Film, Horror
Apocalypse Meow: The Grudge at the End of the World
A short glimpse into the Grudge franchise, nihilism, and why Kayako Saeki is much more terrifying than any other ghost that has ever existed.
There’s a comment that can be found underneath the Youtube video “JuOn The Grudge with English Subs,” which, is exactly what the title suggests; the Japanese 2002 smash-hit Ju-On, plastered onto the website almost nine years ago by some kind citizen. As of writing this, the movie has yet to be removed.
Posted by Youtube user Rylosalex two years ago, the comment is simple, but haunting:
“The ending scene with empty streets and all of those missing persons posters….creepy”.
Creepy is a word for it.
The moment in question comes at the very end of the film after the curse has run its course, leaving nothing behind in its wake. It lasts for no longer than thirty seconds, but the effect is haunting.
Six shots of Nerima, Tokyo. The streets are completely devoid of life. Missing person posters, their edges curled yellow by the passage of time, flutter in the wind and fall to the ground, no one left to heed their warning. There are no children playing on the sidewalk. No passerby with groceries in hand, headed home for the day, no ambient noise of traffic, because there’s no one left to drive the cars. There is no sign of the everyday hustle and bustle of life in Tokyo, Japan, as there is no life left.
The curse has taken everything.
The Grudge, or Ju-On Series, is an absolute must for any horror fan; it is the pinnacle, the piece-de-resistance, if you will, of the dead wet girl, the beginning of the stringy, black-haired ghost woman we fear, the one that creeps and crawls into our nightmares. The series of films, starting in 1998 and boasting a lineup of ten movies, all center around a single plot thread; housewife Kayako Saeki is murdered by her jealous husband after she shows interest towards another man. In his rage, Takeo Saeki murders the family cat, and it is implied that he kills his son, Toshio.
Anyone that enters the Saeki house is then pursued by Kayako, now transformed into a terrifying Onryō. In Japanese literature, the Onryō (怨霊) is a wrathful ghost, a spirit wronged in life now looking to get even with the living. Once an unsuspecting victim steps foot into the property, they are doomed to die, and the allure of experiencing an actual haunted house keeps the citizens of Tokyo flocking to the Saeki house, giving Kayako and Toshi, now a vengeful spirit himself, a steady diet of victims.
This isn’t the isolated haunting that most of us are used to. The typical ghost story plays out as: victim ventures into a haunted house, and the victim is terrorized and or killed by the spirit that inhabits said haunted property. Or perhaps you can replace the house with some other haunted item. The victim comes into contact with haunted tape/haunted box/haunted doll, the victim is terrorized, and or killed by the spirit that haunts the cursed item. Rinse and repeat.
But what makes The Grudge especially haunting, is that it — it being the curse, Kayako Saeki, the Grudge herself, etcetera — seems to function dually. It is a ghost story with an apocalyptic end, what happens when you cross something like Contagion and The Woman in Black.
The Ju-On/Grudge series is told in segments, each focusing on a seemingly random person that somehow comes into contact with the house; let’s refer to the structure as Patient Zero. Dare to enter the property, and you’re immediately infected, with a zero percent survival rate. Hysteria, hallucinations, fever, and visions of a ghostly white naked cat-boy are just some of the symptoms that the infected experience before death. And, just like a bad cold, the Onryō can be passed on to the poor unfortunate souls who just happen to be in the vicinity.
In the first film, doting sister Hitomi becomes infected after visiting her brother Katsuya, when he unknowingly moves into the Saeki house. She inevitably dies, but it gets worse; when the spirit follows her from the house to her office like that cough you just can’t get rid of. A security guard, with zero ties to Hitomi, the Saeki family or that infected house, “falls ill” with Kayako, and the spirit eats him alive.
In fact, the much-maligned Grudge 3 expands on this idea, when an American girl living in Japan moves back to Chicago, Illinois, only to infect her entire apartment building. Even after she dies, residents get passing glimpses of Toshio, of black cats running just past their field of vision, until it’s time for Kayako to take what is hers. The curse runs rampant in the building, forcing residents to move out; and the unspoken idea here is that, since there’s no escape from the curse, the only thing they’re doing is spreading the infection further, prolonging the inevitable. The residents that stay end up dying. The residents that leave will likely die.
Think back to the empty streets of Tokyo from the first Ju-On, and that’s how every place visited by the Onryō will end up; empty, lifeless, forgotten.
Like a bad case of HPV, Kayako Saeki cannot be cured. There is no antidote for an Onryō, and your efforts of resistance — be it moving away, visiting shamanic matriarchs, or trying to tape the windows up with newspaper so your dead friends don’t look in through the windows at night — are all futile.
In the end, the infection — the curse — will run its course, and everyone will die. And, in my opinion, that’s part of the allure. The Grudge is a fantastic series, in that it really tests and pulls at the restraints we put on hauntings. It forces us to confront the unfairness of being mortal, to come to the understanding that sometimes bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. And there’s nothing we can really do about that.
There’s a special sort of nihilism in those shots of empty Tokyo, that is much more terrifying than the croaking apparition of Kayako; it’s the thought that, given time, each of us will fall victim to the infection that is time, and the only thing to prove that we ever existed will be a piece of yellowing paper fluttering in the empty street.
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