Hello Enthusiacs I am the lord of Shadow and today we ask a question. What happens when you die terrified? What happens when you death is so traumatic it rips the veil between our world and the next.

The film The Grudge tells us that spirit is born. A vile and terrible demon that hungers to pass your pain onto another thus repeating the process. Thus it is a never ending curse. When you find yourself haunted it is already to late.

The movie is told out of order however I will be talking about in the proper order mainly because it will make more sense that way.

The curse is born when a Tokyo family falls apart. The husband believes his wife is having an affair, so he breaks her neck not just breaking her neck but spinning her head a full 90 degrees. He then drowns their young son and his cat. This is one of the most shocking moments of the film and it really shows you why the curse is as powerful as it is in the film. But don’t think the father got away the rage and sorrow did not spare him long. The risen spirits hung the man slowly choking him to death and the curse took hold over the house.

Now I’m going to leave the rest of the film a mystery because it’s better to see it first hand. However the I am going to say the movie does a good job of mixing jump scares with actual suspense and in the mid 2000’s we had a lot of movies try to do that and fail horribly.

That’s why I wanted to give this movie a spotlight as it did get a little attention at release but it wasn’t very well received long term. The main reason for that is the original version was released in 2002 in Japan and this is it’s American counterpart released just 2 years later.

Having seen the two I would say they are on equal footing at least in my own opinion. It does have two sequels but honestly I didn’t like those as much and there is talk of a remake involving Sam Raimi so that could be interesting.

Until next time I am the lord of Shadow saying Stay Scared