka Tarring]

JuOn: The Grudge is a 2002 Japanese supernatural horror film written and directed by Takashi Shimizu. It is the third installment in the Ju-On series and the first to be released theatrically (the first two being direct-to-video productions). It stars Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Takashi Matsuyama and Yui Ichikawa.

Several years prior to the main plot, Takeo Saeki murders his wife Kayako after discovering she is in love with another man, also killing the family cat, Mar, and his son, Toshio. The murders create a curse that revives the family as vengeful ghosts, with Kayako's ghost murdering Takeo. Whoever enters their house in Nerima, Tokyo, is eventually consumed by the curse, which spreads to the place they die in and in turn consumes anyone who comes in.

The latest owners of the house are the Tokunaga family, consisting of salaryman Katsuya, his wife Kazumi, and his ill mother Sachie. Kazumi is quickly consumed by the curse, and Katsuya is possessed by Takeo before dying too. Kayako's ghost follows Katsuya's sister Hitomi to her office, where it kills a security guard, and then to her apartment, where it kills her as well.

Social worker Rika is sent by her boss Hirohashi to care for Sachie. She discovers Toshio and witnesses Sachie being killed by Kayako's ghost, causing her to faint. Hirohashi finds Rika and contacts the police. Detectives Nakagawa and Igarashi discover Katsuya's and Kazumi's bodies in the attic and later learn of Hitomi's disappearance and the death of the security guard at her workplace. Hirohashi's body is discovered, and Rika is haunted by the ghosts.

Upon researching the history of the house and the Saeki murders, Nakagawa and Igarashi contact a retired detective named Toyama, who is afraid of revisiting the case. Toyama goes to burn the house down but hears a group of teenage girls upstairs. One flees while the others are consumed. Kayako then appears, chasing Toyama away but killing Nakagawa and Igarashi. Toyama eventually succumbs to the curse after becoming a shut-in, leaving behind a young daughter named Izumi.

As a teenager, Izumi visits the house with her friends but flees while her friends were killed by Kayako; this is the event Toyama witnessed when he visited the house, as a vision of the future. Two weeks pass and two of Izumi's other friends visit her to deliver some photos. A news broadcast confirms Rika's body has been found at the Saeki residence after she was reported missing. They find that Izumi is wrought with guilt for abandoning her friends and has become increasingly paranoid, and her mother is under the influence of the curse as well. As Izumi's friends leave, they find that and her and her dead friends have their eyes blackened out in photos. Izumi encounters a vision of her dead father and then discovers the ghosts of her friends watching her. She is cornered by her dead friends, only for Kayako to appear and drag her into damnation.

In the almost deserted Tokyo streets, many missing persons' posters lie on the ground. Rika's corpse, now with a much longer hairstyle similar to Kayako's, lies in the house's attic, only to reawaken with a death rattle.

In 2004, Sony Pictures Entertainment released an American remake of the film. The film was directed by Takashi Shimizu and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jason Behr. The main plot of the film follows Rika's experience within the house but with a different ending. Its sequel, The Grudge 2, however, mirrors a similar ending, where Aubrey Davis meets the same fate as Rika.[citation needed]

Ju-on: The Grudge was shown on 18 October 2002 at the Screamfest Horror Film Festival in Los Angeles California under the title The Grudge.[5] The film was also screened as part of Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2003.[1]

Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 80% based on five reviews, with an average rating of 5 out of 10.[11] At Metacritic, a website which assigns a rating out of 100 for reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 48, based on 22 reviews indicating "mixed or average reviews".[12] The Washington Post gave the film a mixed reviewing, stating that it "isn't particularly scary. No, it's much harder on you than mere fright: It's ... creepy" and "it lacks any interest in conventional narrative and doesn't bother with hero or heroine, or with any sense of coherency, of any mechanism of solution of its mystery".[13] David Kehr of The New York Times compared the film unfavourably to The Ring (1998), opining that Ju-on: The Grudge "turns into a rote series of killings, with each new sequence introduced by a title with the name of its primary victim. Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks".[14] Kim Newman gave the film three stars out of five in Empire, noting that "as a film, it is at once too much a part of an overarching story and divided into too many episodes to be all of a piece. However, as a sustained collection of scare moments, it's a winner".[15] Derek Elley compared the film unfavourably to both The Ring and Dark Water, writing that "in the end, The Grudge comes down to little more than when and where the ghostly little boy will next appear, and the final explanation is so-what".[1]

