Ju-on: The Curse (2000)

directed by Takashi Shimizu

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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As I mentioned last week, I've been reading David Kalat's J-Horror book, and his treatment of movies that I had seen before but was well overdue to give a second look to has been compelling me to go back and revisit some old favorites. In particular, I enjoy his enthusiasm for V-Cin, seeing it not as a wasteland full of trashy splatter flicks but a breeding ground for creative freedom that spawned some of the scariest and most original films in J-Horror.

Ju-on: The Curse is about the house. Shimizu himself has stated that if he had to posit a main character for this strange, free-floating, non-linear film, it would be the house wherein the horror unfolds. As Kalat says, this is a real house, not a constructed set, but the cinematography (Nobuhito Kitsugi) and the lighting (Hideo Oka) manage to transform a normal house into a Skinamarink-esque labyrinth of pain and misery. There's a shot early on in the film where one of the house's unwitting inhabitants starts hearing the tell-tale moans that signify her doom is close at hand, and when she runs out of the room she's in, the hallway outside is dark and she is framed in a classic Dutch angle - the house transformed, all of a sudden, the house itself conveying the ghosts to her, not content simply to let itself be haunted but insisting that it plays a hand in the horror continuously playing out within it. There's something oppressive about the interior of the house - we see characters throw open windows to daylight; look outside; enter and exit, but as long as they're physically inside the house, it could be as dark or as light as the house wants it to be.

It feels like there's too many stairs, too many angles. Not in an obtrusive way - just subtly. I kept catching scenes where the actors were framed inside doors or windows, boxed in by the house (perhaps, if I may be allowed to risk committing the sin of unforgivable pretentiousness, by the house). During that most famous scene at the end of the film I had a thought that somehow hadn't occurred to me before: "oh, wow, the house is giving birth to Kayako". Sliding down the stairs, wet and blood-matted, there's something disturbingly biological about the whole affair.

It kind of feels like one of those dreams where you're in a house that you used to live in, but something is not right about it.

The plot of Ju-on is deliberately told as a disjointed collection of scenes that aren't arranged in chronological order. When Kobayashi (the appropriately-named Yūrei Yanagi) discusses his missing student Toshio (Ryōta Kayama) with his pregnant wife Manami (Yue), the narrative flashes to a memory - whether it's of the past or of the future, we don't exactly know - that foretells the rest of the film. Kayako bows to him slowly, itself not an unusual action but disconcerting in the way it allows her long hair to fall in front of her face as she advances, out-of-focus, towards Kobayashi. It's not clear what the timeline is here: we see Toshio variously alive and dead at different points as the movie progresses. It's not that we never figure out what events set other events in motion - it's that everything seems to be happening at once.

Aside from how effective this movie is, what's also impressive is the influence it had. From the way Kalat describes it, the film garnered a reputation essentially through people spreading it around Ring cursed videotape style and telling all their friends "Have you seen this? It's the scariest thing I've ever watched". While it is not a perfect film and some aspects of it do still manage to feel superfluous despite its short running time, there's a core of pure, unrefined architectural horror goodness here that went on to have a ripple effect on horror as a whole down the line - much like the violent deaths of Kayako and Toshio Saeki would forever curse the space around where it happened, reaching out and touching any and all who come too close.