Fiona Landers The Grudge

It Will Never Let You Go

Cast: Tara Westwood, Junko Bailey, David Lawrence Brown
Director: Nicolas Pesce
Genre: Horror, Mystery
Rated: MA15+
Running Time: 94 minutes

Synopsis: A house is cursed by a vengeful ghost that dooms those who enter it with a violent death.

The Grudge
Release Date: January 30th, 2020

About The Production

Fifteen years have passed since one of America's most successful producer/directors, Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan, Spider-Man, Drag Me to Hell), first introduced American audiences to The Grudge. Now, the creator of the Evil Dead series is excited to return to one of his favorite stories in an R-rated version. "When we made the original in 2004," Raimi says, "horror was still on the outside, and it was still for the cult audience. But it has now moved into the mainstream."

The 2004 American film was based on the Japanese horror movie Ju-on: The Grudge, directed by Takashi Shimizu, which captured (and terrified) horror audiences in Japan. The movie was so popular in Japan that, a year later, it not only generated a sequel, but interest from Raimi in having Shimizu bring it to American audiences. "Takashi's Grudge films were very successful in Japan," Raimi relates. "and I'd so loved his series, I wanted the American audience to see The Grudge."

Raimi says that the time is right to return to the franchise – especially since he says that audiences have approached him often over the years asking for R-rated Grudge thrills. "A lot of fans out there have been asking to see another Grudge film," he says. "But we didn't think we could do one until we had the right voice to tell the story."

That voice belongs to Nicolas Pesce (pronounced "Pesh") who was in middle school when he first saw the 2004 Grudge film. "At that age, I was a big scaredy cat. Horror movies freaked me out," he admits, having been raised on more classic black and white horror. But upon entering film school, he realised it was horror films that wound him up, not the art films shown in the classroom. "The fact that a movie can, days later, make you afraid to go to bed is awesome," he states.

Pesce brought his very first feature film, Eyes of My Mother, to the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016. There, Raimi's producing partner at Ghost House, Rob Tapert and producer Roy Lee (Godzilla: King of the Monsters), saw the film and took a meeting with the tyro director. "I was doing the usual round of meetings that you do up there," Pesce recalls, ending up in one with Lee. "I was kind of raving about how my I loved the Grudge movies – I didn't even know they were trying to do a new one!" Though a previous pass at a script had been written by screenwriter Jeff Buhler, Lee was particularly taken with Pesce's understanding of the films being essentially anthology stories, following different characters in different places. Lee informed him they were actually looking to make a new film, and asked if he had any ideas. "It's a tapestry of stories that are loosely connected, all surrounding this house," Pesce says. "So we had an opportunity with this franchise to not remake anything, but rather add a new installment into the franchise – a new chapter to the canon."

Signing on to the project the following month, Pesce began developing a story – and, unlike previous Grudge films, this time armed with an R-rating, which he put to good use. "We thought it was time to push The Grudge to the next level," Raimi explains. "The fact that Nick can make this film with an R rating is a great weapon in the arsenal of a storyteller whose goal is to terrify the audience. He can portray these vengeful ghosts really harming their victims, and he can show blood on the screen without fear of it being cut."

Pesce began piecing together a story drawn from his own life, in particular, growing up in the New York City suburbs, in a small town called Cross River. "In any small town, there's folklore and legends – 'Oh, you know, I heard that, at that house, this happened' and 'Did you hear about so-and-so's dad?' It's fascinating – you look at idyllic places, and behind closed doors, it's a different world. There's horrifying stuff happening even in the most glamorous of places." So he pieced together some of those memories and lore and created his own mythology.

The first thing Pesce did was place the Grudge story on American shores for the first time, in a small town named. . . Cross River. "There are some underlying things that make The Grudge work that are really specific in the setup in the original movies," explains executive producer Schuyler Weiss, who produced Pesce's previous two films. "And if you play within those rules, then it automatically connects to the movies that have come before. But it also gives you a lot of freedom, in terms of stories and characters."

