THE GRUDGE Reboot Poster Wants You to be Scared of Hair

When previously talking about the movie, the director said:

“The beauty of The Grudge franchise, both the American and Japanese iterations, is it’s an anthology series. 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.”

Pesce went on to talk about what he discovers most compelling about the story of the grudge curse that all the stories have been set around:

“I think the most compelling thing about the grudge is that it’s inescapable. All you need to do is walk into a house that feels unassuming, and you’re screwed. 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.’ A motif of all the 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.”

It’s also been revealed that the upcoming movie of The Grudge is set in America, and it’s said to take place at the same time as the 2004 movie directed by Takashi Shimizu that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played a student living in Japan. In the new horror, Andrea Riseborough (Mandy) “plays a cop in a new area who comes across an unexplainable case that leads her to a house that, in Pesce’s words, ‘has been grudged.’” He explains:

“We follow her, as well as two other storylines, that are all interacting with this grudged house in small town America. Like the old films, it’s a tapestry of three different stories that interweave and all take place at slightly different times, centered around this one house that’s at the center of this case that this cop is working on.”

The Grudge stars Demián Bichir, John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Lin Shaye, and Jacki Weaver. The Grudge will hit theaters on Jan. 3, 2020.