Normally I like nonlinear storytelling, vignettes can be done very well and I don't mind it when a film doesn't make complete sense - however here these three features mean there is no drive of any kind, the horror isn't all that involving and we get almost zero time to get to know any of the characters. None of these faults would neccessarily be a damning if the film did enough to distract me from these problems but the film just doesn't. Some of the scares being quite cheesy doesn't help.

Better than the American version, still not good.

Better than the remake, but it's still dull and full of cheap scares and bad acting.

Interesting... yet kinda boring. Check it out if the honky version didn't quite do it for you.

Sympathy may be stirred, if nothing like terror, at the spectacle of low-budget filmmaking reliant on imagination and ingenuity instead of special effects. Narrative context, however, is filled in so sketchily and belatedly that it plays less like a ghost story than like an audition: a well-stocked bag of tricks that might come in handy in a ghost story. Evidently Shimizu passed the audition, as he was hired to do the Hollywood version, too, and handed a bigger budget to play with.

The back-and-forth temporality was an interesting decision, seemingly intended to indicate that past, present and future are not the step by step progression that conventional narrative might lead us to believe, but are rather constituted by a series of interlinked and interlocked fates. Some scenes were more effective than others.

A seminal J-Horror classic, Ju-on tells the story of a haunted house in rural Japan as a metaphor for domestic violence. While the pacing is slow and the stories disjointed, Ju-on delivers a thick atmosphere and excellent staging.