Page 111 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
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98 Nightmare Japan
each of the film’s episodes to a sudden close, Shimizu culminates our
rising dread by propelling us face to face with Kayako and Toshio in all
their monstrous alterity. Finally, Ju-on: The Grudge is a film that
disallows its characters and, by extension, its audience, access to those
conventional ‘safe spaces’ to which people most commonly retreat when
the tension escalates or becomes too much to take. Peering through the
fingers covering one’s face does not distance the imperiled characters
from that which is frightening; rather, it forces immediate confrontation
with the horrific. Likewise, pulling the covers up over one’s head does
not provide a buffer zone but, instead, reveals that the monster you most
fear has been in the bed with you the whole time.
Image 9: A doomed social worker tends to a neglected parent in Shimizu Takashi’s
Ju-on: The Grudge (Courtesy: beyondhollywood.com)
Covering Adaptations
As notions of transformation (both thematic and cultural) and the variable
impacts of trans-cultural generic debt inform the analyses that constitute
the bulk of this chapter, I would be remiss if I did not at least
acknowledge that the three films examined in the previous pages –