Pesce set the new film in 2004, picking up the timeline from the first American-made film, and doing something he would do throughout the project: pay homage to the previous Grudge movies. "In the 2004 film, Yoko is seen taking over for someone, who is never named," he explains. "We thought it would be fun if she was taking over for Fiona Landers," who would then return to the U.S., now infected with the Grudge. Fiona is indeed seen briefly at the start of the film, leaving the very house seen in the earlier films in Japan. . . and starting an entirely new "infection" in America, leaving the Grudged Saeki home and eventually drowning her own daughter, as Kayako (who sharp-eyed fans can actually spot briefly in that beginning scene) did to her son, Toshio.

One very important aspect of Pesce's storytelling, which he brought along from Shimizu's original, is his play with time. Though the film begins with Muldoon and Goodman's discovery of Lorna Moody's decaying corpse, the story cuts between the current time and the bits and pieces of the other stories (the Spencers, the Mathesons and Wilson). "You're given vignettes that you don't fully understand how they connect, truncated stories that, at first, feel divorced from each other, until you get through the whole movie," the director explains. "It's sort of a puzzle movie. It's always about figuring out how these things go together – learning hints from other people's stories that might give you insight into another storyline."

Notes Weiss, "It's a great opportunity to create mystery, particularly since the main characters are detectives. So they're trying to solve this crime, and we, the audience, sometimes learn things in the other stories that the detectives are also trying to find out. And as we go back and forth, we begin to understand what really happened here." Adds Raimi, "It's one of the things that makes it more of an adult, interesting experience for the audience. It's really up to them to pay attention to what's happening and to put together what happened when, and who murdered whom. By the end, they've solved a puzzle. It's a challenging and satisfying picture to watch."

In Shimizu's original, he introduces each character's story with a title card with their name. So in homage to that, Pesce did, as well, but in a more subtle way. "We give you only the year of each story when it is first seen, but none thereafter. So as you're watching each piece, you have to ask yourself, 'Wait, what was that last chapter? Oh, that was 2004, okay.' I like when the audience has to actively participate. Passive movies are fun, but when you have to work with the movie, if you're willing to put in the effort, it's going to be a more rewarding experience."

The Grudge takes full advantage of the characters' issues. For instance, Peter wants to be a dad so much, that when he arrives at the Grudge house, he's faced with a young girl whose nose starts bleeding. "We see his paternal instincts kick in," Pesce notes. "He's taking care of a girl who's trying to find her parents – and that's the very thing that leads him into trouble."

For the most part, the ghosts don't actually, physically harm people, Weiss points out. "These ghosts are themselves terrifying. But they don't do anything to the people. They drive them to a kind of madness that leads them to do horrible things to themselves and each other. So the most terrifying menaces in the movie are the people themselves. The most gory, visceral, shocking moments are the things these characters to do themselves and to each other. That's real horror."

Grudges & Grudgees – Cast & Characters

Those characters wouldn't hook us in if they weren't portrayed by the talent that is seen onscreen in The Grudge. "Horror isn't just a sidelight of major entertainment anymore," Raimi explains. "It's really moved into the mainstream, and I think the film understands that. And that's why we've got such great actors to support the story. People that you'd normally find in a mainstream drama or love story or comedy." Notes Weiss, "So much of what Nick has written on the page in this script, these really richly drawn characters, constantly dealing with both real world problems and battling the Grudge, has attracted phenomenal acting talent. The craft they bring to these characters makes them feel so lived in. And then what we do to them with the Grudge is so much more impactful."

Playing Det. Muldoon is British actress Andrea Riseborough (Battle of the Sexes, Birdman). "It's through her eyes that we first experience this new Grudge," says Raimi, "and then follow her through the course of the film," as she investigates the murders.

At the heart of the film is a police investigation, so Pesce drew on some of the classic tropes of the drama, but turned them on their ear. "When we think of cop movies, it's always 'buddy cops,'" he explains. "It's always two guys in the car, bantering. And I thought about the fact that, often in TV, when a cop is female, they make her a hot cop."

It was important to Pesce to subvert all of that, "it's important that Muldoon was never a bubbly, happy go lucky woman. She's a homicide detective. And that's a really tough job. It weighs on you a lot." Muldoon's husband was also a cop, who recently had died of cancer. The two lived a blue collar life, dealing with the terrible realities police offers face every day. "So she was already an intense person. Then you throw grief on top of it."

She pursues the mystery of The Grudge with a great intensity. "It becomes an obsessive drive. It really became about going down the rabbit hole with her," something the Grudge took full advantage of. Pesce was conscious of keeping 7-year-old actor Zoe Fish comfortable during his scenes with Riseborough, when Muldoon is going through difficult trauma. "We needed to be careful how we shot scenes where she's losing it a little bit more. Even if kids have acted before, you put them in intense situations and it just feels different. And I never want to terrify a child. So we needed look out for his wellbeing and keep him comfortable."
Demián Bichir describes his Det.Goodman as "a very lonely person – more so since his mother passed a few years ago." Goodman had come to live with his mother and take care of her, "And he's essentially left the house the way it was when she was alive," including all of her medical equipment and Catholic religious paraphernalia. "His partner attempted to take his own life, and that alone was very, very heavy. There isn't a day that goes by without Goodman thinking about what he went through. He still asks 'Why?' All of that has stuck in him. So he's marked, in a way. He's damaged goods."

He's a guy who wants more in his life, but has sort of accepted where he is, Pesce notes of the character. "He's this chain-smoking, rumbling, gruff-voiced guy, but he does have a heart, and really does care about people. That gruff exterior is more a coping mechanism for what is essentially a kind of a depression he's been in."

The actor was drawn to Pesce's script, upon first reading. "It was really well written. I loved the dialogue and the musicality of it. This is more like a psychological kind of terror. And I liked doing it because it's a way of exploring my own fears, facing my own demons."

His relationship with his new partner is a reluctant one, due to his previous partner relationship, but Muldoon forces him into it. "We knew we didn't want it to be like every malefemale partner, where they have to fall in love," Pesce notes. "They're not romantic at all. Goodman actually, I think, gets very small doses of the feel of fatherhood that he always wanted."

But he is wary of his new partner's fascination with a case he wishes she'd stay away from, though the discovery of Lorna's body forces him to have to deal with it. "Muldoon latches onto it and wants to see the investigation through," Weiss explains. "At first, she can't understand why Goodman won't go near the house, but after she goes to visit Wilson, she sees where it all leads. But by then, it's too late for her – she's in it too deep."

The first person to enter the Reyburn house after the Landers murders there (and the establishment of the Grudge) is Peter Spencer. Peter and his wife, Nina, have a local real estate business together, Over The River Real Estate. The two, both in their early 40s, put off becoming parents, and now that Nina has found herself pregnant, they must face the prospect of parenthood.

Actor John Cho, often known for comedic roles, was immediately taken with the script and the story. "These sorts of adult situations, kind of real life horrors, are absent in cinema right now," he informs. "This felt like an adult role. And the rest of the cast are grownups. It felt like, with the help of the genre, we were telling a story that just is not being told in movies today. It felt fresh, it felt grounded, and I thought it was a subversive way to do it. And I just thought that was cool."

He was also fond of the way Pesce built the couple's story over time. "The way Nick shot it, we see the aftermath of things. Sometimes we're not in the horrible moment, but in the aftermath of it, and we spent a long time working up to it. Sometimes, when you don't see something, it is a lot worse than what's going on in your imagination."

Betty Gilpin (GLOW, Masters of Sex) plays Nina. "It's a really challenging role," says Weiss, "because she is a woman wrestling with a very difficult, real world decision, about trying to have a child and all the stress and anxiety that goes with that, and not being on the same page as her spouse. And she is ultimately the victim of the Grudge, through her husband. But Betty was able to make this character so much more than just a victim in the story. You're really drawn into her drama. She makes Nina a three-dimensional character, which makes it much more powerful when the Spencer family tragedy happens."

