In American horror movies, we have a tried and true tradition of peeved ghosts, sudden shock and screaming women.
But, like never before, the audience is starved for new ways of being scared, for different imaginations to reset the Gothic and grotesque.
We've seen Japan's yen for sadistic creativity in much of its erotic and horror cinema, in the glorious gross-out fairy-tale "Spirited Away," and movies such as "Ringu" that become American adaptations such as "The Ring."
The appropriation continues with "The Grudge," and the distance from the cultural source has grown even though Japanese director Takashi Shimizu has remade his own movie, "Ju-on: The Grudge." The result is too easy to belittle.
The characters are ciphers, so it's appropriate that Sarah Michelle Gellar leads the cast with one multipurpose facial expression and no interesting dialogue.
She plays a nurse working in a cursed Japanese house, and the movie unleashes yellow peril on this defenseless American. The handful of white lead actors are surrounded by a Japanese ensemble, all thrown into anonymity like mass-produced images of Kabuki.
There's a market out there for Asian exoticism, and in foreign film, it inexplicably surpasses most of our other cultural curiosities. Look at how we responded to the Chinese martial arts film "Hero" this year.
But Shimizu doesn't even leave us the tawdry thrill of the foreign. His movie is rigorously patterned after predictable Hollywood horror, ironing out a sense of both Japanese spookiness and white alienation in Tokyo a la "Lost in Translation."
The movie is full of the same bathtubs, morgues and doors revealing the same old phantoms. One is a pale Japanese stand-in for Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense." Black hair is a sinister signifier, loosed in irrepressible plumes as in "The Ring." And, of course, the clinically insane are freak-show conduits for supernatural evil.
There is vague potential for an intercultural horror flick based on various nationalities of terror. But in this movie, American fear couldn't be bothered to commune with its Japanese counterpart. "The Grudge" is a standard haunted-house story, and the ending whips out a minute of flashback that falls pathetically short of bloody, lusty tragedy.
I haven't laughed so hard at a movie this year. But if horror is the new comedy, will we forget the value of a good scare?
Contact the A&E Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu
