This is where The Grudge fell flat. The original, Ju-on, was absolutely terrifying, but the remake was just boring. It’s somehow gone on to become something of a horror classic, even though it’s not actually scary, or fun. When South Korean horror classic A Tale of Two Sisters (2002) was remade as The Uninvited (2009), it went from being one of the scariest films in recent memory to a damp squib, incapable of even the most rudimentary of shocks.
It’s not as easy to retain the scares as one would think. It relies on a series of factors – taking what was scary about the original, and using that in the film’s new context – tying in to rule 1 of this very article. One film that did manage to acheive this was The Ring – although not quite as pant-soilingly jumpy as the original Ringu, it still reached an adequate amount of horrorosity. It localised the story of the haunted videotape to a small American town, and Naomi Watts made her character, Rachel, feel real. It’s probably the most famous of the horror remakes, and with good reason – it’s simply the best of those films. It was followed by Dark Water , and a disappointing sequel, The Ring Two (confusingly not based on Ringu 2).
Sure, they succeeded with The Ring by making it scary, but that can’t have been the whole story, right?
Well…
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