This reviews compares and contrasts Ju-on: The Grudge with its 2004 remake. The critical content of both pages is the same.

Five years ago, a father brutally murdered his wife and then killed himself. Their six-year-old son mysteriously disappeared at the same time. This tragedy caused a deadly curse to be placed upon their house, affecting all who enter it.

This is Takashi Shimizu's setup for a movie that he filmed twice. His original Japanese Ju-on: The Grudge, released in 2003, was in fact his third entry in the series; the first two installments were made for TV. He filmed it again as simply The Grudge, one year later, with American actors, written in English and with a revised screenplay tailored to Western viewers. Both versions have a lot in common. Not only the director, but also narrative, key scenes and some of the main characters in both movies are similar in intent and execution. But the movies are different enough to offer a nice case study on how a more or less identical movie turns out differently when made for another audience. In this back-to-back review, I will refer to the Japanese original as Ju-on, and the American/Japanese remake as The Grudge.

Both movies are essentially ghost stories, very much in the post-Ring vein of modern Japanese horror. Their non-linear narrative structures mean that they aren't as gripping as Hideo Nakata's signature piece, but both versions deliver more individual scares than most of their recent rivals.

The meat of the shared story is actually little more than a connected series of spooky vignettes. In Ju-On, we kick off with a social worker called Rika (Megumi Okina, the closest the movie gets to a lead character) visiting the house in question to check on an old woman who lives there. She finds a spooky little boy locked in a cupboard, and then something horrible happens to her off-camera. Next, the terror gradually spreads to each and every person who has something to do with the house or the people in it, like a young man and woman who come to live in the house, only to get affected by the unseen horror. The man's sister is haunted by a blood-covered woman in her own home, the policeman who investigated the original murders sees something horrifying on a surveillance camera, and so on.

Ju-on's narrative is confusing, largely because Shimizu chooses to display the curse's accumulating effect by messing with chronology and overlapping events. The movie's format is chaptered, each episode named after the person who's going to be hit by the curse, but some characters reappear later (Rika in particular), and there's no real climax or dramatic resolution.

But Shimizu knows how to build tension and how to orchestrate a good scare. There are virtually no special effects, but he realises that there are few things so unnerving as a creepy kid. He gets plenty of mileage out his white-faced, black-eyed ghost child Toshio who keeps popping up in corners of rooms, under tables, in cupboards and, in one brilliant sequence, on each floor of an apartment building, seen through the window of an ascending elevator. The sound design is also marvellously spooky. The murdered woman's spirit emits a horrible crackling noise as she crawls towards her victims, and meowing of a cat becomes extremely sinister when coming from a kid's mouth.

None of all this is, of course, particularly original. We've seen scary kids in anything from The Shining to The Sixth Sense, and the crawling woman is reminiscent of both Sadako-coming-out-of-the-TV from The Ring and Linda Blair's spider walk sequence in The Exorcist's extended version. What the curse actually is doesn't really get any clarification -- some victims are scared to death, some are claimed by mysterious black smoke, others get dragged away by the boy or the woman. But all this adds to the nightmarish feel of the movie, with its Lovecraftian unspeakable horror, lurking on the edges of our world, and ready to intrude and disrupt normality.

The story in The Grudge is largely the same. Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is an American student who's living in Japan with her boyfriend. She spends her days studying to be a social worker and temping as a caregiver for homebound patients. After one of her co-workers disappears while caring for a patient, Karen is given the assignment and asked to visit the house. There, she finds a nearly catatonic woman (Emma, Grace Zabriskie) lying on the floor in soiled sheets, surrounded by trash and rotting food. Emma shares the house with her son and daughter-in-law, but they're nowhere to be found. As Karen sets out to tend to the woman, she discovers a bizarre young boy (Toshio), seemingly trapped in a taped-shut closet. She tries to question him but doesn't make much headway and it's here that the film sets off the first of several timeline manipulations, different storylines through flashbacks that merge with present day, making Karen an interactive participant in the past.

Sam Raimi was so impressed with the Ju-on franchise that he persuaded an initially reluctant Shimizu into remaking his own movie for Western audiences. Stephen Susco (Mr. October) was hired to write an English screenplay from Shimizu's original script with Raimi himself as executive producer. Despite all the attention he was receiving from the U.S., Shimizu was adamant about filming in Japan. Sets from Ju-on were recreated in Tokyo's Toho Studios and interpreters were hired to help the American actors and Japanese director (who speaks very little English) understand each other.

The cast is a mix of familiar faces from the original (Takako Fuji and Yuya Ozeki reprise their roles of Kayako and Toshio), American stars (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Pullman), supporting players (Jason Behr, Clea DuVall, Grace Zabriskie and KaDee Strickland), and a fine performance from Ryo Ishibashi (Audition) as a detective. Gellar does a decent enough job, though after years of watching her as the vampire-ass-kicking bimbo Buffy, it might be a bit tough to accept her in the role of a victim. But it's Ozeki and Fuji who particularly deliver standout performances. Fuji has perfected Kayako's freakishly disjointed crawl and no matter how many times I see Toshio, the meowing little boy still freaks me out.

Right from the film's stunning opening sequence (involving Pullman), you know that The Grudge isn't going to be your average ghost story. In addition to its non-linear storytelling, the curse and its heralding wraiths don't play by conventional ghostly rules. They also wreak havoc outside of the house, they can't be appeased, and discovering the source of the curse doesn't necessarily end the evil, as was the case with Ringu. With the same director, the same sets, and two of the principal actors from the original, the movie comes out as a fairly faithful remake of Ju-on, although the plot has been made (somewhat) more coherent, and the ending has been changed to deliver something like (but not entirely so) an all-encompassing pay-off.

Its bigger budget notwithstanding, the original's eerie and minimalist imagery is mostly kept intact. Keeping the story based in Japan with American leads paves the way for an interesting subplot with a culturally alienated Karen who's having a hard time blending in with her new environment. The movie has its share of creepiness (Kayako's otherworldly groaning, for instance) and some great jump scares, one involving a ghostly image on video footage, another chilling scene that has Kayako stalking Emma's daughter Susan on a stairwell, and the movie-capping climactic encounter with Karen.

Comparison of the two versions is an interesting affair. Clearly, The Grudge has the typical workings of an American makeover of a Japanese movie. It's less interpretive with its stronger focus and higher pace, discernable (and likeable) lead character, narrative consistency and plot resolutions. In this case however, unlike Gore Verbinski's The Ring (a case bound to be lost, despite Naomi Watts' stellar acting performance), this isn't at all a bad thing. Ju-on is evidently the more atmospheric and dynamic version, but the script is so loose that it's difficult, for some maybe even tedious, to keep track of what the hell is going on.

Would I recommend seeing either version? Oh yes I would. Both of them. Neither movie is a spoon-fed viewing meal, but The Grudge is more accessible and digestible. My advice would be: see The Grudge first. And when your recollection of the movie dims, give Ju-on a spin.