The Grudge

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the movie. For the Tool song, see The Grudge (song).

The Grudge
The Movie Poster
Directed by	Takashi Shimizu
Produced by	Sam Raimi Robert Tapert
Written by	Stephen Susco
Starring	Sarah Michelle Gellar Jason Behr William Mapother Clea DuVall KaDee Strickland Grace Zabriskie Bill Pullman
Music by	Christopher Young
Cinematography	Katsumi Yanagishima
Editing by	Jeff Betancourt
Distributed by	Sony (USA) Universal Studios (UK)
Release date(s)	October 22, 2004 (U.S.)
Running time	92 min. (98 min. director's cut)
Country	USA
Language	English Japanese
Budget	$10 Million [1]
Followed by	The Grudge 2 (2006)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Grudge is the 2004 American remake of the Japanese film Ju-on: The Grudge. The film is the first installment in the American horror film series The Grudge. The film was released in North America on October 24th, 2004 ^[2] and is directed by Takashi Shimizu (director of the original series)^[3] while Stephen Susco scripted the remake. In the same tradition as the original series, the plot of the film is told through a non-linear sequence of events and includes several intersecting subplots.

The film is rated PG-13 by the MPAA and 15 by the BBFC its content of mature thematic material, disturbing images/terror/violence, and some sensuality ^[4]. The film has earned a cult status among many users on various Internet forums including Rotten Tomatoes^[5] and Internet Movie Database ^[6]. The film has also spawned several sequels including The Grudge 2 (which was released on October 13th, 2006) ^[7] and The Grudge 3.

Tagline: It never forgives. It never forgets

Contents 1 Synopsis 1.1 The Saeki Murders and Peter Kirk 1.2 The Williams family 1.3 The Social Workers 2 Differences between the Saeki murders 3 Cast 4 Characters 5 Reception 5.1 Sequels 6 D.V.D. Release 7 Trivia 8 Basic References 8.1 Specific References 9 External links

[edit] Synopsis

The Grudge is the curse of one who dies in the grip of a powerful rage or extreme sorrow. Those who encounter this murderous supernatural curse die and a new one is born, passed from victim to victim in an endless, growing chain of horror. The following events are explained in their actual order (which differs from the order shown on film).

[edit] The Saeki Murders and Peter Kirk

(Note: These events happen two years prior to the events in the film and several events portrayed in this section are shown in the director's cut, but parts of it are in the regular version.)

A pretty young Japanese woman named Kayako (Takako Fuji) is unhappy in her marriage to her husband, Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama). Kayako slowly develops an unhealthy obsession with an American college professor, Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), who is working in Tokyo, Japan. Despite the knowledge that the professor, unlike her, is happily married, Kayako continues to hold a torch for this man that she does not know, and keeps a secret diary which she uses to chronicle her fantasies about him. She stalks him regularly, and even sends him love letters informing him of her feelings. One night Kayako returns home and goes upstairs to their bedroom. When she appears in the doorway, she sees Takeo standing in the middle of the room with her journal in his hands. He studies it intensly, biting his nails with one hand, flipping through the book with the other. Kayako realizes that her husband is reading her diary, and knows all about her affection towards the American man. He sees her in the doorway and stares at her evily. Some of Takeo's recent artwork on the walls looks very distorted, and it can be hinted what will happen next. She realizes what is happening and slowly backs into the hallway. Before she can make another move, Takeo drops the diary and chases Kayako out into the hallway and rips her white dress. He grabs her and shoves her to the floor, Takeo bangs the walls while yelling and screaming. In a last attempt to escape, Kayako crawls down the stairs, but when she gets to the bottom, Takeo grabs her hair and head and twists her neck to a 90 degree angle. When Takeo looks up, he sees that their young son, Toshio (Yuya Ozeki), is at the top of the stairs; he had seen the whole thing. Takeo leaves Kayako on the floor, grabs Toshio, takes him back to the first floor bathroom, and drowns the boy in the tub. He also slits his cat's throat and tosses the carcass on the floor of the bathroom. He takes Kayako upstairs and wraps her in a garbage bag, and puts her in the attic through a closet door. He puts Toshio in his own closet. Although it was believed Takeo hung himself, Takeo is hung by Kayako's hair drooping from the ceiling in Toshio's bedroom.

