#thegrudge

Hello Club Members! 👻

This week, we finally tackled a movie that has loomed over us since 2004. We both grew up hearing The Grudge was the "scariest movie ever made," but sitting down with it for the podcast... well, the vibe was more "nap time" than "nightmare fuel."

🔴 SPOILER ALERT 🔴

The Remake Trap 🎞️ It is rare that we are in complete agreement, but we’re in sync: This movie is boring. Why did this need to be an American remake? It feels like the only reason it exists is the 2000s-era refusal to read subtitles or watch the original Japanese Ju-On. The translation lost the soul, the pacing, and the scares.

The Analysis: The "Stain" of Trauma 🔗 On a deeper level, the movie does have an interesting way of showing the cyclical nature of abuse.

Victim to Abuser: In the film, a mother and child are murdered by a husband/father, creating a "curse" that torments anyone who enters. In real life, trauma often repeats itself.

Unprocessed Anger: This movie is basically a case study in what happens when you bottle up massive emotions with nowhere to put them. Eventually, they explode and cause destruction to everyone in the vicinity.

Wasted Potential 👹 We have to give credit, the spirit design is solid. She looks creepy, her movements are iconic, and that croak is legendary. It’s just a shame such a great horror design was wasted on a film that felt so repetitive.

🎧 In the Episode:

The Recap: Silly as always.

Voices from the Void: Reading the most chaotic Letterboxd reviews we could find.

The Poll Reveal: We announce what we’re watching next week!

It was a rare sunny April day, and after school, Martha asked if we could go for a walk round the graveyard. This used to mean us grabbing the dog and doing half a lap before Martha got into some kind of role play leaving a very bored non-role playing pooch wanting to go home for a sleep while Martha was a princess in a maze made of headstones (including that of David Bowie's paternal grandmother, Zillah Hannah Jones). You know, standard 5 year-old activities.

Now that our poor pet was buried in her own private pet cemetery under the trampoline in our back garden, trips round the graveyard were less stressful in terms of animal boredom, but now an open ended proposition timewise. Going to the graveyard at 3:30pm, could mean no tea on the table for when mum returned from a shift at the hospital, and a feeling of failure on my part. After a walk round, Martha stopped at the small area of graves that flanked the old chapel, which was being restored into a home. I guess that the neighbours would be quiet. This section of the cemetery was usually Martha's 'Labyrinth', due to her love of the 1980s Bowie movie of the same name. I spent a third of such games apologising to the dead people that I was standing on.

Labyrinth wasn't on the agenda this time. Martha sat on the edge of one grave and I on another, as she declared "I want to make a small house dad".

"Errrm okay". I immediately became more a grave borrower than a grave robber, finding four flat pieces of quartz form atop a grave and using thme to form some rudimenatry insect house sized walls. I topped mty 'house' with a piece of bark off the floor, and presented my building to my child with a flourish of my hands. It looked uncannily like Fred Flintstone's house, but from far away.