Ju-On Plot Analysis

So far throughout this course, there haven’t been many movies that have truly art-horrified me. That is, until I was Ju-On. From what I have seen and heard of this movie, I was expecting something scary, and I believe that this movie fulfilled expectations initially. But once the movie was over and the hype gone, I realized that I wasn’t as scared as I initially thought I was.
The film follows the typical complex discovery plot seen in horror films. We see onset early on in the movie with the strange behavior seen in the old woman and the cat, or boy, found in the closet upstairs; the latter of these findings bordering on the next phase which is discovery. There are several other scenes with discovery and confirmation by the different characters throughout the film until the end when Rika attempts to confront these spirits by covering her eyes and peeking through her fingers, something she’s noticed other cursed characters doing, in an attempt to overcome the curse that it haunting her. As we can see though at the end, her plan fails and she becomes one of the spirits which she once feared.

Though overall the movie was moderately frightening after the fact, there were a couple elements which I found particularly chilling once the film was over. For one, as we’ve seen in The Haunting, most ghosts or haunting occur at night, or in the dark. In Ju-On, we see the small boy twice during the day – once when Rika finds him in the closet and again when she is out to dinner with her sister. This could make these ghosts more frightening because they are out of the norm for what we expect of these fictional characters. Another thing which stood out for me was when we see one particular character in her apartment hiding under the covers. When she lifted the blanket, she came face to face with another one of these ghosts. This struck me because when I was younger, I used blankets as well to hide from things I found threatening or scary, as I’m sure most of us id. This for me dealt with the discussion of childhood imagination in relation to fear and struck me as the most terrifying scene in the whole movie. Other things, scary but not as frightening to me, were the unnatural movements of one of the ghosts, as well as the ghosts’ ability to present themselves at anywhere at any time to haunt those who were cursed.

By the end of the movie, we are left with no fantastic hesitation. We see the story from the 4th wall point of view, and the ghosts are confirmed by several characters – not just one. Overall though, I didn’t find the story extremely cognitively stimulating. Perhaps this is because I was reading subtitles and could only partially commit time to watching the film, which may have also led to my slight confusion in some scenes. Even with all of this though, I believe that the most definitely fulfills Carroll’s theory of horror.