Sarah Michelle Gellar

09:00am ET, 1-April-04

Raimi Feels The Grudge

Ted Raimi told SCI FI Wire that he’s just wrapped work on The Grudge, an upcoming remake of the popular Japanese horror film Ju-on: The Grudge. "I play this character called Alex, who is the head of a nursing home in Tokyo, where Sarah Michelle Gellar temps," Raimi, a genre favorite, said in an interview. "She’s a student and she temps at this place, and I send her off to this home where a woman dies."

Raimi added, "It’s a terrifying story about angry ghosts in Tokyo and what happens to a bunch of Americans when they are confonted with this horror. It’s a very good story and, interestingly, it’s told in this Japanese style, which is that everybody suffers. Everybody suffers in a Japanese horror film. In American horror films, in Halloween, for example, there’s that morality system where P.J. Soles sleeps with her boyfriend and then Michael Myers comes and kills her. In this film, the innocent and the guilty suffer. There is no distinction. I don’t know if it’s a philosophical thing they have in the East, but it’s quite unique."

Raimi went on to note that unlike The Ring, a remake of the Japanese hit Ringu that was "completely rewritten and re-done for American audiences," The Grudge has not been entirely rewritten from the original Japanese. "It, of course, is in English and stars American actors," Raimi said. "But the story is the Japanese story." The Grudge, which also stars Jason Behr, Clea DuVall and Bill Pullman, will be released later this year.