Grudge is a reimagining of blockbuster 2004 supernatural thriller The Grudge, which was based on Japanese original Ju-on (2002). The 2018 reboot finds Detective Muldoon investigating a gruesome backroads’ murder. Even though her partner Detective Goodman assures no connection to a previous grisly case at the same street address, her own secret probe unleashes a series of horrifying happenings with one thing in common: a house.
In 2004, The Grudge took the world of supernatural movies by storm, breaking out as a blockbuster hit among fans of the genre. Filmmakers revisited this world in 2018 with a reimagining of the classic thriller in a way that stays true to the original, says Schuyler Weiss, executive producer on Grudge.
“The way that horror is often told in Japanese horror, it’s a lot of slow boil building of tension and anticipation. It’s like keeping the audience in this sense of anxious dread and then into the aftermath. Nick Pesce, the director, is a big fan of the Japanese films and the world of The Grudge in general, and he and Sam Rami had an idea for how to bring it back but with a completely new story that still pays homage to the themes of the Japanese stories and the underlying ideas of The Grudge, but with a whole new take on it.”
“There are some underlying things that are really specific in the set up in the original movies – the rules of how the grudge works and things like that – and so if you play with those rules then it automatically connects to the movies that have gone before. And so you can take whole new stories but it still feels like The Grudge because you have those underlying rules that were set up in the original movies.”
“The grudge is born in this house where a terrible tragedy unfolded and now everybody who encounters the house is affected. The story takes place with three distinct chapters, with three distinct crucial characters in different time periods in the life of this house, and the narratives are chopped up so that you go back and forth between the different storylines and in each one you learn a little bit more about the other story. And as we go back and forth the plot thickens and then finally we understand what really happened here.”
“There’s very little violence that transpires on the screen in this movie, and yet when the audience fills in the blanks themselves, it’s truly horrifying, what’s happened to these characters. We spend a long time sucking both the characters and the audience into this house of horrors, and we know that it’s not going to end well, and it’s getting so far beyond the point of no return.
“The other part of the horror in this movie is that we have ghosts that are the grudge and they are themselves terrifying. But they don’t do anything to the people most often. They drive them to a kind of madness that leads them to do horrible things to themselves and each other.”
“You see these ghosts and they’re scary, but it’s what happens after that’s truly horrific. Some of our goriest, most visceral, shocking moments are these things that these characters do to themselves and to each other. So the most terrifying menaces in the movie are the people themselves.”
