I finally got around this week to watching Ju-On: Origins on Netflix. I say 'finally', but in actuality the show has only been available for about 2 weeks, so it's not quite old at this point. But everything is moving so fast, even in the elastic timeline nightmare that is 2020, that its moment in the pop culture sun seems to have passed by already. Also 'finally' because I consider myself a fairly big Ju-On fan, though I'm sure I'm a dilettante compared to other fans of the long-running J-Horror franchise. Ju-On has grown from a pair of short films in the 1998 TV movie Gakko no Kaidan G into a franchise that includes 9 Japanese films, 4 American movies, several comics, 7 novelizations, a video game, and even a Pachinko machine. And now, thanks to Netflix, a TV series consisting of 6 half hour episodes.
I'm going to cut right to the chase and say that I loved it. Absolutely loved it. This is probably the best Ju-On product to come out in years. Though, admittedly, I've only seen the 7 Japanese films and the first American remake (it was bad enough that I never bothered with the others, though eventually I plan on changing that). There is a way to read Ju-On: Origins as yet another attempt to reboot the franchise by taking it back to its roots, as in the thoroughly lackluster Ju-On: Beginning of the End, and in fact I read some reviews that had a hard time reconciling the series' mythology with what had been established in the movies. However, Origins is positioned as portraying the real-life events that inspired the franchise, and while that's just more marketing hokum, real life does frequently intrude on the events of the series, and vice versa. As such the story doesn't quite line up with the convoluted mythology of the preceding 13 films. Gone are Kayako and Toshio, the spectral mother and son who provided most of the jolts in the movies, though analogs of them do exist in this series. In fact, while the supernatural is definitely at work in Origins, the show is more often than not about the real-world evils that people inflict upon each other.
The entire premise of Ju-On is that when someone dies in intense anger, they can create a supernatural grudge, a curse that can be passed from one person to another (in fact Ju-On roughly translates to Curse Grudge). This is a fairly common trope in Japanese horror films, the vengeful spirit, commonly a spectral woman with long black hair. But Ju-On mixes it up a bit with the somewhat Buddhist belief that negative emotions can have physical manifestations. The curse is not limited by where and how it is created, but can be spread to people who visit the place where it was begun, or even people who come into contact with those who are cursed. Think of the way the cursed VHS is passed around in Ringu, or the ghostly phone calls in One Missed Call, or the spreading loneliness of Pulse, or even how Ashitaka is cursed by touching the corrupted Boar God in Princess Mononoke. Hate and anger as a physical disease, corrupting the bodies of everyone that they infect. Ju-On has always embraced that ethos more directly than most other J-Horror films, explicitly tying the atrocities onscreen to traumas that were inflicted in the past, and illustrating how trauma not only repeats, but spreads.
Part of what scared me so much about Japanese horror films, back in the early 2000s when I started to really dig into the genre, is how random it all seemed. Western horror films tend to operate to enforce cultural or ethical standards that we've all grown up with, whether consciously or subconsciously. The killers in slasher films may not be as puritanical as critics claim (the equation rarely comes down to strictly sex=death), but it is largely true that there is a code to their horrors, and that the good live to see daylight while the not-so-good end up impaled on farming equipment. This is not necessarily the case in many J-Horror films, where the punishments more often than not depend on bad luck. In Ju-On in particular you can find yourself tormented by vengeful ghosts and killed in horrible ways just by house hunting in the wrong neighborhood, or by being a schoolteacher who cares a bit too much about kids who have been mysteriously absent, or hell, just by sharing an elevator with someone cursed. Oftentimes the most pure characters suffer the worst fates. There was a cosmic randomness to these films, a bleak fatalism that left no source of refuge or safe harbor. Watching these films (Ju On, Ringu, Pulse, Cure, One Missed Call, Reincarnation, et al) felt dangerous, like any one could die at any moment. Not even our hero or heroine was safe!My introduction to the Ju-On franchise came in the early 2000s, and actually started with the 3rd and 4th movies in the series. The first two movies, titled Ju-On: The Curse parts 1 & 2, were direct-to-video affairs. It wasn't until the third movie, Ju-On: The Grudge, that the series went theatrical. Ju-On: The Grudge was a big hit and the first to make it to the states, screening at a few film festivals and getting a limited theatrical run. However I saw it, and its sequel, on bootleg V-CDs my friend brought back from comic-con. The quality was fairly low-res, and each film took up two discs, and while that might not seem like the ideal manner in which to watch a scary movie, it actually couldn't have been any better. There was something about the illicit nature of the viewing experience, combined with the grainier, blurrier picture quality, that heightened the desolate horrors on display. It truly felt gritty and dangerous in a way horror often aspires to, but rarely achieves. In contrast, when the series finally arrived on proper DVD in America a few years later, the picture quality was too clean, it laid bare all of the budgetary restrictions they were working under and made the ghosts look too solid, too much like actors in white makeup.
As the series grew so did the budgets, and with that came a corresponding decrease in quality. I actually thought half of Black Ghost/White Ghost was decent, but by the time we got to the final two films in the Japanese series (so far), they were glossy and brightly lit rehashes of previous plots while recycling the same old scares. Guttural noises, yowling cats, Kayako crawling down the stairs, people stopping short and slowly realizing there's a particularly pale 9 year old boy in his underwear clinging to their legs. About all that was added at this point in the series were a couple brief flirtations with found footage and a weird, never explained obsession with spirals, which gave me a very brief hope that we'd get a Ju-On/Uzumaki crossover. After seeing these things repeated over so many films it was impossible to remember a time when they were the least bit frightening.
