20 Years Later: ‘The Grudge’ and Its Mid-Aughts Nostalgia for Millennial Horror Buffs

Horror Aughts Issue #1 — A new column about forgotten scary movies from the 2000s that were big hits

‘Horror Aughts’ is a column in which I revisit scary movies from the 2000s that were big commercial hits at the time but have been largely forgotten ever since.

Then:

I vividly remember seeing The Grudge for the first time at 15. I was at my childhood friend’s house on a school day, filled with excitement and joy because watching ghastly horrors back then counted as a bragging right. The gorier and frightening, the better. As a teen in the 2000s, horror was a cool thing to be a fan of. I guess it would be embarrassing to admit that we saw a pirated version of the film, except that new movies were hard to come by in Hungary at the time, and most working-class families didn't have internet yet. We had to use all of our connections (meaning anyone from a wealthier family with internet access) to get the latest flicks which we then burned on CDs and DVDs and lent to each other at school. In a way, torrenting brought us new friends — and it was also illegal, which gave it an appeal.

After Gore Verbinski’s American remake of The Ring, which we were obsessed with two years earlier (one of the most terrifying horrors that scared the living hell out of me and still do today), rumour was that The Grudge was the shit. That guttural, disturbing-as-fuck sound from the film spread like wildfire among the kids who already saw it. That alone gave it a buzz. We didn’t care whether it worked as a proper movie as long as it did as a scarefest. You know, effectively creeping you out like it was meant to do.

I recall not fully grasping what The Grudge was supposed to be about, but it didn’t matter. The scares were there, and that was the point. Deliciously deranged, bonkers, and grotesque, perpetrating our not-fully-developed mind with the kind of visceral images nightmares are based on. Did they actually make sense or advance the plot in any way? Not really, but none of us cared about that. They were gnarly and weird, a little ridiculous but equally unsettling, and they poured fuel on the fire of our growing fascination and enthusiasm with the genre.

Now:

20 years later, I'd say, I expect a lot more from most horrors than simply trying to be scary. But even that is a high bar to hit when you spent your formative years and a big portion of your adult life geeking out on hundreds of scary movies. Yet Rewatching Takashi Shimizu's 2004 remake of his own Japanese original now, I have to say I continue to appreciate his whole-hearted commitment to this jumpscare machine he had the chance to make twice (with a significantly bigger budget the second time).

The Grudge still doesn’t work as a proper film — meandering and stretching his paper-thin narrative into a non-sensical turmoil of a plot — but those butt-clenching and surprisingly creative moments of prolonged dread with the goofy eyes and floating jet-black hair still deliver a tingling to the spine today.

The absence of a real narrative and legit characters actually allowed Shimizu to focus on his one and only primary goal: inducing and cultivating fear in the viewer. The house in The Grudge where most of the atrocities take place is essentially a black hole that absorbs and obliterates people either physically, mentally, or in both ways. It’s a raging furnace of pitch-black cruelty and sheer terror into which Shimizu keeps chucking unsuspecting and innocent victims to make them suffer and (usually) die in horrific ways. It’s a dead-simple and satisfying setup since there’s always a draw to watching a bunch of people walk into a building filled with vicious spirits that died dreadful deaths before returning to haunt the living (Thir13en Ghosts has literally taken that concept to the most extreme and over-the-top highs in 2001).

Because no matter how you look at it, the true protagonist in The Grudge is the atmosphere. Yes, we have Sarah Michelle Gellar, riding the wave of her then-Buffy fame, as our quasi-hero, but she has no real presence (let alone an arc) nor an important role to fill whatsoever. The same can be said about Bill Pullman who wonders through the film like someone who got lost in a nightclub trying to find the men's room. The closest we have to star performances are Takako Fuji's Kayako and Yuya Ozeki’s Toshio as the ghost lady and ghost boy. They even get a hazy backstory that gives them a tragic and humane allure. Their powerful and effective delivery, however, rests mainly on the shoulders of Shimizu’s elaborate use of practical (and occasionally special) effects. It’s pretty impressive how he turned an everyday-looking Japanese woman and a kid into two eerie entities who crawl under your skin in mere seconds.

Thus it’s somewhat disappointing that the director’s entry into the American horror zeitgeist at the time remained brief (save for The Grudge 2 two years later) before he went back to directing mostly mediocre and low-scaled J-horrors in his country. As flawed and contrived The Grudge was from a narrative standpoint, he evidently showed some potential as an adept filmmaker with a knack for atmospheric horror. As for his movie’s legacy in the U.S., despite spawning two sequels and another remake in 2019, The Grudge franchise got virtually forgotten and written off as a rather singular sensation of the 2000s, making hundreds of millions on a relatively small budget.

Verdict:

I'd be lying if I said that the "blood-tinted” glasses of nostalgia from my early years of becoming a horror buff didn’t play a big part in how fun this rewatch was, but I’m happy to report that The Grudge has been absolutely worthy of a revisit.

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I’ve already taken a deep dive and rewatched three movies that could potentially be the subjects of future Horror Aughts issues, but I’m totally open to suggestions. Let me know in the comments if you have any specific film in mind that you’d like to see in this column.

As always, thanks for reading The Screen.