Ten Days of Terror!: Ju-On: The Grude 2

Film: Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (Ju-on 2)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Horror movies always reflect the fears of the time and of the culture. It’s not shocking that post-9/11 a lot of American horror films were like Hostel and Turistas: extremely xenophobic. A great deal of Japanese horror was of the atomic variety (Gojira and the like) for obvious reasons, but a lot of Japanese horror is ghost-based as well. Japanese horror stories have involved ghosts for centuries; often the ghosts are there to impart morality lessons to the living. Modern Japanese ghosts, though, are often about bringing up the sins of the past—the people of the present are still paying for the crimes that happened years ago. That’s certain the them of the Ju-on films, and it’s the major throughline of Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (or just Ju-on 2 if you prefer).

While this does tell a particular story, it does so in a non-linear structure that isn’t easy to follow. It jumps around a lot and we see the same thing from several different perspectives at different times. The conceit of the original movie is continued here. That original conceit is that when someone dies in extreme sorrow or extreme rage, those emotions linger, generating a curse. Anyone who encounters that curse dies from it and lingers themselves, continuing and expanding the curse in an ever-widening circle. That’s where we started in the first movie, where we ended when the first movie ended, and where we will pick up here.

Look What the Cat Dragged In

Film: The Grudge (2002) (Ju-on)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

There is a stupid trend in American films where a successful foreign movie is created and then remade for an American audience. I understand remakes when there’s a time distance between them. There are plenty of remakes that are good, and some that are better than the original versions. But when the remake is just a couple of years after the original, frequently sanitized in some respect, and different mainly in that it’s in English rather than its original language, I wonder at the point. There are a few exceptions. The American remake of Ringu is almost as good as the original. The American remake of Ju-on is decent as well, but now having seen the original film from 2002, I have to admit that the remake really wasn’t necessary.

One of the more interesting aspects for me of Ju-on is that it represents a very serious shift in some respects in terms of the victims in horror movies. While I’m certain there are earlier examples of this, in Ju-on, the victims of the curse that the film explores are all entirely innocent. There is no one here who even remotely deserves what is going to happen to them, and there is no way to stop what is happening to them. That’s the point—sure there are innocent victims in previous films, but there was a way out for them. Or, they weren’t as innocent as we’d like—often simply privilege is enough to set someone up to be “worthy” of being attacked. Okay, sure there are some examples from the past--The Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave and the like, but our victims here are not merely minding their own business but are actively trying to assist the people who are cursed, and thus end up cursed themselves.

Wednesday Horror: The Grudge (2004)

Films: The Grudge (2004)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

Everybody has a few holes in their viewing history. Somewhere out there is someone who has seen a ton of musicals including a number of obscure ones but who hasn’t gotten to something like Showboat. For me, one of the big holes in my horror movie viewing is any version of The Grudge. Typically I like to start with the original in a case like this, but it’s the 2004 remake that appears on one of my Bravo lists, and it’s the 2004 remake that I found at a local library…so it’s the 2004 remake that I watched.

There’s no shame in having these holes in the viewing history. There are so many movies out there that no one can see them all, and there are always new people becoming movie fans who suddenly have worlds to discover. I no longer shame people on the movies they haven’t seen. That said, though, I am going to say something that will piss some people off. The “Blindspot” lists are something that are pretty popular on many film blogs. I think that’s cool, but you all need to start crediting the right person for coming up with the idea. The first person that I know who did Blindspot lists—and did multiple versions of them that were dozens of movies long—was Nick Jobe.