Sarah Michelle Gellar

Actress Sarah Michelle Gellar opened up the question-and-answer session about her upcoming film The Grudge by reading a tongue-in-cheek list of the top 10 reasons she had never appeared at Comic-Con International before.

Most of the "reasons" were obscure riffs off the comic world — such as "I was waiting for the next issue of Ben Edlund’s The Tick — and I’m still waiting." — that completely went over the heads of Gellar’s mainly youthful audience. No. 2 was "I’m already married to the world’s biggest comic geek," referring to husband and fellow actor Freddie Prinze Jr.

And No. 1? "There’s just not enough damn merchandise with my face on it," a reference to the endless series of T-shirts, posters, books, toys, temporary tattoos and other material spun off from her seven-year run as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But Gellar and almost-ignored co-star Jason Behr (best known for his roles on Roswell and Dawson’s Creek) were there to promote The Grudge, so promote The Grudge they did.

Based on the the Japanese film Ju-On and being remade for American consumption by the original Japanese director, The Grudge is a horror film about an American nurse in Tokyo who runs afoul of a haunting curse (not unlike the gimmick at the heart of The Ring, another Japanese remake).

A trailer screened for the audience of more than 6,500 showed Gellar’s nurse seeing a lot of things out of the corner of her eye and, in perhaps its creepiest moment, putting her hand to the back of her head while taking a shower to find another hand emerging from her scalp.

Both Gellar and her fans had some trouble leaving Buffy behind.

One fan prefaced his question with, "Hey, Buffy, how are you doing?"

"Sarah," Gellar corrected him, then pointing to her co-star. "Jason. Sarah."

But years of playing Buffy affected her performance on The Grudge for the straightforward Japanese director Takashi Shimizu, Gellar said.

She kept being told to reshoot a sequence in which she runs in fear down a street.

"It’s almost harder to act like you don’t know what you’re doing," Gellar said. "He told me I was running too much like a superhero ... that I needed to flap my arms more."

Produced by Sam Raimi, The Grudge is scheduled for an Oct. 29, 2004 release.