The Ju-On films generally revolve around a curse created in a house in Nerima, Tokyo, when Takeo Saeki, convinced that his wife, Kayako, is having an affair with another man, murders her, their son, Toshio, and Toshio's pet cat in a jealous fit of rage. According to Ju-On, when a person dies with a deep and powerful rage, a curse is born. The curse gathers in the place where that person has died or which they frequented, and repeats itself there. The spirits of the deceased haunt the location, potentially killing anyone who encounters the curse by any means, such as entering a cursed house or being in contact with somebody who was already cursed. The curse's manifestation is mainly death, where the victims' bodies may or may not disappear. The following deaths may create more curses and spread them to other locations.

Shimizu stated in an interview that the inspiration for Ju-On came from his own personal fears as a child, and from a Japanese butoh dance group that would paint their nude bodies white and perform. Shimizu found the performance frightening and decided to "paint [his] ghosts white". He also mentioned that the rise in the number of domestic abuse cases emerging in Japan during production of his previous films gave him ideas about the origins of the story.[3]

The title of the Japanese films translates roughly to "Curse of Grudge", or more abstractly, a curse created due to an individual bearing a grudge against someone or something. The first two films in the series were so-called V-Cinema, or direct-to-video releases, but became surprise hits as the result of favorable word of mouth. Both films were shot in nine days and feature a story that is a variation on the classic haunted house theme, as well as a popular Japanese horror trope, the "vengeful ghost" (onryō). The titular curse, ju-on, is one which takes on a life of its own and seeks new victims. Anyone who encounters a ghost killed by the curse is killed themselves and the curse is able to be spread to other areas.

The rights to an American film remake of The Grudge were eventually acquired, with Shimizu himself attached to direct and Sarah Michelle Gellar starring.[4] The film was released in 2004 to mixed reviews. The film's box office success would lead it to spawn its own series of American-produced films, including 2006's The Grudge 2 and 2009's The Grudge 3.[5] Both films follow a unique storyline, albeit The Grudge 2 still drawing inspiration from several Japanese films.[6]

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the franchise, two new sequels, Ju-On: White Ghost and Ju-On: Black Ghost were screen simultaneously in Japanese theaters in 2009. The stories of two films deviate from that of the cursed Saeki family, focusing on two unrelated, but also, ill-fated families.

For the fifteenth anniversary of the Ju-On franchise, a reboot was released in 2014, titled Ju-On: The Beginning of the End. Drawing inspiration from The Grudge 2, The Beginning of the End features a new backstory regarding the curse, while still featuring the Saeki family as an integral part of the plot.[7] The film was followed by a 2015 sequel, Ju-On: The Final Curse, which was promoted as the final film in the series.[8] Both films had no significant input from series creator Shimizu.

Grudge director, Nicolas Pesce, expressed interest in a crossover between the American Grudge and Ring film series, just as was done with 2016's Sadako vs. Kayako.[10] Prior to his film's release, Pesce expressed further interest in a sequel being set in both a different part of the world than America or Japan, and in a different "less contemporary" time period compared to previous films.[11]

Official Japanese-language novelizations of the American films were also written by Kei Ohishi,[19] the first being a novelization of The Grudge (released in Japan as The Juon), which was published in 2005 and generally follows the premise of the film faithfully. A novelization of its sequel, The Grudge 2 (released in Japan as Ju-On: Pandemic), was published later on in 2007. The novels were all published by Kadokawa Shoten and only the 2003 novel received an English translation.

Xseed Games described it as a "haunted house simulator", rather than a traditional survival horror game. The game does not feature any combat, as its format relies on subtle exploration and scare tactics. Joystiq reviewers who were present for the demo's screening at the E3 justified this, observing that "in most horror games, a skilled player can actually defeat the creatures (with notable exceptions like Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head ...), making the game more of a power fantasy than a true fright. In both of these games [Silent Hill 2 and Ju-On: The Grudge], you can escape the creatures at best".[20]

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