JU-ON: THE GRUDGE 2

Harase Kyoko, a world-famous horror film actress, is invited as a guest on a television show dedicated to paranormal events set in the infamous and feared house said to be cursed and haunted by spirits. The crew and cast of the show go to the residence to do the segment, but after their entry into the house, one by one, all the staff members fall victim to the curse that looms over the house. How could they not make a sequel to that film which immediately became an icon of Japanese horror cinema? We all expected it, and indeed in the same year as the first chapter and without losing time, the sequel to “Ju – On” was made, the little horror that managed to scare millions of people both at home and abroad. The project for “Ju-on 2” was born immediately, during the production of the first film; in fact, already foreseeing a wide public success, the producer Taka Ichise developed the idea of a sequel and suggested to the director Shimizu Takashi to start imagining what the story of “Ju-on 2” would be. Shimizu accepted and developed a new project, which aimed to show all the themes that could not be included in the first film, a project intended to be better and more frightening than the previous one, involving the viewer differently, inserting the so-called “hidden theme”. This is a secondary but at the same time essential theme to the story, capable of involving the viewer's feelings and which will be that of motherhood; it was necessary to create a film whose main and evident purpose was to scare but which hides different themes such as maternal love. These were the premises on which “Ju-on 2” was to be based; we therefore expect something new, something original and that manages to remedy the weak points of the previous chapter…but are these the results obtained? No, the result obtained is that of a semi-clone of the first chapter, a film that proves to be not very bold in inserting variations in the story, which falls into all the defects of the first one but that (same reasoning made also for “Ju-on”) manages in a singular way to satisfy the viewer who seeks in a horror film elements that really scare. Once again we are faced with a not very compact story that turns out to be the sum of many small stories, but this time, differently from what happened in the first film, the various episodes fit better together, the links between the various characters are stronger and therefore the idea of the “film” is more successfully conveyed. As in “Ju-on”, here too we will find ourselves facing truly “scary” sequences (see the ending in the hospital or the scene in the wig room), sequences worthy of entering the anthology of the most terrifying ghost appearances and that with great difficulty will be forgotten by the viewer. Another positive element of “Ju-on 2” is the imagination with which many deaths and many sequences were created (such as the episode of the woman who hears a continuous banging in the wall of her house at the stroke of midnight), an imagination that was completely absent in the first film. But the element that most differentiates the first from this second chapter can be found in the fact that, while in “Ju-on” the story was entirely set in the cursed house, here the sequences in the residence are reduced and most of the murders are carried out outside what everyone considers to be a cursed house. Therefore, this “Ju-on 2” can be considered as a somewhat unnecessary sequel from a narrative and innovative point of view, but which is still enjoyable for the development of the horror themes that in some points surpass the famous first chapter. But it is undeniable that Shimizu Takashi could have done more for the second chapter of the film that marked his career.