Evil is not banal in Ju-on: Origins, a particularly grisly six-part Netflix series. The J-horror wave that broke at the turn of the millennium may no longer be in vogue, but this supposed origin story of the 2001 Ju-On: The Grudge is probably even more extreme in its depiction of ghostly malice and vengeance. It's scarier too -- if you have a stomach for murder, disembowelment, matricide and self-combustibility -- because here the origin of violence is mostly domestic: the violence committed by father against mother, mother against daughter, husband against wife, friend against friend. It's a series (or you could see it as a three-hour film) about monsters that shows us that monstrosity really is born and raised first and foremost by humans.
Because this is a story of domestic violence, it's a story of a house -- an ordinary-looking house in an ordinary middle-class Tokyo neighbourhood. Ju-On: Origins, set in the 1990s, is basically a haunted house series in which the sad, wrathful spirit of a brutalised woman infects a succession of people who live in or simply visit the cursed abode with a propensity for despair and violence. The series, directed by Sho Miyake, is not a typical Netflix staple: it's slower, more oblique, with a disconnected storyline that wilfully leaves loose ends here and there unexplained. And it is more graphic in its combination of fright, gore and black comedy.
Several characters come and go, some will live and others will die, sometimes gruesomely. Among them are a paranormal investigator called Odajima (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), who is trying to locate the legendary haunted house believed to be somehow connected with many mysterious deaths, and a TV star called Haruka (Yuina Kuroshima), who has had a brush with the menacing spirit and whose boyfriend, a psychic, is having dark premonitions about a spirit that possesses the house. The most tragic victim, however, is high-school girl Yuka (Ririka), whose traumatic experience in that bedevilled house will curse her for the rest of her life.
There are many others: a husband who's cheating on his pregnant wife; a serial child-killer; a rapist whose evil capacity probably dates back before he even ventured into the haunted house. As these characters try to ward off the curse that follows them, we hear the evil of men and nature in the background: the TV news keeps narrating reports of horrifying murders; a destruction caused by an earthquake; and other disturbing crimes that remind us that Japan is not always the nicest place on Earth as some might have imagined it to be.
Ju-On: Origins is a "ghost film", but what makes it scary is the fact that this is a about evilness -- the pitch-darkness that defines the contour of our spiritual lives and the extreme with which one person can commit a violent act against another, and it is the darkness that has no redemption. You'll get to see the Ju-On's signature spirit, in her usual white clothes, but it's not the same overused imagery of a croaking, crawling banshee that, at the height of J-horror over a decade ago, inspired giggle rather than terror.
In this series, the lineage of spirits as depicted in Japanese cinema since the post-war years, the boom decades, and the post-boom bust that bred social problems and domestic melancholy has found its relevance on screen again.
- Ju-on: Origins
- A six-part Netflix series
- Starring Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Yuina Kuroshima, Ririka, Koki Osamura
- Directed by Sho Miyake
