More thoughts on "The Grudge"
The Onion A.V. Club review matched my own impressions of it pretty well.
It's like a primer for "Japanese horror" symbols and motifs--a collection of scary scenes, but not really much of a story to collect them or make you care.
One thing I noticed was that there was so little sense of external reality in the film that I had a hard time caring about whether any of these characters were "got" by the various ghosts that were haunting them. For example the woman in the office block, by that point in the film I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that there's *no* safe or "real" space these characters can escape to, so I hardly saw the point of even running away from the ghosts.
I remember watching "Poltergeist 2" as a child and first realizing that I really just thought the protagonists would be better off killing themselves because they couldn't escape all this stupid junk that was happening to them. I didn't care about them as people so the "horror" wasn't horrific at all, it just seemed pointless.
The first "Poltergeist" was an excellent horror movie (mainly up until the psychic arrives and they start "solving" things) because it built slow, on a foundation of reality. There seemed to be some real life to these people, both in how we saw them at the beginning and just in the way they were written once things started to happen.
"Night of the Living Dead" is another good example--not a whole lot happens before the first zombie attack, but the entire time is filled with strong character dialogue that sets up Barbara and her brother as real people that it's possible to care for. That's especially important considering that Barbara is virtually catatonic through the rest of the film. All the characters we meet subsequently are well-written and vivid as realistic people coping with a horrific scenario. They don't just feel like stick people propped up to have something jump out at them.
Ira Levin was especially good at combining real-life horror with supernatural frights in "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives". In both those cases, the horror is virtually metaphorical--based directly on realistic fears and confusions about modern life, amplified into a demon baby or a neighborhood of robots.
For me, horror really works best when you care about the character, and can have some reasonable hope that they might survive their fate. There's a mild thrill to watching somebody stalked by a killer in "Friday the 13th" or by ghosts in "The Grudge", but there's such a sense of inevitability about it, without any sense of reality to make it tragic.
Romeo and Juliet's fates are inevitable too, but I care about the characters so I can't help but thinking "No Juliet, look, he's going to wake up any minute now! Don't take the poison!" I find the same thing happens in the best horror movies, I care about the characters and the story lets me hold out hope that they'll make it--even if I know the story and know in my mind that they won't.
In the worst examples, it basically boils down to "You died because you're in a horror movie. Oh well." In the best examples, it makes me sad, anxious or horrifies me to see this fate befall someone that I care about, no matter how inevitable it is.
Jeff
It's like a primer for "Japanese horror" symbols and motifs--a collection of scary scenes, but not really much of a story to collect them or make you care.
The Grudge functions primarily as a fright machine, using a haunted house and a time-leaping chronological structure as an excuse to tie together a bunch of bumps and jolts. As such, it functions reasonably well, operating as kind of a greatest-hits collection of J-horror tropes. Supernatural happenings that operate like diseases? Check. Creepy ambient sounds aggressively mixed into the soundtrack? Absolutely. Ghosts manifesting themselves in modern technology? They show up on videotapes, security cameras, and cell phones. Lurching bodies? Yes. Ghostly children staring into space? Oh, most certainly.
One thing I noticed was that there was so little sense of external reality in the film that I had a hard time caring about whether any of these characters were "got" by the various ghosts that were haunting them. For example the woman in the office block, by that point in the film I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that there's *no* safe or "real" space these characters can escape to, so I hardly saw the point of even running away from the ghosts.
I remember watching "Poltergeist 2" as a child and first realizing that I really just thought the protagonists would be better off killing themselves because they couldn't escape all this stupid junk that was happening to them. I didn't care about them as people so the "horror" wasn't horrific at all, it just seemed pointless.
The first "Poltergeist" was an excellent horror movie (mainly up until the psychic arrives and they start "solving" things) because it built slow, on a foundation of reality. There seemed to be some real life to these people, both in how we saw them at the beginning and just in the way they were written once things started to happen.
"Night of the Living Dead" is another good example--not a whole lot happens before the first zombie attack, but the entire time is filled with strong character dialogue that sets up Barbara and her brother as real people that it's possible to care for. That's especially important considering that Barbara is virtually catatonic through the rest of the film. All the characters we meet subsequently are well-written and vivid as realistic people coping with a horrific scenario. They don't just feel like stick people propped up to have something jump out at them.
Ira Levin was especially good at combining real-life horror with supernatural frights in "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives". In both those cases, the horror is virtually metaphorical--based directly on realistic fears and confusions about modern life, amplified into a demon baby or a neighborhood of robots.
For me, horror really works best when you care about the character, and can have some reasonable hope that they might survive their fate. There's a mild thrill to watching somebody stalked by a killer in "Friday the 13th" or by ghosts in "The Grudge", but there's such a sense of inevitability about it, without any sense of reality to make it tragic.
Romeo and Juliet's fates are inevitable too, but I care about the characters so I can't help but thinking "No Juliet, look, he's going to wake up any minute now! Don't take the poison!" I find the same thing happens in the best horror movies, I care about the characters and the story lets me hold out hope that they'll make it--even if I know the story and know in my mind that they won't.
In the worst examples, it basically boils down to "You died because you're in a horror movie. Oh well." In the best examples, it makes me sad, anxious or horrifies me to see this fate befall someone that I care about, no matter how inevitable it is.
Jeff
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