Everyone keeps missing these things with “Ju-On: Origins” and it’s driving me nuts. (Spoilers)
I like listening to people’s thoughts on things I’ve just watched, like watching and listening to reviews. But with “Ju-On: Origins”, I’m pulling my hair because people keep missing a few things that are blatantly told to you in the story series. If you want a breakdown of the timeline, go here. If you want a better explanation, this is also great.
The movie is based on true events and they are worse than the movies.
Obviously, these events are mostly fictitious (and I’ll get into why mostly), but the basis of the series is that the storyline with Haruka and Yasou is the “true” events that the opening scene is referring to. The whole season is the “true events” going on here which inspired the creation of the “Ju-On” franchise. I don’t know why people keep missing that (looking at you Highly Suspect Reviews).
But the news stories that flicker on in the background are based on true events. One being the Om Shinrikyo subway Sarin attacks and the murder of Junko Furuta. They could be in the series more or less to help establish the timeline to Japanese viewers, but if you’re not familiar with the cases or you don’t live in Japan, that makes sense that you wouldn’t hear from them.
Yasuo and his history with the house.
Yasuo’s work in paranormal investigation and writing collections of ghost stories draws from his experiences to come to terms with his awful childhood, which, by the way, he can only recall certain things. He and his older sister (I speculate) are the first ones to encounter the Lady in White’s curse. When he first meets Haruka, he has no clue that her paranormal experience is tied to his childhood home. As he starts to collect Haruka’s story, he discovers a pattern that correlates a single haunted location. When he finds out where this house is located, he then realizes that this is the house where he grew up in and all the strange occurrences in his life have taken place. He joins up with Haruka to find out what happened, part of it to make sense of what happened to his family.
He is not targeted by the curse of the Lady in White because he has unintentionally and unknowingly brought people to this house and keeps the story of the house and it’s main spirit going. It’s an on-going them in the Ju-On franchise that the vengeful spirit won’t stop and will continue her vengeful loop because of how she was treated and murdered in her life. Yasuo isn’t the only one untouched. When he speaks to the realtor that sold the house to his father, even the realtor laments how he was untouched by the curse, stating that he was spared so that he would keep bringing people back to the house.
Time is meaningless in this house and to the spirits.
This is also an ongoing theme inside of the house (and seems to be that way in other media involving ghosts in Japan, like “Fatal Frame”) that time will overlap. The spirits in this house have the ability to repeat the same scenarios over and over, like a residual haunting. It’s the spirits’ way of telling the living why these things keep happening and why they’re angry. Like Kimikiyo for example continues to be the prime victim of the timeline overlapping.
The Lady in White and her baby.
The Lady in White takes Kayako Saeki’s place as the main antagonist, big bad ghost in the series. Before Yasuo’s family moved in, the landlord’s son kidnapped her, held her captive in the attic, and raped her several times. Eventually, the Lady in White becomes pregnant with his child. I’m thinking because of her later appearance that she died of malnutrition or was murdered by the landlord’s son. Either way, she was able to connect with Yasuo and his older sister when they climbed up the attack and found her spirit. Yasuo brings her baby down (she’s constantly appears to people with her baby for a reason). Before he can do anything, it’s Kimikiyo that breaks into Yasuo’s home and steals the baby.
I think when Kimikiyo crawls into the closet that’s connected to the attic and she encounters the ghost, the ghost picks Kimikiyo to take her infant, and in a sense, Kimikiyo becomes corrupted by the Lady in White, which explains her bizarre behavior after her own rape. Maybe the Lady in White took pity on her in a way, because of their shared experience.
After Kimikiyo is separated from her husband, she confirms to him that their son, Toshie, isn’t his child. She tells Yasudo that Toshie was given to her -- but if memory serves right, she didn’t tell him who or were this exchange happened. But Toshie is, indeed, the Lady in White’s baby. Whether or not he works alongside his mother the same way Toshio works with Kayako is unclear. But it’s obvious that Toshie has a supernatural ability in some way, telling people to run away.
Kayako isn’t in the show because... well. This isn’t about Kayako.
And going back to this, I’ve heard people talk about this on reviews, wondering when she’s going to appear. The Lady in White, in a sense, is the new Kayako. Her story inspired the creator of Ju-On to make these movies, as the opening scene states. All we know about the Lady in White is that she was hold against her will, became pregnant from a rape, was abused and starved, and died a horrible way. And is the opening credits state, the true events and this ghost are far worse than the movies involving Kayako.
The cursed characters have been in the house.
Pretty self-explanatory and something that, surprisingly is missed with a lot of reviewers. All of these characters (with the exception of Kimikiyo’s mom, I remember so far) have been inside the house, which dooms and/or corrupts them to commit similar crimes or pushes them to do more heinous things. That’s been a constant theme in the Ju-On franchise, and that’s also been a thing in the 2020 “The Grudge” movie.
But if you’re not familiar with the series, here’s some core things to remember that are infuriating or weird to some, but pretty normal in the Ju-On franchise.
1. Going inside this house will doom you to a horrible fate. Death doesn’t have to be immediate, you’re damned the moment you walk in. Either you become the murderer or the victim.
2. Time overlaps inside the house and is meaningless. Events repeat themselves to the living, it’s a residual haunting.
3. The curse isn’t limitless to the house. Other people can die as a result in the house and they, too, can become like Kayako or the Lady in White, a vengeful spirit that can carry over the curse into a different place. You see that a lot in the Ju-On sequels, The Grudge sequels, and the 2020 version.
4. The curse doesn’t always have to kill someone. With Yasuo or Detective Namakura, if you haven’t died, you serve as a catalyst of the sort to continue the curse.
5. Women in white are a constant theme in Japanese folklore and isn’t limited to Ju-On or Ringu. When they buried their dead, the Japanese put them in white kimonos, with their hair down. So, if you’re watching J-Horror and wondering why this is a thing... this is why it’s a thing.
And the kimonos were even folded a certain way in funerary practices. I learned this when I was researching A Fatal Frame 2 cosplay years ago; I think it’s really cool that the main antagonist of Fatal Frame 2, a human sacrifice, was dressed in a funerary kimono.
I don’t know if this will meaning anything to anyone, but hey.
I think that people aren’t paying attention (which I get with subtitles) are missing things. After listening to one podcast’s review of it, I just wanted to dump this out online since I was trying my best not to scream in my apartment at the podcast people that, hey, you missed a LOT of things that were told to you.
