A new clip from The Grudge has been released, which may put you off taking a bath ever again. The film will be the fourth installment of the Stateside branch of the unkillable franchise, and the first in over a decade after the sorely disappointing DTV The Grudge 3 in 2009.
In comparison, its older cousin, the Ju-On saga is now up to eight films, not including the two shorts that preceded it, or Sadako vs Kayako, a crossover with the Ring series that began as an April Fool’s joke before becoming a real film.
This reboot and ‘sidequel’ is set in 2004 and runs concurrently with the original US The Grudge, which was itself a remake of 2002 Japanese flick Ju-On: The Grudge and I’ll stop there to avoid confusing things too much. The story follows Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) as she investigates a number of suspicious deaths that all seem connected to a house with a violent past, while the clip in question features John Cho’s realtor Peter Spencer in a scene viewable above that practically forms a checklist of J-horror visual cues.
It seems as though Cho will play a significant role in the film and he’s already promised that it’ll terrify its audiences. It’ll also add to his horror credentials that began with season 2 of The Exorcist and augment the display of his range seen in the sci-fi drama of Star Trek, the heightened emotion of the underseen Searching and the numerous comedies with which he made his name.
The setting of The Grudge in the mid-‘00s is rather appropriate, since at that time, Hollywood was at the height of its obsession with remaking Asian (and mostly Japanese) horror movies and their lank-haired ghostly women, something the first poster decidedly harks back to. It’s likely that the film’s events will do the same, too, introducing a new generation to the mounting dread of Kayako and the throaty crackling of her death rattle as she slowly yet inexorably comes for you.