Bryan Cairns confronts his fear and visits the set of ghoulish sequel The Grudge 2…

Acclaimed director Takashi Shimizu is nursing a nasty grudge. In fact, he’s been nursing it for over six years. Now, he’s even nursing it for a second time in English. Welcome to day 43 of the 63-day Grudge 2 shoot at Toho Studios in Hong Kong, where someone is supposed to meet a bloody and ghastly end at the hands of the vengeful spirit Kayako. At least, that was the initial plan until things wrapped late the night before and the scene was pushed back. Instead, Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) and Eason (Edison Chen), two characters sucked into the supernatural mayhem, are at his apartment discussing their strange circumstances before she has an emotional meltdown and falls fast asleep.

No doubt death will eventually come knocking, but after the American remake of Ju-on raked in over $110 million at the box office in 2004, Shimizu can afford to be patient and picky with the Sony sequel. After all, amping up the fear factor and bringing something new to the franchise wasn’t without its own challenges.

“Yes, it is very difficult to keep it fresh,” acknowledges Shimizu. “It is just really hard coming up with new ideas and if I don’t find it fresh, audiences aren’t going to find it fresh either, so it’s difficult. Sometimes I just come up with one [idea] when I’m walking. It just comes to me all of a sudden. I also listened to those scary stories that happened to my friends or people I know. I haven’t seen a ghost [myself], so maybe I can get ideas from them. Most of those ideas are coming from my everyday life.”

There is certainly plenty to be frightened of. The first Grudge involved nursing student Karen [Sarah Michelle Gellar] coming into contact with a murderous presence while the sequel finds her younger sister, Aubrey, journeying to Tokyo to piece together what happened to her sibling.

“Aubrey has sort of always been the underdog in the family and somebody who’s not as driven as her sister,” explains actress Amber Tamblyn. “She’s always felt like she’s had to follow in her sister’s footsteps. Even her mother sending her to Japan to figure out what happened to her sister – she wants her to figure out where Karen went, what happened, and all this stuff about fire. She’s even nervous about that because it’s the first time she’s ever had to go experience something on her own. It’s something that scares her because she doesn’t know anything about it and she’s really alone in the whole scheme of things. It’s really this huge step for Aubrey trying to figure out where she is in her family’s life, in regard to her relationship with her sister. She’s really the last one to go to the house and have a horrific experience with it. She’s sort of the soft lamb.”

Twice the Evil…

This isn’t Tamblyn’s only encounter with evil. Best known as the lead in the TV series Joan of Arcadia and star of the movie Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, the 23-year-old also appeared in the US version of The Ring.

“Well, first of all, the major difference was that The Ring was a very small part,” she explains. “It was just an opener. And obviously in this film, we have Shimizu-san who was the originator of all of these films. There’s an American aspect of this film and of having Sam Raimi behind it. The Ring was directed by Gore Verbinski and they have two completely different styles in how they see things horror-wise. It’s something that Shimizu-san created. He really has no choice but to make it the absolute best thing that he can because it’s really his neck on the line. It’s his baby. You couple that with Sam Raimi, who’s such a legend as far as American film is concerned, and to me, that seemed like a really incredible team to put together.

“The script was also really solid. It’s a double-edged sword because not only is it a remake of a Japanese film but it’s also a sequel, which is twice as scary. At the same time, it makes people work twice as hard to make it the best film that we possibly can. I’ve already heard people saying that it’s going to be better than the first one, but that could be just producer talk. From what I’ve heard, it’s coming together really, really well.”

As for making the same leap from television to horror heroine as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Gellar, 24’s Elisha Cuthbert, and recently Veronica Mars’ Kristen Bell, Tamblyn notes, “When I did Sisterhood, for me, that film could have been terrifying because it could have been this sweet little syrupy teeny-bopper film and I really felt like it carried a lot of weight for young women and didn’t marginalise them. No matter what you do, I think you’re risking something. I feel like I’m in really good hands.”

