Ju-On: Origins

Hi, who is this? It's your killer host! My name is Parker, your resident horror fanatic. Oh, you may be surprised to hear that this week it is just me and you again. Unfortunately, we had planned on reviewing the new A24 movie Saint Maud with Julianne Marie. But that movie has unfortunately been pushed back yet again as theaters are not ready to open in the wake of the global pandemic. So I'm glad that steps are being taken to ensure our safety, but please forgive us for having two just Parker episodes in a row. I promise this one will be worth it. Welcome to What's your favorite scary movie? What's your favorite scary movie is a horror film podcast where we're on a journey to find our favorite scary movie one at a time.

Whether you hate them or love them, join us and discover yours. Spoilers ahead, so plan your movie screening every weekend before the episode release. Konichua listeners, I've been practicing saying that all day because I am so excited for today's episode. I have been absolutely obsessed with Netflix's new originals Japanese series, Juwan Origins. If you are not familiar with the Juwan franchise or the American version, The Grudge, it is a massively successful franchise that originated in Japan. We have reviewed The Grudge 2020 earlier this year on our podcast's main feed and Juwan the Grudge from the Japanese franchise on our Patreon feed. And a little surprise this week, I will be putting part of that Patreon episode in today's episode just as a little thank you for sticking with us as we have these schedule changes.

This is also our first time reviewing, or I guess my first time reviewing, because Caroline and Ian are alas not here, a television series, and I am very excited to try my hand at that. But you know, give me a little leeway, and basically I'm going to be reviewing Juan Origins as kind of a long three-hour movie because it is just six short 30-minute episodes, although it is very much constructed like a television series. More on that later. He has worked as a producer or writer on every single Juan and Grudge film, as well as producing similar franchises like Ringu and the Japanese and American versions of Dark Water. It was also co-written by Hiroshi Takahashi.

He is another maverick of J-Horror, the writer of Ringu, Ringu 2, and Ringu Zero. He also acted as a supervisor and creative consultant on the original Juan films The Curse, The Curse 2, and Juan the Grudge. Now, as we get into the performers in this series, I'm just going to list the ones that I viewed as most important because this is ultimately very much an ensemble show. There are a ton of characters and so many characters that are of importance, but I identified who I thought were the main ones. Another note for you is that a lot of the information for Juan Origins and these actors was not readily available on my American access to the internet.

So I have done so much digging and Google translating and you know rummaging through Twitters and Instagram feeds from these actors. So if you're a big fan and I screw it up and do not list what they are most popular for, I apologize, but know that many hours went into making this list. Juan Origins stars Yoshiyoshi Arakawa. He is paranormal researcher and novelist Yasuo Orojima. He stars in Fine, Totally Fine from 2008 and Memories of Matsuko from 2006. The actress who plays Haruka Hanjo is Yuina Kuroshima. Yuina is a model and Torento, which from what I can tell is a word for a celebrity famous for being famous. To me, that sounds a little bit like a Kardashian.

But she's also done lots of work as an actress, so I think maybe that's why she's famous. I couldn't really get a read on why she was famous for just being famous when she's also a pretty uh seasoned actress, from what I could tell. A young one though. But many listed on her credits page. She performed in Juan The Beginning of the Inn from 2014 and Juan the Final in 2015, as well as quite a few television shows. Cursed schoolgirl Kiyomi Kawaii was played by Ririka. She also is a performer in Blue Heaven from 2020 and the video game Yakuza Like a Dragon. Finally, Seiko Iweito plays the woman in white. She is in a film that I'm absolutely obsessed with the title of Laughing Lucky Cats from 2017 and Pure White from 2017 as well.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the critic score for Juan Origins is 78% with an average rating of 5.75 out of 10. The audience score is also 78%, and the critics' consensus is a big fat blank, and you're just gonna have to listen to me to hear what the truth is. Just a note that the Juwan franchise, as I said earlier, is insanely successful and popular and includes two short films, 13 feature films, including the four American entries, many novelizations, a video game, and now the Netflix television series. Looking around at reactions to Juan origins, it seems like the easiest and a prevailing criticism of the show is that people think it is too convoluted and too confusing. And to that I say, have you even seen the other Juwan films?

If you've watched Jewan the Grudge or Jew on the Curse, then you know that a hallmark of the series is that there are many different storylines, many different timelines all being juggled at once. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily a good thing, but I don't think you can criticize this show for being that necessarily when other versions are not that. I read a review that said that this movie lacked all of the hallmarks of a Jewan seer uh entry and was completely different in a bad way, and I just do not agree with that because I think that it shares a similar structure to many of the Juan films. But if you're one of those people who was incredibly confused with this show, which I'm not saying I was not confused, I'm just saying that you have to do a little extra work to understand it, especially because as Americans, sometimes watching something foreign it can be difficult to keep track of, you know, names and places that don't look familiar, but I got you covered.

I have slaved over writing a coherent summary of this show, um, and just a warning, it's a bit of a long one because so much freaking happens in this show. So buckle up. To start, a quote from the original movies explaining what Juwan is. Quote Juan, a curse born of a strong grudge held by someone who dies. The place of his death gathers his grudge. Anyone who comes into contact with this curse shall lose his life and a new curse is born. Now I don't know if it's something lost in translation, maybe it reads uh differently more directly from Japanese, but note for later that that uses all masculine pronouns. The actual Juan Origins show begins with a quote that says, Juan was inspired by true events.

