Ju-on: The Curse

Ju-on: The Curse follows Shunsuke Kobayashi, a primary school teacher who notices that one of his pupils, Toshio Saeki, has stopped coming to class. He visits the family home and finds the boy alone and injured in a house left in disorder, with no sign of his parents. What begins as concern for a missing student draws Kobayashi into a curse tied to the house itself, one that passes to anyone who comes into contact with it. The story unfolds across several connected episodes, tracking different people whose lives brush against the Saeki home and the vengeful presence dwelling there.

The film is the first feature directed by Takashi Shimizu, who also wrote the screenplay, and it was made for Toei with a modest budget. Shimizu would return to this material several times; this is the earliest of the twenty films he has directed in chronological order, followed the same year by Ju-on: The Curse 2. The cast includes Yurei Yanagi, Ryôta Koyama, Takako Fuji, Hitomi Miwa, Asumi Miwa and Chiaki Kuriyama, among twenty-one credited performers. At seventy minutes, it is a short, tightly contained horror mystery set in Japan.

Audience responses to the film are consistent: it holds a rating of 6.8 out of 10 on IMDb from around ten thousand votes, and the same score on TMDB from roughly three hundred votes. A critics' rating of 6 out of 10 from fourteen reviews places critical opinion close to the audience view.