Has Buffy met her match?

10 April 2012

This ghost story with a difference survived predictably dismissive reviews in America to become one of the year's biggest hits. Rightly so, since it's one of the most terrifying films ever made. It is also a flagrant incitement to immorality. Very few people who sit through it will wish to go to their beds alone.

Under the guidance of American producer Sam Raimi, the young Japanese director Takashi Shimizu has recycled the best elements from his Japanese hit, Ju-On: The Grudge, including his two ghosts (Takako Fuji and Yuya Ozeki) and the central set, a haunted Tokyo house unsettling in its very ordinariness.

Shimizu has taken the opportunity to perfect his camera moves, cast better actors and make the plot less confusing. The new version also makes the scariest use of sound effects that I have heard.

The film opens with a memorably brief appearance by Bill Pullman, but its real star is Sarah Michelle Gellar (from Buffy The Vampire Slayer) as a nice American exchange student who is studying social work in Japan.

She agrees to stand in for a Japanese nurse who goes missing at the Tokyo home of an elderly American (Grace Zabriskie). While Sarah tends to the old woman, who is in a state of either dementia or shock, she hears scratching sounds from upstairs and the cries of a child. Naturally, she goes upstairs to investigate.

In most haunted-house movies, the characters lose credibility at around this point. Haven't they seen any horror movies? Don't they know they shouldn't be going up there alone?

The beauty of the plot here is that it gives every character a good reason to explore the house, whether it's because they're doing their job as social workers or detectives, or because they're thinking (heaven help them) of buying the place.

And the film neatly gets round the other problem of haunted-house movies - if the characters know the place is haunted, why don't they just leave? - by making the ghosts so vengeful that they follow the characters home.

In one of the most disturbing sequences, an incautious visitor to the house hides from the ghost beneath the blankets of her own bed, and finds it's right there under the sheets.

This being the 21st century, there's a good deal of gruesomeness. All the same, an awful lot is left to our imagination - one reason I preferred The Grudge to Takashi Miike's equally horrific, but infinitely more sickening, feminist revenge fantasy, Audition.

Some critics will condemn the script for not doing more to flesh out the characters. However, this is not an oversight, but a deliberate policy. The victims - most, though not all, Americans - have characters that are deliberately vague. We're meant to feel for not just one character, but several.

Tarantino would admire the way the script juggles time and interconnected short stories, and Hitchcock would appreciate the way Shimizu builds tension.

Shimizu also knows how to give the audience a break from suspense with occasional flashes of dark humour.

Does the film have any purpose other than to terrify? Well, in an odd sort of way, it has a lot in common with Lost In Translation.

The American characters in Tokyo all have a feeling of cultural dread, of being attacked by forces of which they have little understanding. And Shimizu and his screenwriter neatly sidestep accusations of racism by making two of the most sympathetic characters Japanese.

But the real secret of The Grudge's success is that, like every other huge horror hit, it taps into the spirit of our times. Whether the horror villains of the Fifties and Sixties were giant ants (Them!) or aliens disguised as people you knew (Night Of The Living Dead), they mirrored and exploited Cold War fears about the Bomb and the Red Menace.

In the Nineties of Western triumphalism, trendy young filmmakers made millions by jeering safely at the horror movie as capitalist exploitation. The villains were either preposterous weirdos (I Know What You Did Last Summer) or people so crazed by the idea of celebrity that they thought serial killing was cool (Scream).

These were post-modernist horror films, dedicated to pooh-poohing people's secret fears as hollow and groundless.

But since 9/11 we have been living through an age of anxiety, and The Grudge is successful precisely because it taps into contemporary fears.

It's worth noting that the ghosts in The Grudge, once outsiders have invaded their home, are as implacable as terrorists.

All the ghosts are victims of horrible crimes - which is precisely how most terrorists see themselves - but their anger against their direct oppressor has mutated into a relentless vengefulness against anyone who happens to get in their way. Their aim is not merely to kill their innocent victims, but to terrorise them.

There are many better actresses around than Sarah Michelle Gellar - her lack of facial expression is the film's biggest weakness - but as a screen icon she is the epitome of American innocence abroad. Dressed in her soft, white, woolly polo-neck, she resembles nothing so much as a lamb to the slaughter.

She's an apparently incongruous - but really remarkably apt - symbol for civilised forces battling irrational hatred that we don't understand. Hatred which, once it's aroused, we can never entirely escape.

Verdict: Very frightening *****

MORE ABOUT

Actors And Actresses

Has Buffy met her match?

Read More