New Poster for THE GRUDGE Reboot Wants You to Fear Hair
Thanks to director Nicolas Pesce and producer Sam Raimi, we are getting a new film based on the classic Japanese horror-thriller The Grudge. It seems like a lot of people have already written off this movie as just another reboot, but the director has explained that this movie isn’t going to redo anything that’s already been done with the franchise. This new movie will tell a whole new story set in the same universe.
We have a new poster for the film to share with you today and as you can see, it wants to evoke a fear of hair in a bathtub. It’s such a Grudge thing to do!
When previously talking about the film, the director said:
“The beauty of The Grudge franchise, both the American and Japanese iterations, is it’s an anthology series. Every movie is a different story of different characters having different interactions with this curse. In today’s age where we’re remaking everything, I thought it would be fun to dive into The Grudge universe where we don’t have to remake anything, but rather a new chapter in this canon.”
Pesce went on to talk about what he finds most compelling about the concept of the grudge curse that all the stories have been set around:
“I think the most compelling thing about the grudge is that it’s inescapable. All you need to do is walk into a house that feels unassuming, and you’re screwed. It’s not your traditional haunted house movie where you pull up to a creepy, Gothic-looking house and go, ‘oh god that’s haunted.’ A motif of all the films, especially this one, is that behind the most normal kind of house, inside the most normal-seeming life, there can be something horrifying — whether it’s real and grounded, or something otherworldly and terrifying, it can happen anywhere, behind any door, to anyone. It’s unique to this story and philosophically terrifying.”
It’s also been revealed that upcoming version of The Grudge is set in America, and it’s said to take place at the same time as the 2004 film directed by Takashi Shimizu that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played an exchange student living in Japan. In the new film, Andrea Riseborough (Mandy) “plays a cop in a new town who comes across a seemingly-unexplainable case that leads her to a house that, in Pesce’s words, ‘has been grudged.’” He goes on to explain:
“We follow her, as well as two other storylines, that are all interacting with this grudged house in small town America. Like the old films, it’s a tapestry of three different stories that interweave and all take place at slightly different times, centered around this one house that’s at the center of this case that this cop is working on.”
The Grudge stars Demián Bichir, John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Lin Shaye, and Jacki Weaver. The Grudge is set to hit theaters on Jan. 3, 2020.