The Grudge 2

I watched The Grudge 2 and it was cool! I couldn't bring myself to watch the first movie, because I'm not interested in watching Sarah Michelle Gellar. I saw a scene where she was being haunted by a very well made and extremely scary CGI ghost. Her fear was so disproportionately low, so ridiculously insipid when compared to the real horror the monster inspired. But that's a problem I have with a lot of horror movies: kids scream and scream, but their expressions of fear are phony. Sometimes fear is more eloquent when it's quiet and you're not yelling at the camera.

In The Grudge 2 I especially enjoyed a scene where a school girl is trying to explain to an adult woman at her school that she was inside a haunted house, and now the ghosts are following her, and will eventually kill her. The adult does the usual thing of denying that there's any such thing as a ghost, and even says that she herself was also inside the house and everything is fine. When the girl hears this she is instantly afraid. She knows the woman must now be haunted too. That's when she notices there are bad spirits to her left and right, and that the woman before her has turned into a scary ghost. Do you remember the bathtub scene in Michelle Pfeiffer's movie What Lies Beneath (2000)? When the killer holds back her head and is spooked when Michelle's face turns to a pasty white and blue corpse-like death mask? It reminded me of that.

Another thing I liked in this movie is the characters are really sad people. Sadness is part of their lives, they're not jumping up and down all the time, they're so happy, happy, happy. That's something that bugs me about most horror movies: the characters are kitch clichés of youth as joyful and springy and boundlessly energetic. So when bad things start to happen to them their emotions strike you as childish, as it's children who act like that, feeling terribly happy one second and then crying their eyes out the next. It's hard not to be dismissive of what they're going through, as you can't take them seriously.

But this is true of a lot of movies. It's like characters are not allowed to be sad or fundamentally unhappy, especially if they're young. I guess movie directors figure, understandably, that audiences don't want to see movies with sad people meeting an unhappy end. People look for happiness and well-being, in real life and fiction. But they enjoy downers too, as long as they offer them some strategy for dealing with the bad things in life. I think that's the secret of why corny stories of devoted mothers dying from incurable diseases are such perennial favorites of the soap-opera watching public. In those made-for-tv movies death is always pretty and spiritual, not ugly and messy in all its gross physicality. No words of love are left unsaid, and patients always die surrounded by their loved ones, as they walk towards a light. So, even though they're sad and hopeless they also satisfy people's longing for a peaceful, dignified death, without loose ends or regrets.

The Grudge 2 is a horror, so you can't expect to find a "happy" ending here, or great life lessons. It's pretty basic in that it's more interested in exploring things that scare you and in setting a spooky mood, than in telling a story. But it does give you a strategy on how to deal with an abusive parent, for instance. In this movie Sarah Michelle Gellar is the favorite daughter, and her sister, the least favorite, has the sad duty of telling their mother that Sarah is dead. And she is insulted and abused on the phone for her trouble. She's used to being hurt by her mother, so it's not a huge shock, but she decides not to take it anymore. She says "I love you mom, but I can't let you go on treating me like this." She says goodbye and hangs up. Just little things like that can be very comforting to people. In real life it's extremely difficult to respond like this when a parent hurts you, because your emotions are too much in a turmoil. But the character's maturity and dignity are convincing, and I'm sure a lot of people watching it must have thought, as I did, that was the best reaction to have in the given scenario. Maybe if they ever go through the same thing they'll remember the movie -- and that's why people like sad movies, because they can teach them how to handle terrible situations, and make them better.

For me the significance of The Grudge is that it's all about how there's no worse humiliation than being the talk of the town. Whenever people talk about you, it's usually to say something bad. And if there is something bad for them to talk about, so much the worse. In the first The Grudge a husband reads his wife's diary and discovers she's interested in another man. He sees inside her mind. So now he must kill her and their son, and himself, to make sure his humiliation is kept from the eyes of the world. And now that they're all dead and have turned to ghosts, anyone who goes inside their house and sees them, anyone who learns about their shameful secret, anyone who blabs, must be killed. And the people they blabbed to must also be killed so they can't spread the word, and so forth. I think this theme may also have been present in The Ring, what with the videotape that killed anyone who saw it, and the dangers of word of mouth.