Writer-director Nicolas Pesce's (THE EYES OF MY MOTHER, PIERCING) upcoming reimagining of THE GRUDGE sports a killer cast which includes Lin Shaye, John Cho, Demian Bichir, and Andrea Riseborough. And today we have your first look at the film via three creepy new stills. The first comes to us from our buddies over at Bloody Disgusting and can be seen in all its bloody glory above, and the other two come to us from Entertainment Weekly and you can check those out below.
On top of that, we also have some new details on the upcoming film's plot via director Pesces who lets us know this new version takes place in America but – get this – happens at the same time as the 2004 Sarah Michelle Gellar flick. Interesting… The new plot finds Andrea Riseborough (MANDY) as a cop in a new town who comes across a seemingly-unexplainable case that leads her to a house that, in Pesce’s words, “has been grudged.”
Pesce says:
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.
He continues:
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.
He adds:
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.
THE GRUDGE is set to hit theaters on January 3, 2020.