The Grudge Reboot Snags R Rating

A little over 15 years ago, the Japanese horror hit The Grudge was rebooted for English audiences with Sarah Michelle Gellar in the lead role. That franchise may have spun out a bit but the property isn’t staying dead for very long. The Grudge is being resurrected once again in early 2020, this time with Nicolas Pesce directing. The new take on the story will bring the entire Grudge franchise to America and feature a different version of the antagonistic spirit than we’ve seen in the past. That said, perhaps one of the biggest changes coming to The Grudge with this reboot its the film’s rating itself.

It was confirmed this week that The Grudge was going to be rated R, stepping things up from the PG-13 rating of the previous reboot franchise. This will allow for a much darker, more disturbing version of the story, provided that the creative team is able to do something fresh.

According to Exhibitor Relations, The Grudge has been rated R for disturbing violence and bloody images, terror and some language.

This take on The Grudge will look different than those in the past, but the ability to change things up is what makes the franchise so memorable, at least in the eyes of its new director.

“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,” Pesce said in an interview earlier this year. “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.”

“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,” he added. “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 arrives in theaters on January 3, 2020.