Page 110 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 97

biological monsters either, this other-worldly, mother-centered family
merges a dangerous corporeality (they can physically attack and
manipulate their victim’s bodies), with an eerie spectral quality without
adhering absolutely to one convention or the other. Furthermore, this
uncanny mother and son become even more disturbing, as well as less
exclusively linked to Japanese horror cinema, when one factors in
Shimizu’s masterful camera work and brilliant control of the film’s mise-
en-scène.
In keeping with ‘classic’ and contemporary works of Japanese
horror, Shimizu allows tension to build slowly, almost contemplatively,
throughout Ju-on: The Grudge’s numerous, non-linear episodes. Many of
the expected, culturally specific trappings of filmic terror are present:
long black tresses framing wide staring eyes, ominous tatami shots of
sliding closet doors, shadowy apparitions that render their human victims
virtually paralysed with fear. However, true to his roots as ‘an eighties
splatter movie kid’ (Macias 2003, para 18), Shimizu also incorporates a
slasher/ ‘stalker’ film aesthetic throughout Ju-on: The Grudge, most
obviously via the occasional alignment of the viewer’s gaze with not only
the central protagonist’s perspective, but that of Kakayo and Toshio as
well. Such compositions and camera movement allows us, by turns, to
‘stalk’ and ‘be stalked’, a visual motif almost exclusively applied to what
Shimizu refers to as ‘splatter movies’ or ‘monster stories’ (para 18). This
collision of ‘an American and Japanese style’ (para 18) creates a
cinematic hybrid that appeals to viewers familiar with the visual
iconography and cinematography of both Japanese and US horror cinema.
Lastly, by vacillating between limiting what we see and revealing
the objects of our fear in groundbreaking ways that separate him
aesthetically from other directors, Shimizu creates a text that may very
well alter forever the way that some viewers process cinematic horror. By
frequently relegating frightening images to the extreme edges of the
frame, as fleeting, yet troubling figures glimpsed peripherally but never
completely, Shimizu artfully manipulates the audience’s gaze, creating
the impression that we may have just witnessed a flash of something
disquieting – as if from the corner of our collective eye. During other
moments, most particularly the climactic sequences that inevitably bring