Page 115 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

102 Nightmare Japan

estranging environment rendered threatening through its very difference.
As such, Shimizu risks transforming the vengeful spirits at the film’s core
into merely one more manifestation of a culture abjectified through its
radical and threatening unfamiliarity. Thus, rather than functioning as the
return of a repressed feminine identity or as a creative barometer for
social change at the turn of the millennium, the onryou of Shimizu’s The
Grudge may be interpreted as constituting the ultimate metaphoric
representation of a seemingly irreconcilable alterity. Shimizu risks, in
other words, morphing his vengeful spirits – and Japan itself – into
abstracted entities, monsters that, in their radical difference, threaten the
imagined cultural, psychic, and physical cohesion of the decidedly non-
Asian characters with whom Western audiences are invited, if not
ultimately forced, to identify.