Upon his arrival at the Saeki residence the next afternoon, Peter Kirk finds Toshio seemingly alive but bruised and shaken. He decides to wait for his parents to come home and stays there. A bit later, Toshio is in his room drawing, while Peter calls his wife Maria informing her when he will be home. He checks on Toshio in his room (where Takeo's body has seemingly disappeared), and then closes the door. He sees a bedroom at the end of the hall,(Takeo and Kayako's bedroom) and goes inside. There are paintings and illustrations nailed on the wall. Peter notices a bunch of family photos on the floor with Kayako's face cut out of every one of them. Underneath them he finds Kayako's journal and reads it, seeing how obsessed Kayako was with him. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees all of Kayako's face cut-outs stuck to the closet door with blood. Peter opens the closet door and looks up, seeing a lot of flies and bugs. All of a sudden, Kayako's bloody dead body in a trash bag falls from the attic and lands in the closet, her eyes staring at Peter. Peter backs up, Kayako's eyes following him across the room. He runs down the stairs and leaves the house in a state of shock. The next morning, in front of his wife, Maria (Rosa Blasi), he commits suicide by jumping off the balcony just outside his apartment bedroom.

[edit] The Williams family

After he is given a promotion by his superiors, Matthew Williams (William Mapother) moves to Tokyo, and takes his wife, Jennifer (Clea DuVall) with him, along with his ailing mother, Emma (Grace Zabriskie). His sister Susan (KaDee Strickland), who has been living in the city for some time, helps them in their search to pick out their new home. Matthew, Jennifer, and Susan decide on a house located in the suburbs, even though Emma feels a great sense of disease when she ascends the staircase to the second floor of the house. Her unease continues when the Williams family finally move in, and she sleeps fitfully. Jennifer has quickly gone off to her new life in Tokyo, feeling lost and lonely as she hasn't the faintest grasp of the language. She chooses to spend most of her time in the house.

One day, when Matthew is out at work, Jennifer goes to investigate some strange noises and occurrences within the house. When Matthew returns, he finds his wife laid out on their bed, struggling to breathe. A young boy appears in the bedroom and confronts him with strange cat-like sounds. Matthew and Jennifer meet a gruesome fate. After a while Susan, worried about her mother, phones the Williams residence and leaves a message on the answering machine, and prepares to leave work.

In the sequence with the most "frights" in the entire movie, Susan begins to exit her office by going down the stairs. As she does, the lights begin to flicker and go out. As the throaty, raspy noise (a death rattle) is heard (because Kayako's neck was snapped and broken), Susan looks over the railing to see Kayako's bloody ghost crawling up the stairs (in her traditional, jerky fashion). Just before Susan slams the door to the stairwell closed, a rabbit's foot attached to her cell phone is grabbed onto and torn off by Kayako, who seemingly cannot move into the lit hallway. Susan then quickly rotates, finds the night watchman, who finds nothing strange in the area, and leaves. Kayako's black ghost then materialises and begins walking towards the security camera (which Susan is watching from the security office). Susan then runs from the building in horror.

As she ascends the elevator to her apartment, Toshio is seen several times looking into the elevator from the floors that Susan passes, moving closer until he is staring right in the window. However, Susan takes no notice of him, as she is taking a moment to rest against the side of elevator. Once at her apartment, Susan begins to settle down. Her phone rings startlingly, and she is relieved to hear that it is Matthew (who seemingly died in the previous sequence). As soon as she "buzzes him up", her doorbell rings. A peek through the eyehole reveals Matthew, but when she opens the door, there is no one there. Kayako's throat noise is heard loudly from the phone and she throws it to the ground. The batteries are ejected from the phone, yet the croaking can still be heard as Susan slips back inside her apartment. Trembling fitfully and crawling into bed, Susan looks down and in horror lifts the rabbit's foot that had previously been torn from her phone. The camera pans out to show a large lump in the bed sheets, moving up towards Susan. Lifting up the sheets, Kayako's face is seen staring at Susan. A quick pan shot then shows the sheets falling down on a flat, empty bed.

[edit] The Social Workers

Yoko (Yoko Maki), a teenage homecare worker, goes to the cursed house to help Emma with house cleaning (this takes place shortly after the Williams move in). She enters the house listening to her walkman and walks around in several rooms before going upstairs. There, she takes off her headphones after hearing banging on the ceiling and looks around the room. (There is an extended version of this scene available in the Director's Cut version.) She opens a closet at one side of the room and looks up at the top of the closet, to an attic access sliding door. She opens the sliding door and ignites her lighter, looking around in the attic until she comes upon the face of Kayako's pale white ghost. She is dragged up into the attic and has her jaw ripped off; then she becomes possessed by the curse.

The next day, when Yoko does not appear for work, the main character Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is asked by her boss, Alex (Ted Raimi), to cover for Yoko and go and check on the house. She enters the house and finds Emma lying on the floor in the dining room, made up as a bedroom, in a sort of catatonic state. She helps her and cleans up the house until she enters a different bedroom with a closet upstairs. The closet is completely taped up and there is a sound coming from inside. She opens the closet to find a small Japanese boy sitting at the bottom looking rather bruised and innocent. She is not sure what to do and calls her boss, Alex, asking him to come.

