The Grudge

The Grudge is a real scary movie. I hate watching scary movies, especially this one that's good. The color and the atmosphere are beautiful, and the sound effects are done to the tee. I love the way Japanese directors do this kind of new ghost/haunted house movies because they are much deeper than the Hollywood horror.

There are not a lot of special effects, and when the director applies it, it's not over the top. The ghost mother appears in the tenth floor corridor is perhaps the scariest moment in the movie. The dark lines that appear out of nowhere are truly nightmarish. The young child and its hybrid with the black cat is facinating. I like it, but I hate to watch this visual extravagaza because I understand it all too well.

Ju-yuan, the title, means the grudge a ghost holds when it was killed or murdered out of passion. The story goes like this. A young Japanese woman fell in love with her English professor, and her husband found out her infatuation. She was murdered in the bathroom by drowning. Her son was also abused and murdered. The fury was held by this house, and all the people who has been to the house died either mysteriously, or disappeared without any trace.

The police officer's friends died investigating this case. The American family, the Williams, died in this house after seeing the young green kid. The wife died first, then the husband died. His sister was tracked down in work, then the mother tried to kill her. The security guard in her work building got killed there. She went home, and her dead brother came calling. She got killed by the wife.

Yoko got killed in the beginning of the movie, she took care of the William's mother, Emma. She was deemed crazy, and live in the house for a long time alone. Yoko saw the woman in the attic and died there. The detectives saw a jaw from Yoko. It was apparently torn from her face.

Enters Karen the caretaker/exchange student. Sarah Michelle Geller is certainly grown up and mature, with the much older Jason Behr, Doug.

Karen takes care of Emma in the haunted house, but on that day, she found the kid, Toshio, and the mother in Emma's room. The mother was spooked to death on her bed.

Karen is scared. She has been sent to the hospital to recover, but she can't stand to be alone there. The ghost is out and always following her.

She searches for the truth on the internet. Three years ago, a Japanese family killed one another in a murderous rage. The professor, played by Bill Pullman, witness the killing and threw himself out of his apartment. This part was played out in the beginning of the movie.

Karen goes to the house after the detective. The detective brings two bottles of petrol. The kid pretended to drown himself in the bathtub.