Sarah Michelle Gellar

"The Sixth Sense" aside, the Japanese and South Korean film industries are almost single-handedly responsible for the rejuvenation of the old-fashioned horror movie, both in Asia and in America (where countless remakes are in the pipeline).

JU-ON: THE GRUDGE

DIRECTOR: Takashi Shimizu

CAST: Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara

RUNNING TIME: 92 minutes

LANGUAGE: Japanese with English subtitles

RATING: R for some disturbing images

WHERE: Varsity

GRADE: B

Takashi Shimizu’s "Ju-On: The Grudge," the third in a kind of anthology series of ghost stories (the first two were made for video), is one of the most successful films in Japan’s horror explosion. Shimizu himself is helming the American remake, currently in production with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Paxton in the leads. This is a chance to see the original in all its creepy, low-tech glory.

According to the introductory note, "Ju-On" is a curse left behind by someone who dies in a powerful rage — a part haunting, part supernatural virus that infects anyone who comes into contact with it. More than just the premise, that’s the plot in a nutshell.

Volunteer social worker Rika (Megumi Okina) stumbles across the curse when she finds an almost catatonic old woman in a shambles of a home, a spooky little boy with a froggy voice and a veritable black hole of a phantom that seems to be sucking the life from the old lady. The story then jumps back and forth along the timeline in a series of chapters named for the characters haunted and hunted by the unsettled souls.

It’s ostensibly a mystery — who are these ghosts and why do they kill? — but the story is sloppy and confusing. The final explanation is wanting at best and carries none of the emotional dramatic punch of the best Japanese horrors.

What the film delivers is 90 minutes of ghost story goosebumps. Shimizu has an old-fashioned sense of scary movies and creates an atmosphere of dread from simple techniques: blank-faced ghosts in greasepaint whose hollow yet desperate expressions are downright chilling, lingering images that ratchet up the tension and the intensify the revelations and imaginative sound effects that are at once unearthly and unsettlingly human.

For all of its weakness, "Ju-On: The Grudge" is creepy and unnerving, qualities in short supply in gore-filled American horror films.