October Horror 2013: 9 - Ju-On (2002)

Ju-On is the original Japanese horror movie that inspired 2004's The Grudge.  The film itself is a sequel to 2 direct-to-video j-horror movies.  I remember The Grudge and The Ring being pretty big back in the day, though I never really felt a major need to watch the originals until I started getting really into horror and then figured that comparing the source material to the native interpretations would be a nice exercise.

For the most part the story is the same, although as is often the case for adaptations of j-horror many elements are trimmed to make for a tighter narrative.  But the core story of a husband killing his wife, son, and pet cat before killing himself, causing their house to become cursed place of sadness and rage.  Anyone exposed to the house becomes a bearer of the curse until it kills them, and they can also bring anyone they care for into the curse.

The flow of time in this is somewhat difficult to lock down.  The film opens on the murder, but the scene is quite obfuscated with heavy effects, close shots, and many cuts.  After that we go through a series of almost short segments, like an anthology, following each person affected by the curse.  I think the first segment happens before the first, though I'm at a loss to explain the need for a social worker in the first segment if the wife is at home as in the second.  It could be a weekend/weekday thing, but then why would the husband put on a suit and go to work?  But then again, if they're backwards and the first happened afterwards, why would the old woman continue living in the house?  I had similar issue with The Grudge, since these two sequences were almost exactly alike apart from the nationalities of the characters.

From there it's mostly straight forward until one sequence in which a man has a vision of something happening in his future, that sets up what happened prior to the next segment which takes place years later.  After that it's possible some of the last few bits happen in parallel.

It was a good movie, I was confused a bit because of the time lapses, which may or may not have been helped by the subtitles.  What was particularly difficult was that apart from the opening scroll and the title cards before each segment with people's names, very little on-screen text was subtitled.  As is often my issue with foreign films I had some trouble following along and had to discuss the movie while it was happening to keep everything straight.  Also, I have a hell of a time keeping peoples' names straight in Japanese movies because their names are so dissimilar from Western names that I have no basis on which to associate the name with the person.  In a Western film if Brad, Frank, and Jenn are in a room together...it's easy to figure out which one is Jenn, but in a Japenese movie and Takashi, Katsuya, and Kayako are in a room...I got nothing.

Anyway, it still pulled off some great creepy bits and really did unnerve me in a few parts.  Some of the scenes where the ghost manifests as a black cloud look really bad, effects wise, but the acting and the sounds the ghost makes when showing as a full person are profoundly creepy.  It's also got more to it, so the variety in haunting is nice.  I do like the increased production values in the remake, and there are a few places where this one looks cheap or much older than it should be, but it's still very solid and I liked seeing where a lot of the elements of The Grudge originated.

Next up was supposed to be Don't Look Back, but Netflix apparently expired it off streaming so we're going to have to substitute something else.

--PXA