Horror remakes are as common as horror sequels, if not more so at this point. The Grudge was originally a Japanese film titled Ju-On, which was then remade for American audiences in 2004 and spawned two more sequels. But this latest version of the film isn’t really a remake, and doesn’t truly count as a sequel. According to director Nicolas Pesce in an interview with EW, the franchise is an anthology and this just the latest chapter…
“The beauty of ‘The Grudge’ franchise, both the American and Japanese iterations, is it’s an anthology series. Every movie is a different story of different characters having different interactions with this curse. In today’s age where we’re remaking everything, I thought it would be fun to dive into ‘The Grudge’ universe where we don’t have to remake anything, but rather a new chapter in this canon.”
What’s interesting is this new film will take place at the same time as the 2004 movie that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and produced by Sam Raimi, who is still around. Andrea Riseborough leads the way as a cop in a new town who gets involved with a case that leads her to a house that has been “grudged”, or cursed by a particularly violent death. But Pesce doesn’t want anyone going in thinking The Grudge is just another haunted house movie with the same old scares…
“It’s not your traditional haunted house movie where you pull up to a creepy, Gothic-looking house and go, ‘oh god that’s haunted.’ A motif of all the [‘Grudge’] films, especially this one, is that behind the most normal kind of house, inside the most normal-seeming life, there can be something horrifying — whether it’s real and grounded, or something otherworldly and terrifying, it can happen anywhere, behind any door, to anyone. It’s unique to this story and philosophically terrifying.”
Pesce adds that Riseborough’s storyline will be accompanied by two more, creating “a tapestry of three different stories that interweave and all take place at slightly different times, centered around this one house that’s at the center of this case that this cop is working on.” Also in the cast are Betty Gilpin, Demian Bichir, Jacki Weaver, and Lin Shaye.
