All the recent Grudge / Ju-on related activity here at EOFFTV inevitably got me thinking about the extraordinary history of this much-loved Japanese horror series and its creator, Takashi Shimizu. Although it was Hideo Nakata who re-introduced J-horror to the west with Ringu [1998], it has been Shimizu who has been the genre's most committed practitioner, with no less than 14 film or TV horrors to his name since his career began in 1998 - and with at least two more to come.
Although he's occasionally worked outside the
Grudge series - with films like
Tomie: Re-Birth [2001],
Marebito [2004] and
Rinne /
Reincarnation [2005] - it is the six feature films and two segments of a TV film relating the ongoing story of a powerful curse for which he is best known. Much has been written in the past about the obsessiveness with which Italian director Dario Argento has explored various tropes and iconography that crops up over and over again in his films, but even his compulsive need to rework the same themes pales into insignificance beside Shimizu's extraordinary dedication to a single theme.
The Grudge story began in 1998 shortly after Shimizu created a three minute short for his end-of-semester film while studying at film school in Tokyo. The film so impressed his tutor, J-horror legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa [of Cure [1997] and Kairo [2001] fame], that he introduced Shimizu to producer Yasuyuki Uemura, who was preparing a TV horror anthology film, Gakkô no kaidan G [1998] for Kansai-TV. Uemura was also taken by the way that Shimizu was able to create a palpable sense of terror in so short a running time and signed him up for not one but two of the film's segments, 4444444444 and Katasumi [the other directors were Kurosawa and Tetsu Maeda.
Shimizu subsequently claimed [in an interview with the
Japattack website that the two short segments "are actually the foundations of
Juon. They lay out the basic premise of the curse and it is almost like the true prequel of the story."
4444444444 features a young man coming across an abandoned mobile phone which begins to ring. When he answers it, he hears cats, foreshadowing the eerie use of cats and their cries in the
Grudge feature films, and it ends with the genuinely scary first appearance of ghost boy Toshio [unnamed here but its definitely him]. Meanwhile
Katasumi /
In a Corner features a pair of schoolgirls being attacked by the ghostly woman we later come to know and fear as Toshio's mother.
Shimizu developed the two characters for his first run through of the
Grudge story,
Ju-on [2000], again made for Kansai TV. Seen today, in the wake of the two remakes [the Japanese version in 2002 and the American re-run in 2004], this first iteration of the story seems a little crude, with its cut-price special effects and limited resources, but it still packs a powerful punch. It's much slower than the remakes [which should strike terror in the hearts of those who complain that the remakes are already too slow] but has some of the most memorably scary moments in the entire series. Shimizu's real talent is in creating a steadily accumulating air of dread and unease and that's more than evident here - it make take its own good time in telling its story, but that mounting horror is genuinely unsettling.
The first TV version of the story also features that odd story structure that Shimizu has favoured for the series ever since. Perhaps inspired by the anthology format of
Gakkô no kaidan G, the
Ju-on films feature a series of loosely related and inter-locking vignettes which combine to tell a single overall episode in the ongoing tale of the Grudge.
Ju-on was a huge success and Shimizu returned to the same world with the disappointing
Ju-on 2 [2000] which is made up of an extraordinary amount of material from the first film, as much as 30 minutes of its meagre 76 minute running time. After a pointless recap of events from the first film [which is where the 30 minute "flashback" comes in] Shimizu finishes off the storylines from the first film but this time it's a rather prosaic and tedious affair, leading some commentators to suggest that this is actually just material that was cut from the first film and lazily cobbled together to create a hasty cash-in.
Nevertheless, the video release of
Ju-on 2 was another hit and Shimizu decided to bring the story to a wider audience with a feature film version.
Ju-on [2003], aka
Ju-on: The Grudge retold the story of Toshio and his vengeful mother and the chaos they create in and around their haunted house. Again, the story is told in a series of inter-locking short stories, chronicling the various residents and visitors to the house.
The film version is obviously slicker than its predecessors and moves at a more comfortable [for Western audiences] pace but it lacks some of the sheer terror that the original, cruder version of the story generated. There are some astonishing moments - say what you like about the apparent silliness of it, but that moment when Hitomi dives under her duvet only to find something nasty waiting for her is still brilliantly scary, and there are some fabulous, almost subliminal glimpses of Toshio stalking Kayako during her time working at the hospital. But the film lacks the steady accumulation of dread that the TV movie had, and the performances are not as effective or as believable this time round. That said, it's still a genuinely creepy film that proved to be the "next big thing" from Japan when it reached Western audiences.
By the time non-Japanese audiences got their first taste of the Grudge, the series had already comprised the
Gakkô no kaidan G segments and two feature length TV / video releases and even before the film version of
Ju-on had run its course there were nagging questions over whether or not Shimizu had anything left to say on the subject. Just how long could he keep on telling the same story without boring his audiences to death? And was he really a one trick pony, capable only of working in the
Ju-on milieu? The poor critical and public reception of
Tomie: Re-Birth [2001], made between the first two
Ju-ons and the first theatrical version suggested that perhaps he hadn't got it in him to make anything but endless variations of the same story.
