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.
