Anna Daniels
As Pesce noted, there’s a fine line to ride when rebooting a horror property. One could easily become anxious and simply cram everything distinctly Grudge into the new feature to ensure that people would A) know that it’s a Grudge movie, and B) be more inclined to see it. On the flip side, one could also get carried away with their own vision and take the reboot too far away from its predecessors, making it feel like something different in a bad way.
Pesce knew it was important to strike that balance, and ventured to keep The Grudge as grounded as possible when it came to the type of horror he was delivering and how he was delivering it. For the director, that meant making the ghosts look as realistic as possible in a way that would call to mind the original Japanese Grudge movies.
“I think that the opportunity that The Grudge provided me was, again, looking back at the Japanese films, it’s not just one type of ‘ghost scary.’ It isn’t the traditional sort of haunted house ghost story. There’s elements of convection, of psychosis, there’s jump scares, there’s ghosts, there’s a lot of different textures. It was fun to get to play with all those different things,” Pesce shared. “I really didn’t want to do big CG ghosts. I didn’t think that, looking back at Shimizu’s original films, that was really true to the movie. What I loved about what he did initially was the movies are so grounded. It really feels like a home video — like a family’s home videos — and then ghosts just walk through the background. I knew that I wanted to keep them grounded.”
In all, Pesce is proud of what The Grudge turned out to be, and teased that audiences will be more than satisfied with the film: “If you like the old ones, you’re going to come see it. If you like horror movies, you’re going to come see it. Now that I have your a** in the seat, I’m going to deliver something that is a story that I wouldn’t get to tell otherwise.”
Written by: Looper
