The Grudge

So the first time I saw this movie, I rented it because I'd heard bad things but it still looked cool to me, and when I watched it I was underwhelmed, and I thought "oh, that wasn't scary." Then I fell asleep and proceeded to have nightmares about it all night long. I don't usually have nightmares about a particular movie if it scares me, I might have bad nightmares, but they usually don[t feature the characters from a particular movie,l or at least they didn't use to do so, but the ghostly Kayako haunted my dreams, and that made me think twice about this movie, so I went out and bought the Japanese original on which this remake was based, and THAT is still probably my favorite horror movie of all time. Over the years, however, I've come to appreciate the remake more, and now I like them almost equally, so there's something to be said for giving movies time to sit in your head and marinate in your brain juices for awhile.

Last night's viewing reminded me how bleak this movie is. I'd forgotten. It's also got some sad commentary on the state of marriage and family in the world.
there's more of a sense of abusive families and marriages poisoning everything they touch in this movie than in the original, because this movie focuses more on the marriages involved than on showing how many stories they can cram into one movie that show how the ghostly curse spreads. I still love the original, but the images of unloving marriage in the remake haunted me more this time around than they have on previous viewings. It's also pretty ballsy for a movie to have an ending this bleak, so I appreciated that. I definitely think this movie ages better than I would have thought back when I first rented it so long ago.