Sarah Michelle Gellar

A Senseless Grudge

THE GRUDGE (Sony Pictures)

Release date: Oct. 22, 2004

Directed by: Takashi Shimizu

Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, Clea DuVall, William Mapother, KaDee Strickland, Bill Pullman, Rosa Blasi, Grace Zabriskie, Courtney Webb

If you’ve ever heard a campfire ghost story, you should understand the essential structure behind making the scares effective:

Step 1: Create the setting Establish a general atmosphere of dread by describing grave events. Perhaps people are mysteriously dying. And maybe - just maybe - the reason can be traced back to one central spot. A haunted house, for example.

Step 2: Intensify the mood If you’re a camp counsellor or older sibling, you can always enlist the friend of a colleague or relative to lurk out of sight, rustling leaves, cracking twigs or maybe just making a weird throat noise. The point is that there’s something going on out there and it may be dangerous. Be careful. Be very careful.

Step 3: Introduce the bad guys If there’s one thing that Stanley Kubrick taught us in The Shining, it’s that little kids are creepy. If you can use a little boy as the killer, then go for it. Other innocuous characters may consist of a young mother and... Oh, I don’t know. Let’s say... a cat.

Step 4: Explain the motive Don’t kill yourself with detail here. For example, you can say that when someone dies in the grip of a terrible rage, then the events of their demise become like a stain upon the earth. If ticking off the motives or limitations of the un-dead killers seems like a hassle, then just skip it.

Step 5: Details. Details. Details. Several people should have died horribly at this point, so make sure that you’ve included some creative sequences. Maybe a hand has grabbed at you from inside a filled bathtub. Or perhaps a woman with spider web-like hair has been crawling on the ceiling. Make sure these descriptions are rich, but only last for a second or two. To stare at the horror too long would be to deconstruct it.

Step 6: The payoff Once you’ve made those little campers as nervous as possible, lower your voice so that they have to strain to hear you and then, in the thick of the silence and just when they’re not expecting it...

Step 7: "BOOGIE! BOOGIE! BOOGIE!" Jump up and scream, scarring them all as deeply as possible without actually resorting to physical violence.

Step 8: Repeat steps 1-7

For The Grudge, an American adaptation of Japanese horror flick Ju-On, The details here are negligible. This version is still set in Japan, but this time imports a set of characters from the U.S., beginning with Karen, an American nurse (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and extending to her charge, the malaise-stricken Emma (Grace Zabriskie). Most of the elements - from the haunted house where much of the action takes place to the people doing the actual haunting, Kayako and Toshio (Takako Fuji and Yuya Ozeki) - are recycled from the Japanese version. This extends to Takashi Shimizu, who penned the original series. As such, the film stays true to its cousin, delivering quick and creative glimpses of the malevolent en route to delivering the inevitable "BOOGIE! BOOGIE!" BOOGIE!" If the aesthetic bears some resemblance to another famous series of Japanese horror films, that’s because Shimizu is also the protégé of director Hiroshi Takahashi, whose Ring films revitalized the genre in Asia before importing it, nearly wholesale, over here.

This outing bears some stylish creepiness, but fails to deliver more than just a bare outline of a story. Director Shimizu makes the mistake of confusing the money shots - glimpses of dark eyes and reaching hands - with the concepts behind them. While the former should be kept quick and lurching to ensure their full effect, the opposite is true with those devices that fuel the imagination. Shimizu does have a few tricks up his sleeve, though, and if you let your guard down for just one second, then you might... you might just... you might - BOOGIE! BOOGIE! BOOGIE!