Original title: 呪怨
A recent re-watch of what is still one of my favourite films among the J-horror wave of the time reminded me of what a fascinating film Takashi Shimizu’s cinematic version of his DTV movies is. On the surface, this is a much inferior film to that other great classic of its time, Ringu, having to work with much lower production values, as well as an inferior cast, and binding itself to a highly episodic structure.
I believe it is exactly the episodic structure, or rather, how Shimizu creates the structure what keeps this still as such an effective piece of horror filmmaking. Its greatest strength lies in how much the structure of the film mirrors the structure of the curse, a viral infection of supernatural anger that moves outward from a time and place in ways that feel frightening because of their irrationality and by how little the people suffering from the supernatural are actually connected to it. Entering the wrong place, being related to another victim, is enough – the idea of punishing the guilty through the supernatural just never applies here; even warnings to the curious are fairer than that. One can, and I sometimes like to, see a nice parallel to the at best indifferent cosmos of Cosmic Horror here, though arrived at from a direction based in Japanese folklore and Buddhist and Shinto concepts of spirits, and certainly carrying a less nihilist meaning, at least culturally speaking.
The temporally disjointed structure strengthens this feeling of the Grudge as something unfair, cruel and anti-rational, as if the destructive supernatural here worked not just forward in time and outward in space, but also backwards and sideways, destroying causality along with the sense of security.
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