While she is waiting for him she sees Emma seemingly whispering to someone. When Karen asks her about it, Emma says "I just want her to leave me alone." Karen looks at her in confusion as hair starts to appear coming out of a corner of the ceiling. Emma is laid back on the ground before suddenly gasping. Karen looks up to see Kayako reaching down at Emma. Kayako's attention then shifts from Emma to Karen. Kayako's hair, which was at first covering her face, flies back to show completely white eyes. (Her eyes are rolled back.) Her eyes then roll into place as Karen moves back in fright. Alex eventually makes his way to the house and finds Emma dead on the floor and Karen staring at the ceiling. Karen goes to the hospital and is questioned by detective Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi). Yoko kills Alex at the welfare centre (after the most graphic scene in the movie). Karen later learns about the Saeki's and the murder.

Detective Nakagawa returns to the home with two cans of gasoline and attempts to burn the house down. He is distracted, seeing Toshio in the bath tub drowning. When he gets Toshio's head out of the water, he sees Toshio looking behind him. When detective Nakagawa turns around, he sees Takeo behind him and is instantly killed. Later Karen (not knowing what happened to the detective) questions Peter Kirk's wife, but does not get much information, except that Kayako has appeared in the background of every photograph Maria and Peter have taken. Karen goes back to the house after finding out her sweet-heart, Doug (Jason Behr) has gone there to look for her. She goes there and walks upstairs.

A flashback shows what happened when Peter checks on Toshio, and then discovers Kayako's dead body (explained in "The Saeki Murders"). Peter leaves. Karen walks into Toshio's bedroom and sees Toshio in a pale, ghostly state, pushing the hung body of his father against the wall. Karen realizes in a vision that one night, Kayako came upstairs to the master bedroom to find Takeo reading her diary. He partially rips her dress and pushes her to the ground. She crawls down the stairs and tries to leave. Before she can crawl to the door, Takeo grabs her hair and breaks her neck. He sees that at the top of the stairs, Toshio saw the whole thing. (Parts of it are shown on the regular version, but a graphic entire sequence is shown on the director's cut).

Karen goes downstairs and finds Doug on the floor. (Here is another flashback on the director's cut only, showing Takeo drowning Toshio and slitting his cat's throat.) She tries to leave with him when a door opens upstairs. Kayako crawls down the stairs and kills Doug. Karen kicks over one of the open cans of gasoline that detective Nakagawa brought earlier. She takes Doug's lighter and tosses it onto the gas, making the house go up in flames. After, Karen is at the hospital and looks at Doug's dead body on the table, while a police officer tells her doctor that they were able to save the house from burning to the ground. Kayako appears behind her, and it is not explained if Karen lives or dies, although we can assume she lives, as she appears in the sequel.

[edit] Differences between the Saeki murders

In the original Ju-on: The Grudge, Kayako is murdered by Takeo off-screen, except for the montage in the opening that shows him after she is murdered. This makes the Ju-on murder of Kayako a mystery. It's believed that Kayako was murdered by a utility knife due to the slash marks on both her body and face. A deleted scene in the DVD release shows Takeo slashing Kayako with a penknife. One possibility is that Kayako saw Takeo reading her diary most likely in their bedroom, and he attacked her, pushing her down. She crawls down the stairs and is followed by Takeo. Kayako is cornerd by Takeo and backs up against the wall by the door. Toshio is watching from the top of the stairs, not really understanding what is happening. Takeo reaches his hand out onto Kayako's face and hits her head against the wall, somehow making her parylized. Toshio goes and hides in his closet. Takeo brings Kayako up to their bedroom and slashes her neck open with a utility knife. Then he wraps her in a plastic bag and puts her in the attic. He drowns Toshio and slits his cat's throat. Toshio goes missing and is never found. The cat's body was buried in the yard. Kayako's body was found in the attic, and Takeo died on a nearby street because of Kayako (shown in the original Ju-on: The Curse).

In the remake, Kayako is murdered when Takeo breaks her neck. The scenes that outline the massacre are shown off-screen in the theaterical cut, but all is shown in the director's cut. In the director's cut, a flashback before the film's ending shows Kayako standing in the doorway of her bedroom, realising that Takeo is reading her diary and knows about her obsession with Peter Kirk. He then chases her into the hallway and rips her dress and knocks her to the floor as he is screaming and banging on the walls. Kayako then crawls down the stairs in an attempt to escape, but is grabbed by Takeo who snaps her neck with both hands. These events are witnessed by Toshio and is immediately drowned by Takeo with his cat (described in The Saeki Murders).

