Whether you love or hate the JU-ON / THE GRUDGE franchise, the person responsible for it is Takashi Shimizu. The concept for the series came from his mind, and he started it off with a couple short films before going on to direct the first six feature films in the franchise: the shot-on-video JU-ON: THE CURSE and JU-ON: THE CURSE 2, the bigger sequels JU-ON: THE GRUDGE and JU-ON: THE GRUDGE 2, the American remake THE GRUDGE, and the remake's sequel THE GRUDGE 2. Shimizu then stepped back into a producer role as of THE GRUDGE 3, JU-ON: BLACK GHOST, and JU-ON: WHITE GHOST.
Now it's been a while since Shimizu was involved with a JU-ON / THE GRUDGE film at all. JU-ON: THE BEGINNING OF THE END, JU-ON: THE FINAL CURSE, and SADAKO VS. KAYAKO were all made without his involvement, and he hasn't been involved with the making of director Nicolas Pesce's new American version of THE GRUDGE, either.
Pesce's film is heading toward a January 3, 2020 release date, and has just earned an R rating from the MPAA for
disturbing violence and bloody images, terror and some language.
Pesce has said his take on THE GRUDGE is
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."
Lin Shaye, John Cho, Demian Bichir, and Andrea Riseborough star.
Recently io9 was able to ask Pesce about Shimizu's lack of involvement with his film, and Pesce responded that
I came to this movie because I love his early iterations of this movie, and I think what he started when he was just shooting on MiniDV and VHS tape was magical, and I think that Shimizu is not absent from this movie by any means. I come to filmmaking first and foremost as a fan, and my movies are always sort of love letters to work that I love, and if you’re a fan of his original Japanese films in this franchise, you’re gonna see a lot of that and him in here. I tried as much as possible to do my own thing with it and do something new, but have all those touchstones that he made uniquely Grudge, and keep that in the film and keep that in my heart throughout the whole time making it."
Pesce said he was especially inspired by the low production value of Shimizu's earliest JU-ON films, as
it adds this realism to it that I think that — more than anything — is what we were trying to achieve with this, make it much more grounded, much more emotionally real, and hopefully, as a result, scarier."
We'll see how well Pesce did at crafting a new version of THE GRUDGE without Shimizu's guidance when the film reaches theatres in less than three months.