“In The Grip of Powerful Rage” — on rape-revenge and on-screen trauma in ‘Ju-On: Origins’

A review of the new horror series, on Netflix now

“Ju-On: the curse of one who dies in the grip of powerful rage. It gathers and takes effect in the places that person was alive. Those who encounter it die, and a new curse is born. “ — Ju-On: The Grudge, 2002.

Time moves strangely in Ju-On: Origins. Or, I should say, space-time moves strangely. Its characters are caught in a loop, desperately trying to escape the echoes of the trauma they’ve experienced, and yet they are borne back ceaselessly into the past, borne back ceaselessly to that house, unable to move on both spatially and temporally. Everything bad that happened before is still and always happening; everything bad that will happen, has already happened before. It’s a deeply, deeply unsettling experience.

From its title, the new horror series is ostensibly a prequel to the Grudge film franchise; it’s not that, exactly. Instead, it purports to be a dramatization of the “real” stories that inspired the films, of the actual murders and hauntings that cursed the house where the Grudge films are set. It’s about a paranormal investigator trying to track down an ominous house that he believes to be cursed, and it’s about a number of people whose paths have…