The Ju-On and Grudge films – about a deadly curse that begins in a house in Tokyo and eventually spreads all the way to the United States – are finally getting a proper origin story.
And it might be even more terrifying than the movies because it is more realistic, referencing real-life disasters and murders that have happened in Japan.
The new Netflix series, Ju-On: Origins, serves as a prequel to the popular horror franchise, which began in 1988 with two short films by director Takashi Shimizu and his 2000 direct-to-video movie Ju-On.
The two decades that followed saw 12 more movies, including a spinoff Hollywood film series bookended by The Grudge (2004) – a remake of Shimizu's 2002 starring Sarah MichellJu-On: The Grudge e Gellar – and The Grudge starring John Cho, which was released earlier this year (2020).
The new Japanese-language series is helmed by filmmaker Sho Miyake, whose eclectic resume includes the acclaimed coming-of-age tale And Your Bird Can Sing (2018) and hip-hop documentary The Cockpit (2015).
Miyake had never ventured into the scary or supernatural before, but the series' writers – horror maestros Takashige Ichise (Dark Water, 2002) and Hiroshi Takahashi (Ringu, 1998) – asked that he come on board.
In a translated e-mail interview, Miyake says the brief he received from the writers and producers was to craft a convincing prequel to the film franchise.
"Therefore, I tried to make its tone and style more realistic than the movies," explains the 36-year-old.
"The most important thing they told me to do was to make it raw and vivid. So I wanted the actors to deliver a performance that was grounded in reality, and for the audience to experience the rawness of what may happen in real life."
Set in the 1980s, Ju-On: Origins follows several people who find themselves drawn to an abandoned house on the outskirts of town.
One of them is Haruka (Yuina Kuroshima as Haruka), a young actress who has been haunted by the sound of footsteps in her home ever since her fiance Tetsuya (Kai Inowaki) visited the cursed spot and began behaving strangely.
After she enlists the help of paranormal investigator Yasuo (YoshiYoshi Arakawa) to get to the bottom of this, they and several others encounter the two malevolent spirits that fans of the movies know all too well: Kayako and Toshio, ghosts of a mother and son horrifically murdered there.
Miyake wanted to ground this supernatural story in real events that took place in Japan during that time period.
"One of my challenges in creating this original TV series was to express historical context," he says.
Thus the show incorporates actual news footage from the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack of 1995 as well as reports of several well-known murder cases that have taken place in Japan since the 1980s.
It also references issues such as domestic violence.
But above all, the series sets out to channel the essence of what made the films so memorably terrifying: "a feeling of fear that transcends language and culture, and was clearly expressed by visual and sound direction as well as simple and masterful storylines", Miyake says.
This is why "when the first Ju-On movie was released, it traumatised me and other young viewers", he recalls.
Like iconic Japanese horror films such as the Ring franchise (1998 to 2002), Ju-On will also conjure a sense of dread surrounding everyday items, particularly those used to communicate.
"In this series, TVs and phones appear frequently. And given that the show is being streamed all over the world, I think it could be interesting to imagine how media and fear are related to each other," the director says.
But he hints that fans can expect a fair share of the scares here to be in-your-face rather than psychological.
"Fear can be evoked by showing a balance of visible and invisible things, but the Ju-on films have used visible fears more and I wanted to maintain the same technique here." – The Straits Times/Asia News Network
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