Some Random Thoughts About The Grudge (2004)

While it’s certainly not an artistic success, Takashi Shimzu’s repeat-remake of his own movie – already filmed twice by him for the Japanese market - this time around for an US audience apparently thought to be incapable of withstanding looking at a film featuring only Asian faces, is at least an interesting film. Mostly interesting in how it makes one realize how comparatively small changes to a scene can turn it from something creepy into something rote and banal. That happens here again and again with horror sequences Shimizu used to creepiest effect in his Japanese movies. In this remake scenes shot in minimally different ways still lose most of their power.

It is also rather interesting to realize that a higher budget really doesn’t mean a film actually gets better bang for its buck. Just compare the sound design for the ghosts in the originals with the one here, the poor dead things losing half their creep factor despite certainly having cost much more. The increased slickness doesn’t do the film much good either, with houses and offices and so on that look too antiseptic turning what should be lived in, personal spaces for the supernatural to intrude in back into film sets, which obviously decreases the emotional weight for the audience.


Even things changed that are on paper “better” work out for the worse in this one: the narrative’s structure is much clearer but that also means it loses some of the dislocating – and therefore disturbing – effect of the Japanese originals, the film again getting slicker but much less capable of disturbing by it.