nick121235

One thing you can count in any of Cronenberg's films, he is going to cast someone who looks 5-15 years older than they really are for any given role.

I've always felt this was a unique film. Cronenberg chooses to focus on alienation here, even from the very beginning, using his unique sense of cinematography to highlight a sense of distance between characters even when their words say different; a sense of distance that only grows throughout the film as the family begin to question the father and his possible history of violence.

This is a gorgeous film, and I never really understood how it broke Cronenberg into the mainstream. True, it removes his usual focus on body-horror, but it also keeps a sense of alienation that should be difficult for the usual cinemagoer to swallow. Perhaps it wasn't picked up on, or perhaps in this day and age alienation is so common that it actually spoke to people. This is not one of his best films in my opinion, but it's still an incredible film. There's just no substitute for the unique atmosphere that pervades all of Cronenberg's films, and only he and Lynch managed to convince me that auteur theory is real.

You could write an amazing Lacanian analysis on this. The prioritization of the Symbolic over the Imaginary, the focus on repetition in the drive to obtain the object of desire over the process of jouissance, the focus on the unconscious as it infects every aspect of our conscious experience of life without our realization due to fetisistic disavowal. But I do not have the energy to write this essay. If you know Lacan, take a look at this film again and think about it through his work. There's a lot to see here, and although this could simply be that it shows Lacan is correct in his commentaries on social normativity and, especially, the way the human mind works, it would surprise me if Nolan didn't at least have some psychoanalytic background in Freud. At the very least.

This is almost gialloesque for some reason. It's honestly not well made, nowhere near as soon as Ringu, or even The Ring, but it has a type of charm to it.

This movie is almost not "j-horror", at least not in the same vein as Ringu or One Missed Call or Pulse; I generally think of j-horror as focusing on technology, while this is a much more traditional ghost story.

And to tell you the truth it isn't well made, in the sense that it clearly has a low budget and the editing is almost amateur, the lighting is also far too bright.

But all of these problems fall away when we focus on the atmosphere. Ju-On has a PHENOMENAL atmosphere, and almost feels like a giallo (or even Lynchian close to the end?) in its prioritization of atmosphere and images over plot coherence or good editing. There's just something about it that really shines through.