Cho agrees. "She makes very truthful, unusual choices, and I just believe her as someone who's struggling with motherhood. And it's tough to play, but she does it well, her intense, competing desires of wanting to be a mother and not wanting to be a mother. I see the pain in her, as she's struggling with the guilt. She's just great."

Peter is a character through which Pesce got to pay homage to Shimizu's original films, making use of several classic Grudge tropes, as he does throughout the film. "I'm such a fan boy about The Grudge," he laughs. "There were certain elements from all the movies which were important to keep."

After Peter entered the house for the first time, on their way home from the doctor, that night he takes a shower, and in a moment of reflection about his very real problems, notices someone else's hands coming out of his hair! "That's a strong image in the early movies," Pesce says. "We wanted to find a new way of playing with that here. Here we are with a moment that's all about human emotion, and then we hit you with a ghost hand coming out of the hair. So it's about finding ways to use those iconic images, but catch you off guard and using them in different ways." Says Cho, simply, "That was creepy to shoot."

Another shocker borrowed – and twisted – from Shimizu's films is a character cowering in fear in bed, only to get a sense they are not alone – looking under the covers, only to find the white face of Kayako staring at them, and pulling them in. In this case, Peter gets in bed, only to feel someone at the foot of the bed pulling the sheets down. "When the sheets come down," Pesce says, "you know something is going to happen. You're immediately put on edge." In terms of "scare technology," he says, "Audiences are trained to feel things happening in threes. So we're very consciously not giving it to them on the three. You shot the foot of the bed once, there's nothing there, you go back to Peter. We're trained to believe that, 'Okay, we're gonna go back to the foot of the bed, and it's going to be nothing again, and we go back the third time, the ghost will be there.' We avoid that by having Fiona standing there the second time, before you have a chance to even register what's going on, the ghost just hits you."

"That was my first day working with Tara Westwood," who plays Fiona Landers. "That was quite an introduction."

For his third story, Pesce wanted something unique not seen in Grudge movies previously, nor common in the haunted house genre in general. While the typical haunted house story involves people who find themselves in such a venue, trying desperately to get out, Pesce created the opposite. "Here, you have an elderly couple who are willingly living in a house they know is haunted, for sweet, heartfelt reasons," he explains. William Matheson knows his wife, Faith's, time is coming, and after 50 years of a truly loving relationship, he moves them to a place they know spirits are likely thriving, hoping that, when Faith has passed, she will return regularly to continue being with her husband. "So often, you have people who are desperately afraid of the haunted house and trying, with all their might, to get out. But what if you have characters who want to be there?"

Notes Weiss, "It's a brilliant character and plot device by Nick, to take this really twisted, quite creepy logic, but make it so poignant and sweet, that all William wants to do is live in this haunted house with his wife's ghost. And you can imagine how that goes. . . "
Faith is played by Lin Shaye, an actress much beloved in the horror genre, for her work in the Insidious franchise (a fav of Pesce's), HBO's Tales From the Crypt, and even fun roles like that of Magda in There's Something About Mary. "Lin is much beloved by horror fans," Weiss states. "She knows exactly how to create these fantastically scary scenes, but is also a dramatic actress of the first class. Her scenes with Frankie Faison, as her husband, she brings this incredible pathos and depth that she's able to match with diving right into these really big horror moments that are just so key to the film."

"I love character, and I love story," the actress informs. "I just love all storytelling. And, to be honest, this is the scariest script I've ever read. Every time I read the script, I found myself breathing very shallowly. It really does grab you. Nick is a really gifted writer – his descriptions of the experiences that we're about to enter as characters, and of the interior of the characters, are so vivid and so powerful. It gives the actor a tremendous amount to work off of. It totally enriched my feeling of who this character was, who she has become, and what is about to occur because of the Grudge."

The story, she notes, is about rage. "This has a really powerful idea that rage destroys people, and destroys them forever.