[edit] Cast

• Sarah Michelle Gellar as Karen Davis, an exchange student who takes a job as a care worker to get a social credit.
• Jason Behr as Doug, Karen's boyfriend, who attends the University of Tokyo, and has a part-time job working at a restaurant.
• William Mapother as Matthew Williams, a "number cruncher" who receives a promotion from his superiors that requires him to relocate to Tokyo.
• Clea DuVall as Jennifer, Matthew's lonely wife who is trying to adjust to a new life in Japan.
• KaDee Strickland as Susan, Matthew's younger sister, who resides and works in Tokyo, and who helps her brother, sister-in-law and mother choose and move into their new home.
• Grace Zabriskie as Emma, Matthew's mother, who is suffering from senile dementia.
• Bill Pullman as Peter, a teacher working in Tokyo, who receives a number of love letters from Kayako, a woman he does not know.
• Rosa Blasi as Maria, Peter's wife.
• Ted Raimi as Alex, the director of the care centre that Yoko and Karen are stationed at.
• Ryo Ishibashi as Nakagawa, a detective whose colleagues all died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances during the investigation of the Saeki family murder case. He is all too aware of the house and it's strange history.
• Yoko Maki as Yoko, a Japanese care worker who speaks English, and is assigned to care for Emma Williams.
• Yuya Ozeki as Toshio, the eight year-old son of Kayako and Takeo Saeki.
• Takako Fuji as Kayako Saeki, a married woman who develops an attraction towards Peter Kirk.
• Takashi Matsuyama as Takeo Saeki, Kayako's husband, who is angry when he discovers her feelings for another man. He muurders Kayako prior to the film's events and put a curse on the house.
• Courtney Webb as Sick Girl, a young girl who is in the same hospital as Karen. She only makes a brief cameo.

[edit] Characters

Main article: List of The Grudge characters

[edit] Reception

The film opened on 3,348 theatres in North America ^[8]. The film generated $39.1 million in ticket sales in its first weekend (October 22 - 24 2004). The film later declined 43% on its second weekend by earning $21.8 million, becoming the first horror film to top the Halloween box office since House on Haunted Hill ^[9]. The film made a total of US$110,359,362 in North America alone and $183,474,602 worldwide, far exceeding the expectations of box office analysts and Sony Pictures executives. Sony also stated the film cost less than $10 million to produce, thereby making it one of the most profitable films of the year. ^[10].

The film has a 40% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes (with 58 out of 144 film reviews counted fresh) and has received a weighted average^[11] rating of 5.7/10 at the Internet Movie Database^[12].

[edit] Sequels

The Grudge 2

Main article: The Grudge 2

A sequel, The Grudge 2, was announced three days after the film opened ^[13]. The sequel stars Amber Tamblyn as Karen's little sister Aubrey who is sent to Japan by her mother to bring Karen home from Japan.

The Grudge 3

Main article: The Grudge 3

A sequel to The Grudge 2 was announced by Sony during Comic-Con 2006. Takashi Shimizu stated he is offered to direct the sequel but would rather produce the film ^[14].

[edit] D.V.D. Release

The film was released on DVD on February 1, 2005. The film was released as a standard version of the film with only a few special features ^[15]. On May 17, 2005, the MPAA-unrated director's cut of The Grudge was released onto DVD in North America. The release included several scenes that were cut to achieve a lower rating from the MPAA, as well as others which were removed for pacing and plot reasons. This version of the film was used as the theatrical run in Japan. The release also contained new deleted scenes and commentaries, stories In a Corner, and 44444444 from Gakko no Kaiden G ^[16].

[edit] Trivia

• Two cast members previously worked with Sarah Michelle Gellar on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Clea DuVall starred in the episode "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" as Marcie Ross, and Jason Behr was on episode "Lie to Me" as Billy 'Ford' Fordham.
• Bill Pullman played the role of Toshio's stepfather in the 2006 parody film Scary Movie 4.

[edit] Basic References

[edit] Specific References

• Gray, Brandon. "'Grudge' Grabs No. 1", Box Office Mojo, 25 October 2004.. Retrieved June 9, 2005.
• Gray, Brandon. "'Ray,' 'Saw' See Robust Bows", Box Office Mojo, 1 November 2004.. Retrieved June 9, 2005.
• The Grudge. Box Office Mojo. Retrieved on June 13, 2005.
• "The Japanese Version of 'The Grudge' Exposed!!!", Bloody-Disgusting, March 5, 2005.. Retrieved June 7, 2005.

[edit] External links

• Official site
• The Grudge at the Internet Movie Database
• The Attic Crawlspace - Ju-on/The Grudge fansite
• Director Takashi Shimizu Q&A

The Ju-on Curse
Directed by Takashi Shimizu
Short Films: Katasumi and 4444444444 | Tales of The Grudge
Juon Series: Ju-on | Ju-on 2 | The Grudge | The Grudge 2 | The Grudge 3
American Films: The Grudge | The Grudge 2 | The Grudge 3
Characters
Aubrey | Karen | Kayako | Takeo | Other