If you’ve ever had the feeling the human race is one big, dysfunctional family living in a planet-sized haunted house, you probably understand the universal appeal of Japanese horror films.

Internationally successful and trendsetting, these films - including Hideo Nakata’s ``Ringu’’ (1998), which has spawned two remakes here (``The Ring Two’’ opens Friday), and Takashi Shimizu’s 2000 work ``Ju-on’’ (``The Grudge’’) - eschew splatter-movie gore for more nightmarish and psychological jolts. In a few years, they have spawned imitators here and abroad and have flourished on U.S. soil in original and remake form.

Nakata’s ``Ringu’’ tells the urban-legendlike story of a videotape that spells doom for anyone who watches it and the demonic ghost of a little girl who was drowned in a well. It already has spawned Gore Verbinski’s 2002 blockbuster ``The Ring’’ with Naomi Watts (``21 Grams’’) as a journalist and single mother investigating the deaths of several young people.

Almost as profitable was last year’s ``The Grudge,’’ a remake of ``Ju-on’’ directed by Shimizu, featuring former vampire slayer Sarah Michelle Gellar and a haunted house in Tokyo. The upcoming ``The Ring Two,’’ which has been directed by Nakata, again features Watts’ ghost-battling single mother and a script by Ehren Kruger (``Scream 3,’’ ``The Ring’’). A sequel to Shimizu’s Americanized ``Grudge’’ also is planned.

J-horror films owe a debt to ``Kwaidan’’ (1964), Masaki Kobayashi’s big-screen compilation of folkloric Japanese ghost stories. But they also recombine elements from Stanley Kubrick’s genre-film landmark ``The Shining’’ (1980) and M. Night Shyamalan’s much-imitated ``The Sixth Sense’’ (1999) - films in which the horror springs from a troubled family’s collective psyche - and make them more distinctly Japanese.

``Ringu’’ is a film adaptation of a 1989 novel by ``the Stephen King of Japan’’ Koji Suzuki. ``Ju-on,’’ which was written by its director Shimizu, involves the ghosts of a little boy and his vengeful mother who were murdered by the jealous family patriarch (J-horror often features a child-abuse subtext).

``Ju-on’’ has obvious roots in such trendsetting American haunted-house films as ``The Amityville Horror’’ (1979). But it features indigenous touches not found in American variations, most notably the long-black-haired female ghost who materializes out of thin air and, in one terrifying scene, slithers grotesquely down flights of stairs like a snake.

According to Web sites about the origins of ``The Ring,’’ ``Ringu’’ is based on the famous, Kabuki-inspiring folk tale ``Bancho Sarayashiki,’’ about a servant who is drowned in a well and whose ghost climbs out every night to seek revenge.

The eerie child who sees dead people in ``The Sixth Sense’’ often becomes a dead person in J-horror, as in traditional ghost tales, and the effect remains unnerving.

To achieve the weird, herky-jerky motions of Sadako, the child ghost in ``Ringu,’’ Nakata photographed the actor walking backwards and then ran the film in reverse. In ``Ju-on,’’ the gray-colored ghost boy hiding in the upstairs closet screams like a cat, as if his soul has merged with the soul of his pet.

A connection among domestic violence, emotional anguish and the supernatural is the common denominator of J-horror. In a 2002 thriller by Nakata, also based on a novel by Suzuki, a little boy whose mother is in the midst of a nasty divorce is menaced by ghostly visitations. The film, now titled ``Dark Water,’’ has gotten an A-treatment remake by producer Robert De Niro, director Walter Salles (``The Motorcycle Diaries’’) and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias (``Death and the Maiden’’) with Jennifer Connelly in the lead. It opens here this summer.

As Alejandro Amenabar’s ``The Others’’ (2001), Kim Ji-Woon’s ``A Tale of Two Sisters’’ (2004) and Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang’s ``The Eye’’ (2003) demonstrate, the seeds of J-horror have taken root all over. In addition to reflecting our current global tensions, these films are modern versions of the cautionary, often fatalistic works that began appearing in the wake of World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Film noir sprang from this blood-soaked, radioactive soil, as did Godzilla and his atomic age progeny. J-horror films are the expression of a perhaps even greater age of anxiety.

As international tensions reach new highs and the world still reels from the recent tsunami disaster, J-horror is just peaking here. DreamWorks has purchased remake rights to ``A Tale of Two Sisters.’’ Also in the pipeline are a six-film, J-horror package from Lions Gate and a steady stream of releases from J-horror speciality house Tartan Films. Also coming are American remakes such as ``Don’t Look Up,’’ based on Nakata’s 1996 haunted-movie-set film ``Joyu-rei,’’ the pulp noir-ish kidnapping thriller ``Chaos’’ starring De Niro and the hospital thriller ``Infection’’ (tagline: ``Death is just a breath away’’).

In other words, that nagging sense that someone or something horrible is lurking in every shadow? It’s probably here to stay.