It's amplified, of course, in the story, and in a filmic way. But I love the idea that rage is such a negative experience that changes people's lives forever." Veteran actor Frankie Faison (Silence of the Lambs) portrays Faith's devoted husband, William. "Silence of the Lambs is my desert island movie," Pesce says. "I always found so interesting, how he plays a guy who is very sympathetic, who can connect with a serial killer, who can talk to this guy as a person and bring a lot of warmth. We needed someone like that for William, who could find this warm, loving guy, who feels tired and exhausted, but loves his wife so much. We had to see that, even at this point, there was love between them, and to know what he was fighting for – because we don't get to see it. We don't get to see them 10 years ago, living their loving life. We just have to feel the remnants of it. And Frankie can do that, even with just his eyes."

"We thought about it – these ghosts inhabit this house, and here, they have people who aren't necessarily afraid of them. How did that manifest itself?" the director relates. "Just because this little girl was killed, who's to say that she is fully aware of what happened or why? And I liked the idea that, as a ghost, there's some aspect of her child's nature that hasn't gone away. And here she is, with a woman who wants to play games with her and hang out. And we wanted to show that ghosts aren't always just trying to kill you. But even then, there's something creepy about a little girl playing peekaboo – it doesn't make you feel any better that a ghost wants to play a game with you."

The Mathesons, sure of their plans, have attempted to end Faith's life three times, but without success. It is now time to call in a professional: Lorna Moody, a so-called "exit guide," someone there to advise people on their options for euthanasia, to leave life with dignity in the face of a terminal illness.

Pesce cast twice-Oscar®-nominated actress Jacki Weaver, a well-respected Australian actress, as Lorna. "She's such an accomplished dramatic actress," Weiss says. "But she really got to have some fun with this one. She has some of the movie's biggest moments – she's the one constantly being terrified and tormented, and runs screaming through half a dozen scenes. And it was just so great to have someone with the dramatic heft and chops of Jacki, because it makes all of that rage, that horror, so much more real and powerful."

The most horrifically affected by the Grudge is Goodman's former partner, Det. Richard Wilson, whom we first meet when Muldoon goes to visit him in the mental hospital where he now resides. When he first went to investigate the Landers murders, it was Wilson who bravely entered the house. Goodman's gut, luckily for him, was advising him otherwise.

"When he first goes there, he's convinced that there's going to be an answer that fits in this world," says actor William Sadler, who portrays the unfortunate detective. "Little by little, he starts to see that there's more going on here – that the house is involved. That there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of. And it scares him."

Wilson becomes more and more desperate, trying to piece the unexplainable together, and in doing so, he becomes more and more unraveled. "He starts to see things that aren't there – people that are dead start to visit him, with more and more frequency, and he starts to question his own sanity. The Grudge starts to have its way with him." "It was a huge makeup role for William," says Pesce, with Toby Lindala's Lindala Schminkin FX providing a makeup rig for the injured Wilson, complete with bones and missing face, and then a version for a year later, when Muldoon encounters him, after he's had a year to heal. "The finished product was pretty mindboggling," he says. "It's so believable. You can't believe that's your face you're looking at," something he says, does actually get to him. "Actors tend to be pretty sensitive to those things. We take our cue from a pair of glasses or a mustache or hairstyle. And when you put on this hideous, disfigured thing. . . it's a hard thing to deal with. But people are gonna love it."

The Ghosts in The Grudge are rooted in the murders in the Reyburn house of the Landers family, instigated by Fiona Landers, who brought the Grudge back with her from Japan. Different individuals who enter the house and become affected by the curse themselves tend to have interactions with different Landers ghosts – and there's a reason why.

"The Grudge is a curse that manifests itself in different ways, depending on who it's manifesting itself to," Pesce explains. For example, Muldoon is dealing with the grief of losing her husband – so the ghost that primarily appears to her is that of Fiona's dead husband, Sam. "And Peter, he's all about being a parent, and the child ghost is the one that appears to him."

