Ju-on (2000) poster

Ju-on (2000)

Rating:

aka Ju-on: The Curse


Japan. 2000.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Takashi Shimizu, Producers – Takashige Ichise, Kazuo Kato & Masaaki Takashima, Photography – Nobuhito Kitsugi, Music – Gary Ashiya, Special Effects – Hajime Matsumoto. Production Company – Toei Video.

Cast

Yurei Yanagi (Shunsuke Kobayashi), Ryota Koyama (Toshio Saeki), Yue (Manami Kobayashi), Hitomi Miwa (Yuki), Asumi Miwa (Kanna Murakami), Kazushi Ando (Tsuyoshi Murakami), Yumi Yoshiyuki (Noriko Murakami), Yuko Daike (Kyoko Suzuki), Makoto Ashikawa (Tatsuya Suzuki), Takako Fuji (Kayako Saeki)


Plot

Teacher Shunsuke Kobayashi goes to the home of his pupil Toshio Saeki to find why he has been absent from school. He finds Toshio alone, seemingly having been abandoned by his parents. As Shunsuke investigates, he also finds dead bodies in the house. Both a family living in the house some time later and the real estate agent tasked with selling the house encounter the ghostly Toshio and his mother Kayako.


The Japanese film Ring (1998) produced an amazing boom in Asian Horror. Ring was multiply sequelised and led to a host of imitators in Japan and throughout most countries of the Asian region – South Korea, Thailand, Singapore. And that was before many of these properties were brought up for English-language remake. Next to the Ring, the biggest success of the 2000s Asian horror boom was the Ju-on/The Grudge series.

The Ju-on/The Grudge series originally began with two episodes of the tv movie anthology School Ghost Story G (1998). Director Takashi Shimizu then expanded the basics he had created there out with the video-released Ju-on here and its sequel Ju-on 2 (2000), which were retitled Ju-on The Curse and Ju-on The Curse 2 in later re-release. This was followed by the theatrically released Ju-on: The Grudge (2003), which became an international hit, and its sequel Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003). Shimizu was then employed by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to conduct an English-language remake with The Grudge (2004) starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, which was followed by a sequel The Grudge 2 (2006) and a third film The Grudge 3 (2009) without his involvement. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the original films, two new Japanese films of an hour long apiece were commissioned and released simultaneously with Ju-on: Girl in Black (2009) and Ju-on: Old Lady in White (2009). Ju-on: The Beginning of the End (2014) was a further theatrically released reboot and was followed by a sequel with Ju-on: The Final Curse (2015); Sadako vs Kayako (2016), a crossover with the Ring series, and was followed by the tv series Ju-on: Origins (2020). The Grudge (2020) was a reboot of the US series.

Apart from the segments in School Ghost Story G, this was the first Ju-on films proper. All of the key elements of the series are here – the little ghost boy Toshio and his mother Saeko; the uncanny croaking noises. There is also the non-linear structure with the screenplay told in terms of a series of chapters that flip back and forward in time, each devoted to one person who becomes affected. This film even appears to take place at the same house that was used in subsequent entries. The one effect that was dropped by the subsequent films was the boy opening his mouth to emit an unearthly cat howl.

Kayako (Takako Fuji) in Ju-on (2000)
Kayako (Takako Fuji)

As the first of the series, Ju-on is stylistically crude. You can see what Takashi Shimizu was aiming for but it is embryonic at this point. Certainly, this is something that would reach a point of perfection with Ju-on: The Grudge a mere couple of years after this and which still remains the high point of the series after over a dozen films.

At this point, Takashi Shimizu’s work is not as polished. What is here comes out as being a B-budget film but you can see the promise he held. He does produce a number of uncanny scares – the images of the mother’s croaking body crawling down the stairs; the eerie appearances of the little boy. Especially effective is the scene where a mother sees her bloodied daughter walking up the stairs and follows a trail of bloody footprints.

Outside of the Ju-on/Grudge series, Takashi Shimizu has also made Tomie: Rebirth (2001), an entry in another Japanese ghost story series; the exceedingly strange and unclassifiable Marebito (2004) about a man finding a vampire-like woman beneath the Tokyo subway; the ghost story Reincarnation (2005); an episode of the anthology Ten Nights of Dreams (2006); The Shock Labyrinth (2009); Rabbit Horror 3D (2011); the live-action version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (2014); the English-language airplane horror 7500 (2014); the ghost story A Rain Woman (2016); Innocent Curse (2017) about abducted children returned with a curse; Howling Village (2019) about a haunted village; Homunculus (2021), Suicide Forest Village (2021), Oxhead Village (2022) about a cursed box and the Virtual Reality film Immersion (2023).


Full film available here


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