31 Days of Asian Horror: Ju-On Origins (2020)

If you’ve seen the original Ju-On, or even the US remake, you’ll know the basic story of Ju-On and the idea that when an incident happens in a place that is so tragic or horrible, it’ll stay with it forever haunting anyone who encounters it. While the original does focus a good bit of the story on the house itself, the Netflix original series Ju-On: Origins places it in a new light.

The series heavily focuses on the house, and the way it is presented is from a paranormal researcher’s quest to find out about all that happened there, interviewing other people’s accounts, and in turn, uncovers the horrific stories that happened. The drama series is much more darker than its original, really honing in on the idea of the grudge and what type of evil creates it. The series gives the distinction a little more weight, in that the grudge happens when the worst of the worst tragedy and events unfold and that it’s abnormal making the house so much more special.

I enjoyed the series the first time I watched it when it premiered back in July of last year, and still enjoyed it after a second watch. I always found that the original movie’s downfall was that it tried to separate the movie into each individual story and didn’t work to make it cohesive enough like it was trying to be more of an anthology, which I feel the series worked well within. Some of the stories are ongoing throughout the episodes, but because it’s broken into individual episodes, it allows for the jumps to previous incidents in time to flow better within the plot.

Placing the series in more of a documentary style or a faux-true story viewpoint was interesting and I think worked in that sense to keep up the scares when normal jump scares were not used as much, as it focused the horrors onto terrible humans doing terrible things and almost drawn to the house’s evil to carry out their acts. It still has the same flare that the movies do, though, and nods to the original with the use of the closet being a central place and a child's horrific death the catalyst for the grudge. The episodes are fairly short (under and half an hour) so it’s a quick easy binge.

If you are a fan of the series of movies, I do think you’d get something out of the series as it does kind of tie up loose ends regarding the grudge and its specificity of it being at that house thus showcasing how terrible the house is, but it does take the levels of the stories to a whole new extreme that is far enough removed from the original that I could see there being a divide in its reception. They are much more graphic and violent, the focus being on the worst of humanity which can be sometimes hard to stomach. I didn’t find that the series had many scares of a normal horror film, but more of a general sense of uneasiness the entire time that escalates as the series progresses and the stories get much more tragic.

Ju-On: Origins can be found streaming on Netflix.

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