Tara Westwood's Fiona is indeed the victim of not only the Grudge, but her own terrible family life. "She's a mother, she's a wife, in an abusive relationship, mostly emotionally abused and somewhat physically, and just not in a good emotional place," the actress explains. "There's always been a vulnerability with her, but I think after Melinda came along, there's been severe post partum depression and a lot of trauma – and now Fiona's pregnant again. So it's been long boiling. And now she's stuck emotionally in the trauma of what she did and all that happened. Nick and I discussed it – she's just so traumatized, even though she killed her daughter, it's not what she wanted to do. So she's just reaching out – she just needs to be heard and understood," even if that's just screaming at Faith Matheson, inches from her face.

Fiona's daughter, Melinda, is played by seven year old Zoe Fish, whom Pesce describes as "wise beyond her years – which the best child actors always are. She's still a little kid, and she loves goofing around, but she got what we were doing, in a weird way. She just loved being scary. She has older brothers that are six or seven years older than her, and there were days when she would ask, 'Can I go home in the makeup, so I can scare my brothers?'" he laughs. Though seeing other cast members in their horror makeup tended to give her the willies. "Even after she saw Tara getting her makeup put on, if she turned around and was surprised and saw her there, she would get really, really scared. I'm not trying to terrify a young girl. So we had to be careful. There were plenty of times where Tara would walk around set with a bag on her head." The ghosts deliver something else that Grudge fans know and love from the previous films – their "croak" or death rattle. The croak in the Japanese films comes from the sounds that Kayako makes when she dies, one which, Pesce notes, was made by filmmaker Shimizu himself. "Even long before he made the Grudge movies, he used to creep up behind his sister while she was doing her homework and do that sound behind her head! And it would make her lose it."

Here, Pesce also wanted the ghosts to croak, based on how they die. "But always knowing that it should be in the same world as the classic croak (which the director actually borrowed from the original film for a brief moment in the opening, when Kayako appears behind Fiona while she's still in Japan). "Sam's is like a traditional Grudge croak – he fell down the stairs and his neck is twisted. It's a little bit more gurgly, because of the blood that's pooling in his mouth. Fiona had stabbed herself in the neck, so hers is a throaty groan, but a little wheezy, because her vocal chords and her throat are punctured. And Melinda is more like a little girl shriek. So we mixed that with the sound of screams underwater. Because a child screaming is terrifying."

Making The Grudge

Nicolas Pesce brought in his Director of Photography Zack Galler, who had shot the director's second feature, Piercing, in 2016. "When I first got the script," Galler say, "it was really exciting, because there are four different story lines that run throughout the film. Each one has a slightly different visual thread that runs through it. So it was an interesting challenge to have them each be different, but have them all exist within the same world. And Nick is one of the most prepared directors I've ever worked with. He knows what he wants, and he helps everyone else do better at their jobs."

"For me," says Pesce, "the DP tends to be my main collaborator. Zack's work is really beautiful, and I thought he was really talented. But more than anything I appreciated our working relationship, and how we collaborated with each other. I could say two words, and he knew exactly what I was going for. We think in a similar way, but also have differences that balance each other out. Plus, Zack was originally a gaffer, so he has such a great mind for lighting. I tend to talk poetically and atmospherically about lighting, and he can translate that into practical lighting."

For Production Designer, Pesce brought in Canadian designer Jean-Andre Carriere. "We were looking for someone who had shot in Winnipeg before, to know what was available, and what kind of crew we could hire. And Jean had done some huge, huge movies. So there was a level of expertise that he came with that was really impressive. And this was a big undertaking. Just the number of locations and building so much within those spaces was a challenge he knew how to handle. And we would walk into a location, and Jean's first idea was pretty close to my first idea."

For the looks of each story thread, on a cinematographic level, Muldoon's fairly stable world, he notes, "She's the cop, and hers is the central thread that ties all of these other threads together. This is the majority of the movie, so we gave it a very particular style," more grounded and shot on a dolly or tripod. "The other threads that are shorter, and very specific things happen within them, so they lend themselves to a little bit more extreme style, and maybe a little deeper stylization."

Within the Reyburn house itself, the Matheson's time in the house is more stark. "They're living in the house specifically to commune with the ghosts in a haunted house," Galler states. "So that house is darker, dirtier and has more atmosphere in it. And there are more dark corners." The Landers family is seen mostly in flashbacks. "Their look is told quickly in bits and pieces of flashback, so you have to get a lot of information across visually quickly."

Enacting scares with the camera took full advantage of Galler's skills, and Pesce's desire to create everything practically, in camera, and not rely on visual effects. "For immediate scares, we have people coming in and out of darkness. But then the really fun thing about picking camera moves and angles is trying to selectively show the viewer what to be looking at and what to be feeling, without feeling the camera and taking them out of it. It's a kind of a sleight of hand. The viewer doesn't realize that something's about to come out from the corner, and then it does. If you don't show your hand too soon, it works really well." Galler would also play tricks on the audience with framing – misdirection into negative space in the frame. "The viewer knows they're in a horror movie, and they're expecting things to pop up there. So you get to play with, 'Okay, do you use that or subvert that?' We try to keep the viewer just tense."

As mentioned, almost the entire film was shot on location, with very little stage work – Carriere instead building his sets within the buildings used, as "studio on location." "I have this thing about how, in horror movies, you'll be in an old rickety farm house that's tiny, and then you go upstairs, and suddenly the hallways are 10 feet wide, and you go, 'Oh – that's obviously a set,'" Pesce says. "I wanted to really try to ground it as much in sets that feel like real places, where real people have been. And with hallways, doors, rooms that seem the accurate size and not too big."

The house at 44 Reyburn Dr. is actually two houses – one portraying the exterior and another where interiors were shot and the sets were constructed, both in the Wellington Crescent suburb of Winnipeg, just about a mile from downtown.

As with the cinematography, the look of the interior (and some of the exterior) changed, depending on which family and which story is being filmed. And with the film's timeline broken up and shuffled around, Weiss says, "We know which story we're in by the look of the house."

At the very beginning, when Fiona Landers returns from Japan, we see the house of an upper middle class family. "It's warm and sort of romantic," Pesce says. "They lead a nice life." And why shouldn't it be a nice place? "A lot of times in horror movies, there's these rundown farm houses that are haunted. You know, a haunting can happen anywhere."

But as we see the Landers house that Peter Spencer is selling, we begin to notice something different. "They're the perfect family," Weiss informs, "but underneath the surface, there's deep, deep trouble. So the house needs to reflect that. It's beautifully furnished, and yet everything is a little bit unsettling. There's something oppressive about the house, and that's something that really comes out beautifully in the scenes where Peter is walking around the house, searching for the Landers. We feel this house closing in on him. It's pristine, and yet somehow it's sucking him deeper and deeper into darker and darker recesses of the house." A year later, the Mathesons occupy the Reyburn house. And it's sparsely furnished. "They're an older couple, it's very hastily done," Weiss explains. "They buy this haunted house so that she can die there, and there they can enact their plan. So the house feels creepy in a different way." The house is so perfectly an older couple's house: mismatched furniture going back decades of life. "There's pill bottles, ointments, all the detritus of an elderly person's home. It's something Jean Carriere captured perfectly."

By the time Muldoon arrives to find Faith, months after she has killed her husband, it – and she – are "fully Grudged," as Weiss says. "She lives in the house for maybe six more months, with really only the Grudge keeping her, sustaining her. And the house just comes apart around her. When Detective Muldoon arrives at the house she's trying to investigate, she finds a true house of horrors. It's the Matheson house, but just decayed and decrepit, and Faith Matheson decayed and decrepit herself, just shuffling around this endless rat run in this rotten, horrible, terrifying house."

"That's the final stage of the house," Pesce says. "Everything has just gone to rot. And just showing the huge progression from this happy family home, that turns into this house of horrors. It's disgusting, with bugs scrawling on corpses, and this woman covered in her own feces and blood. It's just horrifying."

Filming went smoothly, but there were times when issues came up that required a real expert to assist in problem solving. Lucky for Pesce, that expert was his boss. "Sam Raimi is a legend," the director states, "and is so talented in this genre. There's something very mathematical about horror movies. There are certain ways you achieve the biological response in the audience – even from someone who doesn't even like horror movies, that you can still scare, if you do it right. And Sam is really dialed in to how to achieve that. So to be able to have someone like Sam there to help was just an incredible asset. I was very fortunate."

