Ju-on: The Curse (2000)

directed by Takashi Shimizu
Japan
70 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Last night I intended to watch Ju-on: The Grudge, but as it turned out I actually had the very first Ju-on movie, which is this. Takashi Shimizu also directed a few very short short films before the series that got right down to the bare bones of its concept, giving the world its first glimpses of Toshio and Kayako, and I'm very fond of those short films, which is possibly why I was also so fond of The Curse and its minimalism.

It was shot directly to video and it certainly looks like it. It's a completely different movie from The Grudge, and it certainly looks like that too. That's one of my favorite things about this series; there's not a whole lot of clearly defined rules for it outside of its ghosts and curses, so the sequels get to say that they're based in the same universe, but they don't share any characters or continuity. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it's bad. But I like the feeling of a cinematic world connected only by the thinnest of threads.

I recently read a book on the history of the Japanese yūrei and it helped me to understand the position that movies like The Grudge and The Ring that were able to break out of their locality and into the hearts and minds of horror fans across the globe hold in the history and folklore of spirits in Japan. I encourage everybody to think of yūrei not as simply a translation of the word "ghost" but as an entirely separate entity, as disparate from the general idea of a ghost that persists in Western and other cultures as a dog would be from a wolf. They exhibit convergent evolution, they're both explanations of what we become and where we go after we die, but the specifics of them are different enough that they shouldn't be thought of as the same thing.

Toshio in The Curse, for instance, is actually more along the lines of the oldest versions of yūrei- in old Japanese literature before kabuki plays and the printing press "standardized" the idea of yūrei a little more, these spirits were often not distinguishable from living people- there's even a story where a man's wife bears his living child after she's become a yūrei. The blurry lines between when Toshio is dead and when he isn't make me think about stories like that. The makeup on both him and his mother all across the Grudge films also pulls from the standard yūrei vision, although this time it's taken from the way actors in kabuki plays would have their makeup done to convey to the audience that they were playing a yūrei.

One of the things I'm fond of about this movie and its sequels is that despite the relatively high body count and unsettling method of death, it never quite gets to feeling like it's exploiting death or tragedy. You always- or at least I always- retain a feeling of care for the people who die, because they're given more than just a name, for the most part. Who deserves it less than a schoolgirl, or a responsible teacher, or anybody else who just kind of blundered into the curse by accident? The "nobody's safe" mentality makes the Ju-on series of films remain potent decades after their original debut.