I know what you’re thinking, and no, this is not, for once, me talking about my childhood.

Instead, this time, I am going to talk about the movie I just finished watching, The Grudge, and the various thoughts about the genre of horror in general.

First, my encapsulated review : meh.

It was not a terrible movie, but it wasn’t very good either. I see that the users at IMDB rate it at about fifty seven percent, and Metacritic gives it a 49 percent, so I would say that the consensus more or less agrees with me.

What made it thought-provoking to me was the puzzle of what exactly made it not very good. (See, when you have a hyper analytical post modern brain, even mediocrity can be interesting!)

It is a question in my mind, because I have watched a lot of horror lately, and a lot of it was not exactly what one would called Grade A List film, and yet here is a movie produced by Sam Raimi (so you know Ted has a role) and “starring” Sarah Michelle Gellar (though honestly, she is not the one with the most screen time) and very well shot and with excellent special effects and whatnot. And yet, I liked the cheaper movies more. What gives?

Well, partly, it’s the movie’s complete lack of cues as to when we move in time. I have never seen a movie do so little to tell the viewer when the hell events are happening. Most movies or televisions shows have realized that the simplest and most effective device is to simply use a color filter, with maybe some other simple effect like fade or fuzz, to make each time period unique. Nope, not this film. So already, this film is making me run to keep up with it, which, as a fat guy, I intensely resent.

Plus, while all its devices were effectively delivered, none of them were particularly original or effective. There was only a few real scares in it for me, and even those were not big time scares, more like “Well, that was kind of spooky!”

But the big problem is that it really doesn’t feel like the scares and the plot are one solid whole. In fact, it often feels like they have nothing to do with each other, or even worse, that the tail is vigorously wagging the dog, and the plot is there to have something to justify the horror beats and not the other way around.

And that is one of the interesting things I realized while watching this uninteresting movie : horror, like comedy, works on specific beats that work towards a specific effect. Each “scare” in a horror movie has to work both as itself and as part of the larger whole, just like the gags in a comedy, although, of course, horror needs far fewer of them.

I mean, if the scares came as fast as the comedy beats in a good comedy, you would probably die.

Back to the movie in question. This talk of which end of the dog wags which is leading us to the main problem of the flick, and that is simply a lack of connective tissue. It simply does not add up to a whole movie. It just feels like parts without a whole, ingredients that never become a cake.

I had just been thinking, actually, right before watching this flick, that perhaps horror was like comedy in that really good jokes can compensate for lack of a strong plot, and then The Grudge comes along to prove me wrong.

Or at least, to illustrate that if you are not going to have a good plot, you better make sure your horror beats are really, really good. And these were not.

Another problem was the acting. None of the players seemed to really commit to their vulnerability, their fear, or their dread. A lot of them, in fact, seemed to be of the school of acting that seems to think “fear” and “surprise” are the exact same thing, when clearly they are not.

So there was no emotional engagement, and to me, this illustrated just how important emotional engagement is with a horror movie. The audience has to be able to connect with the characters in order to feel their fear and become scared themselves. This is where a lot of the more mindless slasher style horror films fail. They are about spectacle, not emotions.

Whereas the horror movies I love the most are the ones which are one coherent nightmare, where the scares emerge naturally from the overall plot and the writer understands that all horror is psychological horror, and that real scares come from the darkest parts of our minds, not the more obvious props of gore and cheap surprise.

That’s why one of my favorite horror properties of all time is The Shining. Written by Stephen King back when he wanted to write horror, the entire thing unfolds as one long horrible nightmare descent into the heart of madness, and so it not only scares you in its memorable and quotable parts, it disturbs you because you can feel a terrible resonance with the darkest parts of the human mind, the parts that we all share and that none of us like to talk about.

It gets us where we live, the deep down place where our primal animal selves dwell, underneath our civilized selves and down deep where we keep all our pain, fear, rage, and shame.

So to sum up (hah) : The Grudge is not a very good movie. The acting is unconvincing, the plot is far too thin, the scares are not very scary, the whole thing lack originality (and not just because it’s a remake), and the most interesting thing about the whole movie is the glimpses of life in Tokyo we get.

And when you favorite scene in a horror movie is one where one of the characters is trying to shop for food in a supermarket where none of the foods look faintly familiar, you know something went wrong.