Movies

Shot by Shot with ‘The Grudge’ Trailer

We dig into the beautiful muck of Nicolas Pesce’s latest effort to find a J-horror terror we’re pumped to experience.
The Grudge X
Sony Pictures
By  · Published on October 29th, 2019

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This is why you hire Riseborough. That face. It’s all fear and regret and power and determination. “We need to leave right now,” she says, and the obedient kid goes scooching from his bed.

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But, again, the great thing about The Grudge is that there is nowhere to hide. You can’t simply scooch off the bed and run to safety. The Grudge goes where you go. Geller lights a tiny corner of the room with a fish tank, and we see the kid walk toward mom in the shadow.

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DAMN! ANOTHER JUMP SCARE! We could feel this one coming too, but it is even more frickin’ effective. Jumps get a bad rap in the horror community. We like to act all high and mighty where startle-tricks are concerned, but when operated so deftly, they are one of the most efficient means of successfully securing fright from your audience. Watching a horror film should feel unsafe. You cannot trust the filmmaker. He’s a madman ready to lunge at you at any given moment.

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Hey, the tub got drained, and um, it looks like we’ve found the cause of the blockage.

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Someone, who may or may not be Lin Shaye, takes a swan dive down the stairwell. Not sure she’s going to stick the landing.

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Jacki Weaver behind the wheel while someone in her backseat prepares to make his muddy presence known. Huh. Car. Mud. Inevitable death. Weaver might be the poor grimaced corpse glimpsed earlier in the trailer. Tis gonna be pretty gnarly to see her arm cracked in two.

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Brad Gullickson is a Weekly Columnist for Film School Rejects and Senior Curator for One Perfect Shot. When not rambling about movies here, he's rambling about comics as the co-host of Comic Book Couples Counseling. Hunt him down on Twitter: @MouthDork. (He/Him)