Takashi Shimizu, the Ju-On director who would rather make a comedy

Takashi Shimizu

Photo: Cake6 (talk) / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 27, 1972 Maebashi, Gunma, Japan
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Grudge, Ju-on: The Grudge, Ju-on: The Curse
Awards	Fantasia International Film Festival (lifetime achievement) · Sitges Film Festival · New York Asian Film Festival (lifetime achievement)

Takashi Shimizu built one of the most imitated images in modern horror, a pale boy crouched in a doorway and a woman with black hair dragging herself down a staircase, and he insists it was never the plan. Asked in Montreal about his attachment to the genre, the creator of Ju-On said he became a horror director because his first chance happened to be a horror film, that it turned out he was good at it, and that what he would really like to make is a comedy. He said it while presenting two new features, in the busiest stretch of his career since the years when Hollywood came calling.

That gap, between the man who keeps being handed ghosts and the man who would rather make people laugh, runs through everything he has made. Shimizu has spent a quarter of a century as the name attached to one haunted house, and the house keeps paying the bills.

He grew up in Maebashi, in Gunma Prefecture, where he was born on 27 July 1972. As a boy he read children’s literature and invented his own stories, and he has said that seeing E.T. in the fourth grade turned a pastime into an obsession. He enrolled in the literature faculty at Kindai University, studied under the screenwriter Toshirō Ishidō, and dropped out. He then worked as crew on Kōhei Oguri’s Sleeping Man and on television dramas while taking classes at the Film School of Tokyo.

One of those classes produced the seed. For an assignment he shot a three-minute short, Katei Hōmon (Home Visit), about a teacher who calls at the house of a boy who has stopped coming to school and finds something wrong inside. He has said the idea began as a suspense story, not a horror one. On the recommendation of Kiyoshi Kurosawa he got two shorts in Kansai TV’s anthology School Ghost Story G; by his own account there was no assistant director and the budget, his fee included, was 50,000 yen. The screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi, who had taught him, introduced him to the producer Takashige Ichise, and the two of them made Ju-On: The Curse and its sequel for the video market in 2000.

Word of mouth carried those tapes into cinemas. The theatrical Ju-On: The Grudge opened in Japan in January 2003 and its sequel followed that summer, both hits. Then came the American remake, which Shimizu directed himself in Tokyo with Sarah Michelle Gellar and the backing of Sam Raimi‘s Ghost House Pictures. The Grudge opened at number one in North America in October 2004, took 39.1 million dollars in its first weekend and 187 million worldwide against a 10 million budget, and made him the first Japanese director of a live-action film to top the American box office. The Grudge 2 opened at number one there too, in 2006.

He has never pretended that the experience was smooth. On the first film, he recalled at Fantasia, he argued so hard with a producer that he told him to fire him and buy him a plane ticket home, since there was no point hiring a Japanese director if his vision would not be used. He also says he learned a great deal about how differently American audiences read fear. After the second film he stepped back to an executive producer credit on The Grudge 3 and went home.

The critical problem with that run is the obvious one. Shimizu told essentially the same haunted-house story six times, on video, in Japanese cinemas and in two American studio films, and the remakes that made him famous drew mixed reviews from mainstream critics. The Grudge 2, a number one in the United States, did not even reach the top ten in Japan. The ideas he pursued between remakes, the low-budget Marebito with Shinya Tsukamoto, Reincarnation for Ichise’s J-Horror Theater, a pair of 3D shockers, never found the same audience, and his biggest later hit came with a ready-made hook: Howling Village, built on one of Japan’s best-known urban legends, earned around 1.4 billion yen in 2020, a result the trade press credited largely to the notoriety of the place itself. It became the first of a village trilogy, followed by Suicide Forest Village and Ox-Head Village.

The detour that suits his confession best is Kiki’s Delivery Service, his 2014 live-action version of Eiko Kadono’s children’s novel, a return to the books he grew up on. It opened third in Japan in its first week. The horror kept coming anyway: Immersion, then Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear. He has also become a patron for younger directors, chairing the selection committee of the Japan Horror Film Awards and serving as general producer on Missing Child Videotape, Ryota Kondo’s feature debut, expanded from a short that won the award’s grand prize.

This year he released three features in under three months, a rhythm the Japanese press compared to his peak twenty years ago. The Mouths, adapted from a novel by Sesuji with Rihito Itagaki in his first solo live-action lead, opened on 3 July. Sana: Play with Me, with Suzuka Chinzei of FRUITS ZIPPER and Shota Sometani, followed on 24 July. On 18 September came The Village of Eight Gravestones, his take on Seishi Yokomizo’s mystery, with Shoya Onoe as the detective Kōsuke Kindaichi and Mayu Hotta in the cast, a whodunit that lets the supernatural in at the edges.

The honours arrived in the same season. Fantasia gave him its Cheval Noir career award in July, the fourth Japanese filmmaker to receive it after Takashi Miike, Mamoru Oshii and Shinsuke Sato, and screened The Village of Eight Gravestones as a world premiere. Sitges named him for its Time Machine award at its October edition, where The Mouths screened.

Next is television. Shimizu directs one of the six episodes of Night Tales Club, a Disney+ horror anthology arriving in January 2027, in which Takayuki Yamada plays a tycoon who pays in gold bullion for proof that a ghost story is true. One of the other episodes belongs to Kurosawa, the director who recommended him for his first job. The comedy is still unmade.

Featured Films

Tags: Japanese cinema, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Shimizu, The Village of Eight Gravestones, Ju-On: The Grudge, Takashige Ichise

Related People

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Takashi Miike

Hideo Nakata

Takeshi Kitano

Shinya Tsukamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto