Horror remakes are a dime a dozen, nowadays. Why would Hollywood ever come up with a new idea, specifically in the horror genre, when there’s tried and true IP out there that is ripe for revisiting? Well, when it comes to the upcoming American reboot of “The Grudge,” the film’s director Nicolas Pesce doesn’t feel like his film falls into the above category.
Speaking to EW, who have a few first-look photos from the film, the director says that “The Grudge” doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the remakes that have been populating theaters over the last several years.
“The beauty of ‘The Grudge’ franchise, both the American and Japanese iterations, is it’s an anthology series,” said Pesce. “Every movie is a different story of different characters having different interactions with this curse. In today’s age where we’re remaking everything, I thought it would be fun to dive into ‘The Grudge’ universe where we don’t have to remake anything, but rather a new chapter in this canon.”
The director goes on to explain that “The Grudge” isn’t your typical haunted house horror film that has been done a million times over. Instead, the filmmaker says this film is about how any house can become cursed, which makes the premise way scarier.
“It’s not your traditional haunted house movie where you pull up to a creepy, Gothic-looking house and go, ‘oh god that’s haunted,’” he explained. “A motif of all the [‘Grudge’] films, especially this one, is that behind the most normal kind of house, inside the most normal-seeming life, there can be something horrifying — whether it’s real and grounded, or something otherworldly and terrifying, it can happen anywhere, behind any door, to anyone. It’s unique to this story and philosophically terrifying.”
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The new film finds actress Andrea Riseborough, who has been recently seen in the great films “Mandy” and “Nancy,” playing a cop that finds herself involved in a case that leads her to a cursed home. As you might expect, this leads to all sorts of creepy situations. The film also features Demián Bichir, John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Lin Shaye, and Jacki Weaver in the cast.
“The Grudge” will arrive in theaters on January 3, 2020.
You can see all the new photos below:
