Following in the immensely successful footsteps of RING, JU-ON: THE GRUDGE is an influential, creepy and utterly disturbing low-key ghost story from Japan, successful enough to spawn both a sequel and an American remake. This is Japanese horror at its finest: shot on a minuscule budget, utilising real-life 'run down' locations, and with a cast of subtle actors and actresses fleshing out the roles. Director Takashi Shimizu seems to have cast only deeply attractive actresses in his movie, perhaps to keep the attention of his male audience, and this makes the slow-burning proceedings very easy to watch.The 'haunted house' storyline is very straightforward and there isn't much of a plot to speak of: basically, we see a series of interconnected stories showing how a series of characters are haunted. There are a couple of ghosts; one is a cute little boy, whose manifestation mixes fear and pathos; the other is a more traditional female spirit with long, dark hair and staring eyes, the sort who inhabits every Asian horror film since the similar ghost in RING proved so successful. JU-ON: THE GRUDGE dwells on scares and shocks all the way through, which is why it's so effective: it's 100% focused on scaring the viewer. There are many great bits, my favourites including the duvet shocker, the television breakdown, the bloody staircase set-piece at the climax, and the bit with the three dead schoolgirls. There's even time for a twist ending for those who like that sort of thing. For unsettling, deep-rooted frights and genuine creepiness throughout, JU-ON: THE GRUDGE comes up trumps and will be hard to surpass.

There is a house in Tokyo where every visitor ends up dead. A child and a mother live there. Both are ghosts. Their presence stems from a traumatic event in the house's past. The story follows a variety of characters that enter this house.The film is structured into a series of short vignettes. We follow different people who encounter the horror of the mysterious house. To be honest, the plot only barely makes any sense. It seems to be no more than really an excuse to string together a number of scary moments. This is excusable on the grounds that this is a genuinely unsettling film. It's unnerving in that way that the best Japanese ghost movies are. The cultural difference between east and west means that these movies come at us in ways we can't predict as easily. The Grudge, like Ring, is no different in this respect and its scare factor stems quite a bit from this unknown quality. There is a constant atmosphere of dread in this one.If it perhaps had a little more coherence it would have the potential to reach the top bracket of horror. As it is, it works as an exercise in inventively scary Japanese horror moments. For me this is a perfectly acceptable compensation, as it's quite rare for any film to scare you in the way that this one sometimes does. So with that in mind, it's quite obvious that this movie has achieved something impressive.

this movie is a horror masterpiece, id seen the two American grudge movies first, and they impressed me, but somebody told me that the original was even scarier i had to check it out. the first time i tried to watch it on my own i turned it off after ten minutes because i was that freaked out, and i didn't even really see anything. but the movie has a very haunting and creepy atmosphere that grabs you, even though i had seen the remakes first, it took nothing away from this horror masterpiece. there are a couple of cgi shots here, but for the most part, the scares are very classic, and some moments in this, are scarily haunting, and stick with you. bottom line is you want a brilliant, scary horror movie, this is for you, i highly recommend

I saw the remake staring Sarah Michelle Gellar a few years ago and found it very creepy so when this version was on television I had to watch it to see how they compared. I'm not sure if it was because I'd already seen a version of the story or because I was ready to be scared but this time was was no where near as scared, it still provided a few hair raising moments though.The story opens with Rika, a young social worker being sent to a home where she finds an old woman, upon hearing a noise she looks upstairs and finds a cat in the cupboard as well as a small boy who she didn't notice at first, he says his name is Toshio. Before she can ask him anything else she hears a noise in the old woman's room and finds a strange shadow by the woman, it turns and looks at her leaving her terrified. What follows are a series of incidents each linked to the house some take place before Rika's story and others years afterwards, it appears that everybody who visits they finds themselves haunted by Toshio and the strange shadow and end up dead or missing.The episodic nature of the film seemed strange at first but there were subtle links between them such as mentioning the finding of Rika's body in one of the later chapters. Unlike a lot of horror films there is no gore and we don't actually see the victims die, the chills come from creating genuinely creepy situations, Toshio is particularly creepy even though he doesn't do anything more frightening than stare.