Although The Grudge 2 promises shocks and a new group of unsuspecting victims, the story will begin to fill in some of the blanks concerning the curse and its origin. To date, the only major revelation has been that the brutal murder of Kayako and her son, Toshio, at the hands of her jealous husband has fuelled this ghost’s rage.

“For The Grudge 2, I was going for this mystery that was never there in Grudge 1 and I think that’s going to fulfil the audience,” reveals Shimizu. “The mystery is a secret about Kayako’s childhood life and this Grudge will never stop and it’s going to spread this time. How it’s going to get spread is another mystery… The third mystery is what happened to Karen…

“The idea about Kayako’s childhood secret is actually something I came up with when I was writing Ju-on, the original, but I ended up not using it for the ending because I didn’t know if that would be accepted in Japan,” he continues. “Since this is for worldwide release, I thought that maybe Kayako’s childhood secret would be accepted now.”

The Grudge 2 also finds Takako Fuji reprising her role as the sadistic Kayako and the actress was thrilled about getting more creative in her grisly ways. “There are two different things that stand out as special scenes for me to play this time,” offers Fuji. “There is one scene with the mirror and the reflection. The reflection with Kayako in the mirror will do something very surprising. The second scene takes place in the photographer’s dark room where she’s actually in the water. This is something she has never done before.”

Ghoul over Gore

Today, Fuji hasn’t gone through her frightening two-hour make-up process, although Tamblyn is obviously impressed by the ghoulish transformation. “It was very interesting for me to watch her work,” Tamblyn says. “It’s amazing to see someone be able to move their body the way she does. She’s a really sweet girl and we talk about fashion a lot – she actually brought me this Japanese magazine that had this whole article on Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.”

On the other hand, Tamblyn had no problems realising there is more to The Grudge 2 and the spooky franchise than just the horror elements. “They’re about the dark side of human nature,” she says. “I think everybody takes a piece of it – Shimizu-san told me he was affected by the film Demon, about this young kid who has to live with the devil of a stepmother, I think that there’s a huge undercurrent in all of these films with domestic violence as well.”

Although The Grudge featured a decent body count, the bloodshed was minimal and this installment will also be gunning for a PG-13 rating. “The rating issue is always difficult because it’s never the same,” states Shimizu. “The response they give me is always different. The last time I was doing this, I wasn’t that conscious about it but since I’ve done it once, I’m more conscious about it this time. Every time we have blood or something, I always consult with the producers so we know what we’re going for and sometimes we shoot different versions with less blood or we even do it without the blood at all. It’s actually a very stressful process because sometimes in the script, it says ‘splash of blood’ or ‘grotesque.’ That is not what I am really going for but if it’s in the script, I kind of have to go for it.”

Previously, one of the more memorable Grudge shocks saw a hand emerging from the back of Gellar’s head. The sequence was done with camera tricks and apparently Shimizu prefers practical effects to computer-generated magic. “It’s not that I dislike CGI. But if it’s a horror film, as soon as they figure out that it’s CGI, it’s not scary any more,” he says. “That’s just not something I like as a style. If people are not going to be scared of CGI and we can maintain the level of the scare I want to go for, I’d rather just do it practically. One of the most important things that I’m going for in The Grudge is all these scares can happen in everyday life. Anybody can experience any of these things because they’ll be very familiar to the character’s life or whatever they’re doing. As soon as they see all these CGI things, people think, ‘Oh that can’t be real!’ They’re just going to lose that scare because that can’t happen to them anymore.”

It seems Shimizu might have the chance to perfect that philosophy. At the recent San Diego ComicCon, Sony announced that a third Grudge has already been green-lit which means there doesn’t seem to be an end to Kayako’s reign of terror. “In the script meetings, I do talk about that idea with writers and producers but every time we stop the curse, our ideas just don’t go anywhere good and we just can’t come up with anything interesting to stop the curse,” concludes Shimizu. “If that is the case, I would rather just go for something that could never be stopped. But who knows? Maybe something can be stopped in Grudge 3…”

This article originally appeared in Dreamwatch issue 146.