And then came Ju-On: Origins, which seems like a rebuke to my previous statement, to prove that you could make a decently budgeted Ju-On film and make it scary. I don't mean scary in the old way; Origins largely does away with the jump scares that were the bread and butter of the franchise (with a few exceptions of course), and mostly gets rid of the ghosts as well. This is a new breed of Ju-On, almost as if this were the 'elevated' horror version, to borrow a phrase I hate that seems to be in vogue these days when critics feel the need to justify liking a horror film.
I don't really much care for trigger warnings (though I understand their importance to some people and do not intend to mock them), but I almost feel as if Ju-On: Origins should come with one, particularly for fans of the original franchise who may not be ready for the frank depictions of rape, child abuse, and assault within. That's not to say the show is overly graphic (for the most part these events happen off screen), but it doesn't shy away from trying to disturb the audience. It may seem funny to make this claim when the original Ju-On curse began when a man killed his wife and child (and family cat) in a jealous rage, but the sort of violence in this show is something the series hasn't ever really tackled before.
I could try to recount the plot here, but it wouldn't really do much good. It's not a show you can really spoil, as it's the mood that matters, not necessarily the plot. But allow me to attempt to summarize a few things simply and concisely. The show begins in 1988, and introduces us to a few characters we'll be following, though many of them do not directly interact with each other. Yasuo Odajima (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) is a paranormal investigator collecting stories for his books. He appears on a talk show with Haruka Hanjo (Yuina Kuroshima), an actress who recounts a tale of hearing footsteps in her apartment at night. Off on her own story is Kiyomi Kawai (mononymous actress Ririka), a lonely and sullen girl starting at a new high school. Kiyomi makes a few new friends at school who turn out to not be what they appear, and their betrayal at the end of episode one marks the first, clearest sign that this Ju-On is pulling no punches.
After the first episode the three storylines diverge and converge over the course of the season. It all plays out more or less chronologically, which is another divergence from the original series. The Ju-On films are all presented as a series of vignettes, with about 6-8 per film. Each focusing on a different character, and presented in no particular chronological order. I said more or less chronologically, because this is still a Ju-On movie, and of course that means a few mysterious time loops, which is why it's more or less impossible to spoil this story.
After the second episode the show jumps forward to 1994. Yasuo has published the book he was researching in the first episode, part of an apparently successful series of books. Haruka's fiance has died under mysterious circumstances after house hunting in the wrong house, leading her to team up with Yasuo in an attempt to locate the cursed home and unravel the mystery. Kiyomi and her lover have run away and when we catch back up with them they're raising a 5 year old son to which the father is frequently physically abusive. The final four episodes of the show span a period of 3 years, ending in 1997 (the year before the first Ju-On film would come out).
At various times in the series we check in frequently with the cursed house, which is at times vacant, and other times occupied. When it's occupied the tenants invariably meet violent ends, most often at each others hands. This repetition of abuse, husband against wife against child against self, pretty much hits the nail on the head when it comes to Ju-On's continued themes. Over the course of 13 films one thing has remained consistent; trauma lingers, and cycles of abuse are doomed to repeat. At various times characters will have a television on, and the news will often be about the crimes we're seeing in the show, but just as often they will be clips about real crimes. Beginning in the first episode with the tragic murder of high school student Junko Furuta (never named but the specifics are there) in 1989, continuing on to the Sarin gas attacks in Tokyo subways in 1995. There may have been others but without rewatching I can't be sure. This suggested to me the spreading nature of trauma, that not only does it repeat but it branches out to infect those nearby, whether or not they directly experienced it. The curse is both a product and cause of the violent world. Blending real tragedy with fiction like this is always a tricky thing to do, it so easily comes off as crass and disrespectful, but I found it to be quite effective here. It helps that Origins takes its themes seriously, and even when the subject matter gets graphic it's never exploitative. At several points within Origins characters try to bury evidence of the crimes surrounding the curse, and this is uniformly a bad idea. Burying trauma is never healthy, but those who discuss and share tend to fare better.One other way in which this new series sets itself apart from previous Ju-On films is in the nature of its scares. In previous films the scares came almost entirely from seeing Kayako and her son Toshio pop up in surprising places, but in Origins the scares, when they come, are much more varied. I don't want to go so far as to actual describe things that are supposed to be surprising in the series, so I'll leave the specifics for you to discover. I'll just say that Origins brings in a sense of visual surreality absent from the films. Some of these scenes will be shocking or disgusting to Western audiences not used to the further reaches of horror films, but will probably please fans of more extreme Asian horror, or the films of Takashi Miike.
It's not clear at the moment whether or not Ju-On: Origins signals a reawakening of the long lasting franchise or not. The last Japanese movie in the mainline series was in 2015 and was heavily marketed as being the end of the story. But when has 'the end' ever really meant 'the end' in a horror series? There was then the crossover with the Ring franchise, 2016's campy Sadako Vs. Kayako, but that was just a one-off inspired by an April Fool's Day joke that went too far. Of the American Grudge films there was a remake this year that was hoped would inspire a new franchise, but it was met with mostly negative reviews and those plans seem to have been dropped. Origins seems to have been pretty self contained as well, and the story of these characters is pretty clearly over (though I could see Yasuo spun off into a sequel or even another series rather easily).
If this is the end of the series, I'll be happy. It was great to be reminded what I found scary about the property almost 20 years ago. Even if it wasn't as 'scary' as the early films, it certainly packed in the dread. If this isn't the end, I just hope they learn all the right lessons from this superlative entry, and are able to avoid the rut and break out of the series' own cycles.