In one simple scene, for instance, Muldoon's son, Burke, walks across the room to her at night and passes through a shadow – from which Melinda emerges. "And, since we were doing everything practically, when we shot it, it was, like, 'Oh – I see you guys switching in the darkness. This isn't gonna work.'" So Raimi made the simple suggestion of making another part of the room a little brighter, enough so that the shadow area looked darker. "'Your attention will be over here. We're going to distract you with those moments over here.' And then, all of a sudden, when it's all put together, it all works. So on that day, having Sam next to me at the camera and talking through possibilities and tricks, and things that I had never thought of, I would remember, 'Oh – he's done this 40 times!'"

Much of the horror that Nicolas Pesce envisioned when writing the script was also brought to life via the hands of special effects makeup and gore wizard Toby Lindala (The XFiles) and his team at Lindala Schminkin FX in Vancouver. "Toby was incredible," the director says emphatically. "I went into this knowing I wanted to do all the makeup effects practically, no visual effects. Not only do I just love that stuff, but I also think it simply looks better on camera. And I get such a kick out of that whole process and bringing these really bizarre, messed up images to life."

Says Lindala, "It was a huge challenge, and so exciting, the prospect of having the chance to create things that will hopefully becoming new iconic images and experiences in the Grudge canon for fans."

The approach, per Pesce, as with the entire film, was to keep things based in realism, but heightened. "The whole look of the movie is heightened – everything is a little bit more stylised," he says. "And that's right up Toby's alley, where it's all based in real anatomy. We just make it a little bit more theatrical." For his research, Lindala notes, "We've attended autopsies and looked at all the pictures you shouldn't look at. But we looked at them for textures and colors, as reference. And Nick just loved to shout out, 'More blood! More blood!' There's no such thing as too much blood for Nick."

For the ghosts, as mentioned, Lindala did away with the pale-faced Japanese ghostly image. "It's been done to death, and it's been wonderful, but we needed to find something really new for the look of these ghosts." Lindala Shiminkin illustrator Lance Web created as many as 50 different design approaches, reflecting the characters' stories, as well. "Remember, the ghosts themselves are not strictly scary – they're victims, too. And there's not a single 'ghost look.' Each of them is slightly different. We play their mode of death as part of their ghostly character."

It was actually originally considered to present the ghosts over three stages, using fascinating – and quite gory – practical, animatronic masks built by Lindala and his team, with the looks getting more and more disturbing, the deeper our living friends go down the rabbit hole. "Initially, we were going to go way further," Pesce notes. "But, ultimately, I wanted to pull it back into the world of The Sixth Sense, where they are just more grounded. They just feel like people – which I think is much scarier."

Pesce instilled two other chilling features of the ghosts – having ghosts appear simply walking across in the background, without the character even noticing them. "They do slightly strange or disturbing things," Weiss explains. "but sometimes when the character's back is turned." When Peter Spencer first comes to the Reyburn house and encounters Melinda, "she just seems like a normal little girl who just never talks and doesn't seem quite right. But when his back is turned, her mouth erupts with water that is reminiscent of her drowning," or "sludge water," as Lindala calls it.

One of Lindala's proudest moments is when Faith heaves herself over a stairwell railing and makes a splat six stories below. For that, Lindala and team built a photorealistic dummy of Lin Shaye, complete with a head filled with sacs of movie blood and guts made from sausage casings filled with Selenium mixed with Metamucil. ("It looks like uncooked chicken," he states proudly.)

"As scary as the ghosts are, we wanted the most impactful and shocking moments in the movie to be the things the human characters did to themselves and each other, driven by the Grudge and by the ghosts," says Weiss. "And this is the most extreme and show stopping example. It's epic and gruesome, and really required every department that works on a movie set to make it come off as well as it did."

The Grudge
Release Date: January 30th, 2020