Watch These Movies Before ‘The Grudge’

At the beginning of this millennium, Japanese horror movies, or J-Horror, were the hot new trend when it came to spooky monsters. Folks couldn’t get enough of pale-faced, black-haired little ghost boys and girls contorting their way out of TV sets or into showers. Just as long as we got some recognizable American actors in the remakes to help the very foreign formula go down. And now J-horror has been around long enough for a whole new round of American remakes for the genre’s classic titles.

Watch these movies before The Grudge.

Ju-On: The Grudge

A nifty fact about the first American remake of The Grudge is that it comes from the same Japanese writer/director of the original Ju-On, Takashi Shimizu. So whichever version you pick you’re still respecting the source material.

The Ring

The Ring is arguably the remake film that made J-Horror break big in the West. All of the terrifying imagery here (Sadako’s hair, the well, the VHS tape aesthetic, the curse passing itself along) became instantly iconic. Can you believe this is the movie Gore Verbinski made right before Pirates of the Caribbean?

Uzumaki

Even among J-Horror, manga artist Junji Ito has his own particularly unnerving style. Uzumaki (or spiral) is about a town beset by all sorts of curses that all center around the concept of evil circles. A girl’s curly hair starts killing people. Kids turn into snail monsters with spiral shells. Bodies get twisted up all sorts of awful ways. There’s already a live-action movie but Adult Swim is working on a new animated adaptation.

The Entity

The Grudge is ultimately a ghost story. A brutal ghost story, but a ghost story all the same about dead pained souls with unfinished business on Earth. The Entity is also a particularly brutal ghost story, considering what the monster does and keeps doing to the heroine regardless of wherever she moves to.

Scary Movie 4

They’re super dumb but man I have a lot of early 2000s teenage nostalgia for Scary Movie. Anna Faris is such a gem. I’m only singling out Scary Movie 4 because that’s the one with a Grudge parody.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

This isn’t Marvel’s Iron Man! Although it is probably way closer to Akira’s Tetsuo. This is just a weird freaky Japanese body horror movie about a dude whose flesh keeps becoming more and more metal. In like a gross deformed way, not a rock music way.

Sadako vs. Kayako

You’ve seen Godzilla fight King Kong. You’ve seen Freddy fight Jason. And now you can see the ghost from The Ring fight the ghost from The Grudge. Don’t ever let anyone convince you that Japanese horror movies are less silly than American horror movies the longer a franchise continues.

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