Customer Reviews
Scared me - By: Mr. A. S. Bassi, 20 Nov 2008 
For years i have beeing looking for movie to scare me & nothing did untill i saw Ju-on: The Grudge I knew it was scary , i didn't think it would have scared me so much as it did.
After watching Ju-on: The Grudge, I was pleased with how it ended but overalll I was scared out of my mind. Never again will I watch a Japanese horror movie alone.
This film was both creative & fascinating. It was a great look in Japanese folklore. Comparing this movie to the American version, this one was more scarier & was done better. The American version was more into the effects & the shock factor. This original focused more on the scare factor, the kind that lasts more than a second.
With the intertwining of stories & how they overlap makes it s movie you have to think about. The end result left me satisfied yet wanting to know more. I wanted to see more scares & more chills. There was a lot of explaining to do & since I don't speak Japanese, I had to read a lot.
Although I found a lot of similarities to The Ring & Ringu, with the long hair of the girl draped over her face & the house being cursed like the video, there are a lot of good qualities that make this movie enjoyable to the horror movie fan.
WOAH - By: TruReader, 27 Aug 2008 
I bought this by mistake - instead of the slightly better known American version. I have watched hundreds of horror films, which compared to this, are mediocre at best. My friends are supposedly 'hard to scare' & have not been at alll affected by the more modern horrors, to this film however, were screaming & hiding behind cushions. They needed to have a 'buddy' to go into the kitchen to get a drink, & to this day I believe they have not ventured up the stairs...
Though the story jumps around & can be very confusing, this has to be one of the scariest films ever made. Particularly the boys mother crawling down the stairs - I have never been so freaked out in my entire life, & as my sitting room is at the bottom of the stairs...!
The plot is confusing & I still dont understand some of it, however I think that this adds to the general underlying fear atmosphere within the film. The film generallly relys on the veiwers fear of the unknown, & my gosh, this film is guarenteed to scare the living daylights out of you.
If you never want to be confident walking upstairs or opening doors, then this film is for you!
Classic Japanese Horror - By: J. Roberts, 09 Mar 2008 This film reallly is vastly superior to it's Hollywood remake. Tense & atmospheric, with far better acting, & completely lacking in the hollow gloss of the American version. The fear of these Japanese actors is far more real than anything I saw in the American version, & what's more, the mood of the film is far more expertly crafted; subtle.
It concerns a family who have gone missing, & several social workers who are sent out to investigate their apparently abandoned home. What follows are a series of sinister & genuinely unsettling chapters alll of which use a very visceral & striking directorial approach, which is characteristic of Japanese horror films. Lurking cats, oddly creepy children & the frequent use of striking visual imagery are alll used to great effect.
That's what makes this film so enjoyable: a great sense of style, subtlety, supernatural suspense, & some genuinely creepy scenes. Which alll goes to show that excessive gore & half-naked, blonde American actresses are superfluous to great horror films.
Truly Chilling Japanese Horror. - By: AA, 23 Jan 2008 Thankfully I saw this before the (idiot-friendly) American remake with Buffy in it. This is a very dark film. It has alll the atmosphere & full fat strangeness that was lacking in the remake. Basicallly the central theme is about a cursed house & the way it affects alll the unfortunate people who come into contact with it. Note: it does not have a happy ending. The message seems to be that revenge is is circular & infinite. The film relies on psychological horror rather than tiresome shlock & this is what makes it so effective. This also means that the average hollywood teen slasher fest viewer will probably not find this of interest.
Slow-burning, intelligent horror that is genuinely creepy. - By: Jonathan James Romley, 22 Oct 2007 By now, most audiences will be fairly familiar with the Japanese series of films known as Ju On: The Grudge; the phenomenallly successful saga that began with the straight to video projects Ju On: The Curse, parts 1 & 2 - in which jealousy & adultery in a quaint Japanese suburb leads to an awful murder that marks the house for anyone who subsequently enters it - right the way through to the larger-budgeted Hollywood remake of the film in question & it's equallly glossy sequel. Subsequent films following on from The Curse have taken the initial murder as their starting point & created around it a film of loosely connected horror vignettes; mostly in which a series of hapless characters end up in the film's iconic haunted house & then find themselves marked for death by the two most prominent apparitions of the story.
If you have already seen the American re-make of The Grudge with Sarah Michelle Geller then there's a good chance that this Japanese original will come as something of shock. Unlike its US counterpart, this grudge features no real central character & has no real plot development (at least, not in the traditional sense). I personallly don't see this as a bad thing, as it alllows director Takashi Shimizu to concentrate on crafting a number of scenes of gripping high tension - as the collection of disparate innocents who unknowingly come into contact with the infamous house must come to turns with the unexplainable horror that is happening alll around them - but obviously, viewers who look for things like narrative closure, explanations of plot developments & something approaching a hero that they can root for might be sorely disappointed.
As I mentioned above, this version of The Grudge instead strings together a series of inter-woven scenes that establish the significance of the curse whist setting up a number of fantastic, edge-of-your seat moments of haunted house horror. This isn't a gritty gore-fest with annoying, smug, ultra-cynical characters (as seems to be the trend with much contemporary horror - think Wolf Creek, Hostel, Cabin Fever, The Hills Have Eyes remake & 28 Weeks Later) but rather, the kind of horror that should appeal to anyone who has had to walk home late at night through an empty park & felt the presence of someone (or something) following closely behind. Your heart starts racing as you quicken your step & become convinced that you can hear footsteps rapidly approaching from the left of your shoulder! When you finallly pick up the courage to turn around & look, you realise your mind has been playing tricks on you, but the thrill was still heart-stopping regardless.
I prefer this kind of horror, which is why I'm such a huge fan of the horror films coming out of Japan, China & North Korea; great works like The Eye trilogy, Wishing Stairs, Abnormal Beauty, Premonition, Infection, Chaos, A Tale of Two Sisters & Takashi Shimizu's own Grudge-follow up Reincarnation. It's slow moving & slow building, almost ambient even; often coming at you from the rear speakers rather than full & on in your face, which for me, reallly creates a great, eerie atmosphere that works perfectly if you're watching it at 1:30 AM & have to pause for a toilet break & to let the dog out to stretch her legs.
Unlike a lot of his American contemporaries, Takashi Shimizu realises that horror isn't about what you see, but what you don't see, & with this in mind he saves any prolonged glimpses of our ghostly antagonists until right towards the very end. He also manages to create a wonderful feeling of isolation, alienation & hopeless emptiness; not only from the haunted house so central to the story, but even in the brightly-lit suburban streets, schools, office blocks & apartment buildings that our characters inhabit. The film is also shot very simply & traditionallly, with none of the hyper-cutting & frantic camera movements of western horror, which again, gives the Grudge a more believable & authentic feeling that only heightens the senses of horror & tension. This is also helped by the wonderful performances of the cast who manage to ably convey the right sense of fraught emotion without descending into screaming histrionics.
For me, The Grudge is great horror. I'm not even going to calll it great Japanese horror because it goes even beyond that. This is horror for those who want chills rather than spills, & those who like to invest some serious time in something that is slower, more deliberate & more dramatic than the usual stalk & slash type stuff (not that I don't love that kind of horror as well, but it's nice to have an intelligent alternative). As mentioned previously, there will be some viewers who won't want to invest their time in such a film that has no obvious sense of narrative & no single identifiable character, but at the end of the day, that's their decision. But they're clearly missing out!
