I’m kind of a fan of Asian horror. (I put it in that broad fashion, because there are subtle differences between, say, Japanese, Chinese and Korean horror flicks.) Lots of it is over-the-top and incomprehensible. But the good stuff can deliver a very satisfying brand of dread.
It’s a style that doesn’t seem to survive the trip over the Pacific. For example, I loved Ringu (1998), but didn’t care so much for The Ring (2002). The American version was much more logical and orderly, but that structure came at the expense of the horror.
True horror is never logical. It’s the violent death that comes out of nowhere, shattering your life and destroying your mind. It’s the senselessness of it all that makes it horrible. Tragedy is bad, but horror knocks you off your perch and leaves you tumbling into the depths.
I had wanted to see Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) since I first saw the Japanese trailer on the Internet. (Here is the trailer for the American release of the original Japanese film.) I kept waiting for it to be released on DVD in America, but as soon as the American remake was announced, it was pretty clear that it wouldn’t be available until the new movie came out.
In fact, Takashi Shimizu wrote and directed both the original and the remake, The Grudge (2004), so it makes for an interesting comparison.
The premise is the same in each. As it is explained at the beginning of the story, “When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is left behind.” A man kills his wife, son and himself, and the effects of that violence linger in the house where it happened. In the Japanese version, there’s not much of a story, just a series of incidents that each conclude with a character dying. Some of the scenes are shown out of chronological order, which is confusing the first time you see it.
There are three spirits: The man, the woman and a boy (Well, and the cat…). The boy appears most often, appearing really unsettling. When the woman shows up, you’re really in trouble. Except for flashbacks, the man only appears once, at the end.
The horror seems to operate like a virus, infecting people when they enter the house and spreading out into the community. When the victims are confronted by whatever is stalking them, they seem be overcome, perhaps dying of fright.
The American version goes a different route. It’s a haunted house movie. The lines between the violence of the past and the current killings are very clearly drawn. The kid isn’t really very scary at all, and looks pretty much like a regular kid — except for that thing he does where he yowls like a cat. The man shows up earlier, grabbing people and dispatching them; no dying of fright here.
Ju-On almost proceeds like an experiment. “Okay, here’s the set-up. You’ve got ten minutes to stalk a character and then kill them in a really creepy fashion. Go! And again! Again!” As Dennis Lim put it in The Village Voice, “[It] performs the ratchet-release-repeat trick with such metronomic efficiency that it gathers the force of a hallucinatory incantation.” From the very beginning, every time someone enters that damn house (even in the glare of the day), the tension is almost unbearable. The movie is suffocating. A new character is introduced; you know they’re going to die; it’s only a matter of time. The repetition creates a mesmerizing theme-and-variations effect.
Obvious expectations keep the tension from building in The Grudge. You know Sarah Michelle Gellar can’t die, so she’s safe, at least until the end. The house looks similar to the one in Ju-On, but there’s no creepiness at all. Same for the old woman encountered at the beginning of the film. Many scenes are very similar, but the mood is very different.
The Grudge isn’t a bad movie; there are a few very effective scares. But it’s a pretty conventional horror movie. It’s certainly not as disastrous as when George Sluizer turned his own The Vanishing from an eerie Dutch movie into a stoopid American one (Talk about assisted suicide…).
Part of the problem is that when these Asian movies are translated for American audiences, the model seems to be Wes Craven or John Carpenter. The best of these movies are operating more in the mode of David Lynch: A waking nightmare with no rational explanation.