Earlier this year The Grudge franchise returned to American theaters with the latest film in the franchise, and even though that movie earned a rare “F” CinemaScore and barely made a blip at the box office. The franchise, like any good curse, won’t stay dormant for long though. Netflix has debuted the first official trailer for their new original series Ju-On: Origins, the first television series based on the Japanese horror franchise. The original series will debut on the streaming service on July 3 of this year, and you can take a look at its first trailer in the player above!
The official synopsis for Ju-On: Origins is brief, but reads: “The legendary Japanese horror franchise that has become a smash hit worldwide gets its first drama adaptation. In the Netflix Original Series Ju-On: Origins, the story based on a truth more terrifying than fiction returns. Can the people haunted by this house escape from its curse? And what kind of grim incident occurred in this cursed house in the past?”
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Though that description does seem to have a meta-angle to its basis, with “Ju-On” the franchise even getting a shout out in the trailer itself, it’s mostly unclear how the new series will tie into the larger mythology of the feature films, or if it will at all.
Frankly the continuity of the Ju-On series is pretty complicated to explain anyway. The series began with two short films, Katasumi and 4444444444, that introduced the idea of the wicked ghost Kayako which were followed by the straight-to-video films Ju-On: The Curse and Ju-On: The Curse 2. Ju-On: The Grudge and and Ju-On: The Grudge 2 debuted in theaters some years later with connectivity between the previous movies, and would be followed by additional films Ju-On: Black Ghost & Ju-On: White Ghost (released in theaters simultaneously in 2009), Ju-On: The Beginning of the End & Ju-On: The Final Curse (films that did not have the involvement of creator Takashi Shimizu), and 2016’s Sadako vs. Kayako which pit The Grudge and The Ring franchises against each other ala Freddy vs Jason.
All of that doesn’t take into account the four American feature films based on the series. In a rare move, the creator of the original films, Takashi Shimizu, directed the first two films from Sony Pictures and producer Sam Raimi which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar. A direct-to-DVD The Grudge 3 was released in 2009, with the latest film in the series released earlier this year. That film attempted to tie itself into a loose continuity with the American films and all of the Japanese movies, though that web of connectivity seems absent from the new television series.
