Horror films have systems. There's a scary thing, like a guy in a hockey mask or a bunch of giant ants. There's a way to provoke the scary thing, like going into the wrong house, having sex in the woods, or saying Candyman in the mirror three times. There's a manner in which the scary thing can get you, like by turning you into a bug in your dreams, stabbing you with a coat rack, or setting you on fire. There's usually something you can do to prevent the scary thing from getting you, like refusing to believe in it, chopping it into pieces, or solving its grisly murder. Ju-on wants to buck the system. At every turn, it changes, refusing to follow the rules and frustrating your attempts to figure out what is going on.

Frustrating being the operative word. I wasn't scared of this movie because I was too annoyed to be scared. It just didn't make any sense, even interal sense. As soon as the credits rolled, I turned to the zombiemaster and said "That didn't make a damn bit of sense." He pried his hands from over his eyes, his mouth still gaping in a rictus of terror. It scared the pants off him, and I felt cheated. The film's attempts to mess with my expectations, to frustrate my attempts to figure out what was going on, took me completely out of the movie.

It's best to approach the film as a series of vignettes, instead of a story, with a haunted house (usually) at the center. Five years ago, a man killed his wife and son; now, the place is occupied by a new family consisting of a young man, his wife, and his aging mother. Rika (Megumi Okina) is a young social worker assigned to check on the mother. She arrives to find the place in a shambles, the old woman nearly catatonic, and the rest of the family nowhere to be seen. She discovers Toshio (Yuya Ozeki), a young boy duct-taped into a closet with a black cat. We know he's the ghost of the murdered boy because he's blue and we can hear the scary music, but Rika doesn't figure it out until it's too late for grandma, who is killed by an amorphous black shape that resembles a woman with long, unkempt hair.

Now Rika's in danger (but why didn't she die in the house?), along with her friends, her associates, the cops who are investigating the case, and anyone else she comes in contact with. The evil isn't confined to the house. It can get you in the hospital where you work; it can get you in your apartment while you are protected by the sacred protection of covers pulled up over your head; it can come through the television and attack you at the police station. It can look like the blue kid and the crawly woman; it can look like your brother in law; it can look like the three girls from your class who went missing.

Which is exactly what turned me off. After the first few minutes, when I realized that there were no boundaries, the movie stopped working on me. I was wary, but not afraid, of every closet, door, bathtub, window, staircase, and large appliance in the film. Because writer/director Takeshi Shimizu uses repeating sequences—creaking doors, scary music, flashes of the blue kid, the crawly woman's screech that sounds like a bullfrog choking on a live chicken—I settled into the film's rhythm, and it stopped being spooky. Shimizu's attempts to hit us with a barrage of horrors became a lulling, steady stream that didn't hold any surprises until the end, when it just gets crazy for crazy's sake.

Then there's the whole issue of the titular rage. Other than the first killing, which we can imagine was done out of rage, there's just fear and terror, but not rage. The film's lengthy preface tells us that if someone is killed in an act of rage, their spirit lives on and infects others. There was some possession going on, I believe, but it never led to the possessed killing anyone, out of rage or pique or any emotion. Basically, the damage was mostly done by the blue kid and his crawly mother.

Messing with generic conventions is an admirable thing when it's done right. You can shake up an audience's expectations and create something new and original. However, it's also patently obvious when the shaking up is being done just for the sake of shaking up. I don't think that this film's fractured narrative and refusal to adhere to internal logic is a sign of Takeshi Shimizu's genius; instead, I think they are tools Shimizu has used to obscure the fact that he doesn't have anything to say. He's directed an English-language remake of this film starring Buffy—er, Sarah Michelle Gellar. After the utter travesty of The Ring, the remake of the hit Japanese film Ringu (which is one of the scariest films of all time), I am surprised that I find myself hoping that a Hollywood remake of a Japanese horror film will be better than the original.