Page 107 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

94 Nightmare Japan

house, Shimizu then cuts to a rapid, disorienting montage. The images
that flash across the screen range from extreme close-ups of a mouth
gnawing bloody fingertips, the blade of a box-cutter clicking slowly out
of its plastic casing, and Kayako’s lifeless eyes framed by streaks of
blood, to medium and full shots of a crazed Takeo turning about slowly,
the young Toshio drawing pictures of a long-haired woman on a sheet of
paper before scampering away to hide in a closet, and a black cat
screeching as it is grabbed roughly by the back of its neck. Intentionally
disorienting and confusing, these images allow the audience a privileged,
if ultimately incomprehensible, glimpse into the violent act that has most
likely resulted in the eponymous grudge, a ‘curse’ that, as the film’s title
sequence tells us, originates when one ‘dies in the grip of a powerful
rage’, and then spreads virally, killing all those with whom the spirits
come into contact and, in the process, birthing new curses. It also
anticipates the film’s larger organisational logic, a tangled and non-linear
narrative that, in its episodic construction, resembles the horror manga of
Ito Junji, particularly the vignettes that comprise his anthology, Flesh-
Colored Horror (2001), or that punctuate his larger collected series,
Tomie (2001) and Uzumaki (2002-2003).
The motivation behind Takeo’s murderous assault, we eventually
learn, is his psychotic anger over Kayako’s suspected adultery; while the
film’s narrative makes it clear that the wife died at her husband’s hands,
exactly how Toshio met his fate is left vague. Toshio is described only as
having ‘disappeared’, but from the film’s first extended vignette, it is
clear that both mother and son haunt the site of the carnage presented in
the film’s opening sequence, as well as the lives of those who move into,
or even temporarily visit, the home. This premise reveals a palpable
masculine anxiety associated with a rapidly transforming social landscape
and its impact upon long established gender roles, a dread exacerbated by
the culture’s ‘strong patrilinear emphasis’, as well as women’s
paradoxical role as ‘both a source of danger to the norm and the very
means of perpetuating that norm’ (Martinez 1998: 7). If, as Susan Napier
argues, Japanese men ‘[c]onfronted with more powerful and independent
women…have suffered their own form of identity crises’ (2000: 80), then
the core of Shimizu’s film is the ultimate nightmare for a phallocentric