Sarah Michelle Gellar

Sarah Michelle Gellar’s is a classic when it comes to movie understatements ... "I like to be scared," she says. "Don’t most people?"

Well, there’s being scared and there’s being scared, Sarah Michelle. In your case you seem to be making not so much a habit of it, but a full-blown and highly successful career.

First, of course, there was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the long-running and successful TV series in which she played Buffy Summers. That ran for seven series and, at the end of it, you might have thought she would have had enough of dealing with "the other side."

Then came Scream 2, Scooby Doo and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. The last two admittedly have a lighter take on the supernatural, but nonetheless deal with things that go bump in the night.

Now Sarah Michelle is back to heavy-duty supernature with her latest movie THE GRUDGE, a real chiller filmed in Japan.

Based on the Japanese film Ju-On: The Grudge, I defy anyone not to find it genuinely frightening and Sarah Michelle says the experience of filming it was not without its worrying moments.

"Of the work I’ve done, this is probably the one which steered the closest line between reality and fiction," says the 27-year-old.

"By that I mean there were times when you were hard pressed to know what was real-life and what was being filmed.

"On the very first day of filming, I had an outdoor scene with dialogue. The Japanese director said: ’Okay’ and then the scene just happened. At no point was I sure whether we were just rehearsing, or just blocking, but it turns out we were really shooting. And I think that added to the naturalness of the work.

"There was a scene on a busy street later during filming, and I just became part of the crowd. In America, all the crowd would be extras, everything would be very carefully choreographed so that nothing could go wrong.

"But this was me in a genuine, Tokyo rush hour, doing my lines, while trying to avoid hundreds of people around me!

"And all this genuineness rubs off. It makes the supernatural element of the movie seem especially vivid and believable. So when I look frightened on camera, I’m genuinely scared!"

So she might be with a story revolving around a perfectly ordinary house in a suburb of Tokyo. It slowly emerges that a dreadful thing occurred at this house a few years ago and that the property has since become cursed.

Cue extraordinary special effects and grizzly ends for a stream of characters, with Sarah Michelle’s Karen, an exchange student studying social work in Japan, among those visiting the property.

But why concentrate so much on projects with a supernatural element?

"Well, I do like to be scared - don’t most people? - so I can immediately see why people would want to go and see a movie where they know there is a fair chance that they will be frightened.

"But it’s also about a popular movie genre. There’s always been an appetite for horror and the supernatural, so I think most actors’ CVs would contain some examples.

"Don’t forget, I have made other movies besides, such as Cruel Intentions."

Sarah Michelle says that filming in Japan was not without its peculiarities.

"I wasn’t so surprised that everyone took their shoes off when they arrived on set - even the grips and electricians!

"But what I hadn’t realised was that food is not allowed on set. One morning I walked on set and I was eating. I looked up and everyone was staring at me. I quickly rushed off and dumped my breakfast into the nearest garbage bin."