Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2003)
I feel I’ve written a lot about Nakata’s 1998 Ringu (directely or indirectly) but equally important and influential is Shimizu’s Ju-on: The Grudge, which many people do not realize is the third feature film in the director’s Ju-on series (to which he dedicated almost a decade), following the 1998 short films Katasumiand 4444444444, the direct-to-video releases of Ju-on: The Curse and its sequel (2000) as well as preceding the American films he also directed (2004 and 2006). The way I understand it, this film (which was co-developed by Shimizu’s then-mentor Kiyoshi Kurosawa) thus operates as a polishing of ideas, imagery and themes, a early odd best-of of sorts, that was highly influential in asserting J-horror’s go-to aesthetic tricks and thematic concerns.
Interesting for its disorienting and experimental vignette structure, Ju-on is concerned with the pervasive nature of a haunting, playing almost as a polar opposite to Ringu’s investigation-driven narrative by merely showing us, repeatedly, the cyclical nature of “the curse” or “the grudge”. Temporality and causality remain ambiguous and while Ju-on displays some typical moments where the supernatural is carried trough everyday technologies (a great sequence involving a television screen), it mainly shows a haunted space that has the potential to stretch outwards like a virus following its victims (for more on that, see Kurosawa’s brilliant 2001 Kairo); a encompassing ghost that has many incarnations and can be everywhere at the same time. That said, Ju-on solidifies the cycle’s preoccupationwith the act of looking, or the gaze, as the portent of your demise - whether technologically mediated or not. The horror genre has repeatedly and actively mangled eyeballs in the past, but the idea of a passive yet intimidating gaze (from the ghost to its victim) or a fearful, filtered gaze as a death warrant (through hands or technological means from the victim to the ghostly agent) is of great interest to me and harks back to the power of Ringu’s videotape to kill you a week following its viewing. There are no tapes in Ju-on, but as soon as cute ghost boy Toshio peers at you (or into you), you are done. Add to this imposingly lasting imagery a brilliant sound design work that includes disquieting use of strings and distorted racheting of an utility knife and Ju-on proves to be a profoundly disturbing experience.
Quite fascinating to me is also J-horror’s exploration of the unwarranted memento mori, or rather how the dead is kept alive, is remembered and resurfaces through objects such as video tapes, photographs but also in Ju-on’s case, the quite Gothic horror notion of the house a keeper of the supernatural - which is convenient considering a short essay I’m currently putting together about Kubrick’s The Shining.
