The Grudge: Film Analysis

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the one who murdered her, but instead seeks vengeance on people who enter the house and people who come into contact with someone who has entered the house. This vengeful spirit seems to act more like a deadly disease rather than how it is traditionally suppose to act. Another goes that goes against traditional Japanese folktales is Takeo’s ghost which appears near the end of the movie. In many Japanese folktales, the ghosts of a male are usually seen as nonthreatening and often are seen as guides. Many of the male ghosts are often from men who have fallen in battle and then later roam the earth grieving over their death. They have also been know to help out others who are on a journey and act as more of a warning than as a angered spirit. …show more content…

While the film Ju-On goes against and defiles certain cultural and traditional aspects of Japan in order to create fear, the film The Grudge takes a different approach in the production of fear. The Grudge seems to try and blend in with many of the popular Western horror movies made between the 1970s and 1990s and add similar elements and themes from them. Many of the more popular horror films that were made at that time in America had a sort of similar theme that involved a seemingly perfect family at first and that everything goes wrong when they find out the deep dark truth behind either the place they are currently living in or one of the family members that is currently living with them. It was not so much that something that may have been wrong with the house or father that scared the people of this time, but instead it was how it affected the families who were living in the house or with the father. Many people who live in American are always told about …show more content…

Women of America were begging to become even more independent that they were before. Much like Japan, many of these women began to go off do more activities that wouldn’t have been done in the passed. The wage gap began to decrease between men and women, many women were beginning to get their college degrees, women were beginning to get higher paying jobs that generally consisted of men, and many families began to have two people working jobs instead of just the father working one. Again just like Japan, all of this was beginning to worry many men, because now their own masculinity was being challenged. Before all this, many men were use to being the breadwinners of the house while the wife stayed home and took care of the children and the house. Now many of the men were not only afraid of women taking their jobs and making more money than them, but were also afraid that their feeling of more power would cause the women to leave them to peruse their own life (Taylor pg 771). In The Grudge, it uses this fear of the falling masculinity to is advantage in a couple ways. The first way it does this is when it shows the reason to way Takeo murdered his family. Takeo caught Kayako in the act of stalking her teacher Peter Kirk, whom she was showing interest in. Because this scene Kayako’s inability to be loyal to her husband, this spreads fear through the people watching this

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