These nagging doubts were partly put to rest with the release of the second theatrical film,
Ju-on: The Grudge 2 [2003] which, although it did little to assuage fears that Shimizu was incapable of making anything but
Grudge movies, did at least suggest that there was still plenty of life left in the series. A quantum leap ahead of the first theatrical film,
Ju-on 2 boasts better performances, a more cohesive overall storyline [though it still adopts that curious, time-skipping structure familiar from earlier films] and more scares than the first theatrical film.
Ju-on: The Grudge 2 remains the pinnacle [thus far] of Shimizu's obsessive interrogation of the same story, packing in some incredibly subtle shocks and more inventive twists and turns than all the rest of the films put together. The possessed wig may be a bit silly - albeit with a great pay-off - but look out for Toshio's ghostly handprints on a car windscreen and the disturbing revelations about Kyoko's pregnancy among other impressive new wrinkles to the story.
The film boasts the single best vignette in the entire series, the beautifully constructed and frankly completely brilliant story of Tomoko who is haunted by strange banging sounds coming through the walls of her apartment every night at 12:27 am. This is Shimizu at his very best, an eerie mystery that develops beautifully to a fabulous resolution that is as shocking as it is unexpected. This one story alone is worth the price of a DVD purchase.
Scarier, more emotionally engaging and more ambitious than the first theatrical release,
Ju-on 2 should have been the zenith of the series and indeed Shimizu looked set to move on to pastures new, having finally worked the Grudge out of his system. In 2004, he made the flawed but fascinating dark fantasy
Marebito and contributed a segment,
Kinpatsu kaidan, to another TV anthology film,
Suiyô puremia: sekai saikyô J horâ SP Nihon no kowai yoru [2004], both of which saw him venturing beyond the confines of the Grudge milieu.
But by this time, Hollywood had caught on to the growing worldwide success of Japanese horror and the success of the less-than-impressive
Ringu remake,
The Ring, in 2002 opened the way for a series of Americanised remakes of Asian hits, including
Dark Water [2005] [a remake of Hideo Nakata's
Honogurai mizu no soko kara [2002]],
Pulse [2006] [reworking Kurosawa's
Kairo [2001]] and the forthcoming
The Eye [2007], a remake of EOFFTV's favourite Asian horror film, the Pang Brother's terrifying
Jin gwai [2002]. Inevitably, the popularity of the
Ju-on series demanded it's own remake - less inevitably, the Hollywood reworking would be made by Shimizu, the first time that an Asian director had been brought in to redo his own work.
As a result,
The Grudge [2004] is by default the best of the Hollywood remakes, though to be fair if it had been directed by anyone else it would have been a lot less interesting than it is. It reworks the same ideas that Shimizu has been peddling for the previous six years and is notably less scary thanks to the basic idea being dumbed down for western consumption. But despite that it's a very watchable film, with even Sarah Michelle Gellar turning in a better performance than one might have expected from her in the lead role.
The Grudge was a surprise hit and it had the unfortunate effect of dragging Shimizu back into Grudgeworld just as it looked like he was going to start spreading his wings and move on. Once you get involved with Hollywood, the chances of escaping a long-running series start to get slimmer and Shimizu was lured back for his sixth full-length go at the same story in 2006 with the as yet unseen
The Grudge 2. It's picking up some good early notices [the consensus is that it's better than the first Americanised version] but surely now Shimizu is losing any credibility he may have had. Despite the fact that his contribution to the
J-Horror Theatre project,
Rinne /
Reincarnation [2005] has also been well received, he's finding it hard to escape the curse of
The Grudge and has announced a third Japanese theatrical version,
Ju-on: The Grudge 3, due for release next year. Shimizu has declared that this will be the final instalment of the series, but Sony Pictures, creators of the Hollywood versions, may yet throw a spanner in the works - they announced at the 2006 Comic-Con that they were pressing ahead with their own
Grudge 3. And yes, they've asked Shimizu to direct but he's professed a desire to simply produce this planned version and hands the reins over to someone else. Not that it's stopped him re-visiting the American
Grudge for an extended Director's Cut which adds some new gore scenes, rejigs the storyline and reinstates some previously discarded footage.
The Grudge series is one of the most convoluted in film history, essentially consisting of a pair of mini-prequels followed by three separate but related series of films that all tell the same story - the tale of a curse created by a horrific double murder - from various angles. The curious thing about it is that, although one would love to write it off as a seemingly never-ending cash-cow. every time you thing that Shimizu has run out of steam and done all that there is to do with the series, he comes up with something new and interesting. Whether it will survive another two instalments to the parallel Japanese and American series remains to be seen.
KEVIN LYONS
Win a video camera and copies of the Director's Cut in our Grudge competition.
Sometimes it seems - particularly in the States - as though every possible twist and variation on the tried and trusted cop show has been done. But occasionally, something comes along that's so out of the blue, so unexpected that it make you site up, take notice and hold out hope that maybe, just maybe, there are a few new ideas left.
