This Red-Band Trailer For THE GRUDGE Remake Is Gnarly As Hell

Maybe you have kept up with all The Grudge movies, from the 2002 original Ju-On: The Grudge to the 2004 American remake to 2009's The Grudge 3. I confess to you that I have not, and that I have largely watched this saga unfold in bits and pieces. I'm not even sure at this point which Grudge movies I've actually seen, as many of them seem to be interchangeable.

Far as I can tell, there's generally a house, it's haunted, people stop by, and bad shit happens to them. Sometimes there is a little boy. Sometimes there's a cat. Frequently there is a shot of a hand emerging from the back of someone's head, fingers poking out from between clumps of their hair. It's all very spooky, I suppose, but the basic iconography seems to remain mostly consistent between entries (If there's a Grudge movie set in space that I've somehow remained unaware of, well, I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments).

All of this is to is to say: the new Grudge seems to be taking things up a notch.

This is the red-band trailer for Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge, headed to theaters early next year, and to my eyes (which, again, are not intimately familiar with this franchise) it looks way gnarlier than anything I've seen in previous Grudge movies. Yeah, they repeat the "hair" gag here, and yeah, Lin Shaye appears to be playing a character I remember from Ju-On, but I'm not sure I've seen anyone cut off their own fingers, or a maggot-spewing dead body sitting in a La-Z-Boy, or someone sawing the head off a corpse during my previous explorations of this franchise. Those experiences have led me to believe these are mostly jump-scare movies that lean heavily on atmosphere rather than gore, while Pesce's take seems to revel in it. I would be lying if I claimed this didn't get my attention.

But what about y'all? Am I wrong? Is this par for the course and I just haven't been paying close enough attention, or has Pesce made something decidedly gnarlier than the Grudge films that came before it? Sound off in the comments below, and stay tuned for more on The Grudge as we draw closer to the film's January 3rd arrival in theaters.