November 15, 2004 [Ju-on: The Grudge]

I wonder what would have happened to me if I'd not simply rented Ju-on but had gone to a theater to see it?  Watching it safe at home, surrounded by my everyday stuff, things didn't seem so bad.

But they were bad enough: especially the—hairiness of it, the spider-webby spreading stain of the "plot"—more like a dream clicking under the skin like ghost-bones curved into an ellipse, a flattened circle stretched almost out of the TV and to the tip of my nose, like the finger coming at James Woods in Videodrome—but no Nicki for me, beckoning in taboo seduction—although Ju-on's closing circle is just as fatal, putting a disease in me—and there's another ghost: Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet appearing like a Romero zombie (but infinitely sadder) out of the shaded small-town night.

Then again, sitting here with just the Mac screen lighting the room, I'm not so sure that Ju-on is any friendlier on home video than in a dark movie theater.  After all, the grudge is played out in a quiet little house tucked away, the taped closet a sudden sign that something more is going on than just grandma's dementia—it's so quiet in the house, warm and dim—lots of dark corners, plain eggshell-white dry-walled rooms with doors almost closed, upstairs and down, a small house—but I can't see everything at once sitting here listening to the little creaks in the walls as ducts and so on contract and sigh just before the furnace lets out a muffled heavy thud way down there in the basement.