Kayako is a Bad Horror Villain: Ju-On/The Grudge Rant

So this is a bit different from my normal foray. I recently did a blog on Sadako from the Ring series, and due to the film Sadako VS Kayako, had to watch through the Ju-On/The Grudge series for scaling purposes. I had never seen that series before, but as a horror fan, I had always heard that it is Good, so was excited to check it out. If you can tell from the blog's title I was Really Disappointed in what I saw, and if you know me, you know thats a pretty big rarity indeed. Why is this though? Naturally theres a lot of factors that contribute to this but a lot of it stems from one thing, the villain.

So The Grudge, as I will call it now for the remainder of the post for simplicity, is very similar to an american slasher movie, much more so than a haunting movie which is what one would expect. Its got an original evil, a singular villain, and a bodycount of characters that builds throughout the film.

When writing a Slasher Villain there is normally two schools of thought, the left side being malicious villains, the right one being sympathetic villains. Malicious slasher villains are evil, always were, always will be. They are sick, twisted and absolutely love killing and tormenting, its their favorite thing. These villains are real 'Love to Hate' types, they generally either have really strong Intimidation like Michael Myers, a really strong entertaining presence and showmanship like Ghostface, and in some cases Both like Freddy Krueger.

Freddy in particular, even before he got his powers, was a child murdering serial killer, and after was a godly powerful and pure evil psycho who would kill people just for the fun of it, and made the whole movie both entertaining and terrifying with his big personality and creatively f*cked up ways of doing so.

On the other hand you have sympathetic slasher villains. Sympathetic villains are ones who on some level you can relate to, understand or see the humanity within. Even though sympathetic villains do horrible things to people that didn't deserve it, you can on some level still feel bad for them, and sometimes even subconsciously root for them. These characters tend to need to be provoked into killing people, normally because they have rules they exist by and go after those that violate those rules. Jason Voorhees is the most popular example of this, he was mentally and physically handicapped, he drowned as a friendless child, he never hurt anyone until literally seeing his mother murdered. After which he killed those responsible and decided to kill anyone who enters camp crystal lake, the area where so much wrong was done to him. The rule you violate is entering his territory, and while that might not be a good justification for killing someone, its Jason's rules and they broke it, and in later films they knew the risks.

So lets move on to how this relates to Kayako, so lore wise Kayako is clearly trying to be a sympathetic villain. Her husband brutally murdered her and drowned her son, afterwards they both came back as vengeful spirits, and she killed her husband and put a curse on her house were anyone who enters it dies. Kayako didn't start out as a bad person, she had something horrible happen to her, Clearly We are Suppose to feel bad for her, and she has the rule of only killing people that go into her house similar to Jason's. The problem? Kayako is far too much of a malicious monster for us to feel bad for.

Lets talk about why She fails at being a sympathetic first off, Kayako kills anyone who enters her home......and also family members of those people....friends of those people...random people who just happen to be near them when they die....people who talk to people shes after on the phone....people who talk to THOSE people on the phone....people who just look at her house....people who just hear about what happened....people who enter into other places where she's killed people and the list goes on and on. Kayako is super inconsistent with her own rules for killing people and clearly intentionally tries to stretch her net as wide as she can to kill as many people as possible. This is seen even further when she will do things like intentionally lure people into her house, like enrolling her ghost child in school and not having him go, eventually resulting in concerned teachers going there, among other things. So no I absolutely do NOT feel bad for her, Kayako doesn't want justice or understanding or peace, Kayako is a spiteful bitch that just wants to Kill random people like what was done to her. Jason NEVER lured people into Crystal Lake,  Jason even when the people he's after left Crystal Lake didn't needlessly kill other people, Hell with Jason most people freak out at him cause he's scary looking but Kayako can look like a normal woman so most people who first see her are actually nice to her and try to help her, which may or may not make Jason hesitate. Not Kayako.

Okay so if she fails as a sympathetic villain, maybe she's at least an awesome malicious villain? Ha, funny story about that. Kayako has neither the intimidation nor the entertaining presence of other malicious villains. Kayako doesn't speak and doesn't offer much interesting in her ways of killing her victims, heck a great deal of the time it actually doesn't even show us the kill itself. Yes when Kayako shows up the people she's after are pretty f*cked, but we knew they were f*cked from the beginning cause its been made clear from the title of the segment of the movie that she's going to kill them, because all The Grudge movies are actually presented as a interconnected group of shorter films with the title being the name of the victim. That in and of itself makes another problem, the movies are predictable, part of what made Freddy's attacks so interesting is not only how intricate and surreal the dreams were, but also the characters could beat him, its possible for Freddy to lose and we get to see if they have what it takes to survive. No one survives in The Grudge movies, no ones safe, I feel apathetic towards these characters cause theres no mystery to solve here, no reason to get invested or care, they all only exist to die. Through this, these movies I find strangely mirror a lot of the problems I have with another popular horror genre,

The Zombie Genre. I really dislike the vast majority of Zombie movies, which is surprising due to how much of a horror buff I am but bare with me. Zombies aren't scary, Zombies aren't interesting, Zombies are just generic unintelligent ghouls without reason. Zombie movies are generally two things, boring and depressing. Like The Grudge, they portray a bleak hopeless world, where characters exist and mostly do boring stuff and get worked up before inevitably being coldly killed by some unspeaking ghoul, until there is no one left, The Grudge and the Zombie virus even spread from person to person. The two series are also both guilty of shock horror and trying to dive into the inner evils of humanity, throwing in random things like child murder or suicide for seemingly no other reason than to be Edgy and hard to watch.

Now Obviously this is all just my opinion, The Grudge series is popular, and the Zombie Genre is obviously huge so there are people that love it clearly, and I am happy they do, I actually can see the Grudge being really popular among Zombie fans as its the same kind of thing but in a really unique way. But there is one question about my preference I do have to answer.

Why do I dislike Kayako when I really like Sadako? Its a good question and its pretty easy to answer, Sadako is basically Kayako done correctly. Sadako too is suppose to be a sympathetic villain, and she pulls this off, she was ostracized for her psychic powers, was trapped down a well for 30 years by her adoptive father and failed to escape over and over before dying without ever being saved. After that she created a cursed videotape that kills anyone who views it in one week, with the only way to prevent this being to make a copy of the tape and show someone else, who then has to do the same thing. Sadako through this has a strict code she follows and it is derived from her character motivation, no one knew she was down in that well, and she want the whole world to know, to know what happened to her and how she suffered, thats what she cares about, not necessarily killing. Even some of her more questionable actions are still all in service of this goal, as are times she actually helped the characters solve her mystery with hints. Kayako doesn't care if people know her story, in fact thats one of the MANY reasons she might kill you, and has done to other people exactly what was done to her for no reason.

Villains, not just horror villains, but all villains are judged on 3 bases to me. How Intimidating they are, How Compelling they are, and How Entertaining they are. The best villains in fiction are often really high in 2 or even all 3 of these. Kayako honestly struck out in all 3 for me. Thank you for reading.