JUON: THE GRUDGE 1 (Japan, 2003)

JUON: THE GRUDGE 2 (Japan, 2003)
Directed by: Takashi Shimizu
Starring: Noriko Sakai, Takako Fuji, Yuya Ozeki

"A scare-a-minute hit. The Grudge [aka JUON] will probably be unstoppable as the latest cult phenomenon from Asia."

— Screen International

"The most frightening film I've ever seen, leaving you no time to catch your breath."

— Sam Raimi, director

If you thought The Ring was scary, please don't see this movie — we can't afford to cart you out of the theater after you die of fright. The horrors of disjuncture, carved into celluloid, and slid behind your eyelids — that's JUON. Director Takashi Shimizu is already shooting his Hollywood remake under the auspices of Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Spider-Man) starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Clea Duvall, but here's a chance to drag your friends to see the original.

Depressingly, for those of us who are over 30, the director of this intense, endlessly-replicating, somewhat viral franchise is only 31 years old. After a stint as a theater employee and an assistant director, Takashi Shimizu enrolled at the Film School of Tokyo, where one of his shorts was spotted by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Doppelganger). Kurosawa got Shimizu a job shooting a 30 minute short for a schoolhouse horror show on TV, but the producers cut Shimizu’s contribution by 27 minutes: it clocks in at just over three minutes, including credits. However, these three minutes brought him to the attention of Taka Ichise, the man who pulls the strings of the new Japanese horror boom, having produced the Ring films, Dark Water (currently being remade in the US with Jennifer Connelley) as well as Brian Yuzna and Samuel Hadida’s Necronomicon. Ichise had always wanted to make a haunted house film, and Shimizu pitched him an idea about a house overflowing with homicidal rage, which pushed Ichise’s pleasure buttons. The first JUON was a V-cinema release (shot on video productions designed to be released straight to video — it’s where splatter-schtick auteur, Takashi Miike, got his start) that performed poorly. Nevertheless, Ichise commissioned a second JUON V-cinema film, which also performed badly. Taking a counterintuitive approach to that of most US producers, Ichise paid attention to internet sites proclaiming the JUON videos the scariest movies ever made, and he noticed that they always seemed to be rented out at his local video store. And so, because he thought there was a market for JUON, he authorized a big screen, 35mm version of the story, written and scripted by Shimizu, and ten days before JUON was released, he greenlit production on JUON 2, a big screen extension of the JUON franchise. The first JUON came out and hit big, as did the second, and a long-running gamble finally paid off.


“The theme of the first JUON is shadow and darkness. The theme of JUON 2 is motherhood,” says Shimizu, and sure enough, while the first movie is a fever dream haunted house movie that’s had its chronology hacked to pieces and stitched back together again with rotten flesh, the second focuses more on the plot and characters, and really goes to town with baroque set pieces involving strange knockings, the infamous throat clicks, and oceans of black, greasy hair. Besides Shimizu and Ichise, who are both working on the US remake, the only two people to make it through both V-cinema films, both Japanese JUON films, and the US remake are Takako Fuji, who plays the horrifying, silent-screamed ghost girl, and Yuya Ozeki who plays the little dead boy, Toshio, whose face has become as common a sight in Japanese video stores as the big, sweaty, hairy eyeball of The Ring.

Hailed as the scariest Japanese movie of all time, JUON doesn’t disappoint with its disorienting, non-linear slide down a slippery slope to gibbering, surreal madness. No blood, no gore, no cheap tricks…just pure, skin-crawling, gut-tightening terror.