All of these events originated from one house, however, the real events were far more frightening than the movies. So as you can tell, the whole conceit of Juan Origins is that it is straying away from the iconic characters like Kyako and Toshio from the Grudge series and is going to tell us the air quotes true events of the Grudge. In 1952, a mysterious house was the site of a heinous crime. The son of the house's landlord held the owner hostage in the home's attic and impregnated her. She managed to kill him before dying herself in childbirth, and the baby was never found. Jump forward to when the show begins in the year 1988. On a TV talk show, Huruka Hanjo plays a recording on tape of her haunting experience for paranormal researcher Yusuo Orojima, who is collecting supernatural tales for an upcoming book.

They discover that Haruka's apartment is not the thing that's haunted, but her boyfriend Tetsuya toured the Juan house, hoping to find a home that he could use after he proposed to Haruka. He breaks up with Haruka, telling her to leave him and save herself, and she soon receives news of his death. At the funeral, Tetsuya's mother reveals the permanently terrified and V dramatic face of Tetsuya's corpse and reveals that she is clairvoyant and knows Haruka knows more about Tetsuya's death than she's telling her. A man named M is listening to a spooky tape of one of Yasuo's cases in the car. Who I assumed was his daughter removes the tape because she's scared. In the first truly shocking scene of the show, he mercilessly beats the adorable child, and we learn that she is indeed not his daughter, but a hostage.

At the same time all of this is happening, Kiyomi Kawaii transfers to a new high school, apparently because her mother was having a sexual relationship with one of her teachers. We soon find out that the mother slept with the teacher because she believed he wanted to sleep with Kiyomi and accuses her daughter of being an ungrateful slut who seduced her father and forced him to leave. As you can tell, it's a pretty happy and bright show. At school, two gals named Yoshie and Mai invite Kiyomi to a house called Cat Mansion, an abandoned place where a ton of cats gather. This personally sounds like a dream come true for me, and Kiyomi's cat has recently passed, so she's into it too.

However, it is indeed not Cat Mansion, but the Juan house, where Yoshie and Mai have arranged for a young man named Yudai to meet them there and rape Kiyomi. They take pictures of her and threaten to use them as blackmail if she tattles. Mai disappears in the process and Kiyomi gets her first glimpse of our new star ghost, the woman in white. In an unsettling turn of events, Kiyomi clings to rapist Yudai and he escorts her out. Kiyomi flashes a spooky, perhaps possessed, grin at Yoshie as they go. Scared for the life of her friend Mi, Yoshie gives the photos of Kiyomi to Kiyomi and heads to a nightclub that she's heard Mi was spotted at.

She finds her ghost there and is escorted off camera to her death. Kiomi and Yudaii come home to find her mom, fucking her new teacher. She recites a note stating that she is running away and on the side accuses her mom of killing her cat. Kiyomi uses the rape photos to blackmail Yudaii into bashing her mother's head in with the phone and then plants the note and her teacher Semen from a Yude's condom on her mother before the two, Yudaii very hesitant, leave into the night. Flash forward to the year 1994. Yudaii is now a garbage man who comes home and beats his wife Kiyomi and their child that they presumably conceived in the Juan house, Toshiki.

A child protective services worker becomes involved in their case but isn't able to remove Toshiki from their care. It's now 1995, the year of Mai Parker's birth. And what a year it is according to Juan origins. Haruka visits Tetsuya's mother to hold a seance, and the only scare that actually made me jump in the series, Tetsuya's ghost points out the location of the Juan house and begs the two not to go. Haruka walks past the house and sees that a new couple have moved in. The husband, Tobohiko, is headed out for dinner while his wife stays behind. His dinner date turns out to be his mistress, Chie, who is pregnant with Nobu's baby. While they dine, Chiy's husband, Keiichi, spots them canoodling.

Nobu and Chie agree that they have to do what they have to do before the baby is born. This leads to the scene that all the press and the hype is about. So hold on to your butts because this is one of the most graphic things I've ever seen with my eyeballs on a television screen. Chie has prepared a fine meal and a delish bottle of wine for Keichi. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see him so happy about this gift from her, but her words absolutely haunt me. She says, This baby is not yours, I haven't been happy for a single second since we got married. Keiichi chugs the wine and pours another glass for his pregnant wife.

His words to her refusal are equally haunting. It's fine, all three of us can die together. Keiichi tries to force the wine on her. He vomits, presumably poisoned by the wine. She offers to help with his bane by stabbing him in the back with a chef's knife. You shouldn't be moving around so much, he pleads in his pain. She says die and stabs at his hands. He crawls away, she drops the knife, and as he grabs it, Chi cries out, Nobu, save me. Kiichi slits her throat, and we hear that iconic grudge death brattle as she smears the walls with blood. Kichi slices open her stomach and pulls out the fetus. Now she gets really crazy when Keichi staggers to the Juan house, the home of his wife's side piece.

No one is home, but we see the butchered bodies of Nobu's wife on the floor and Nobu Nobu himself hanging from the entryway rafters, poop dripping onto the floor beneath him. Keichi notices the newborn has stopped crying and buries it in the backyard. He returns home to hear the telephone ringing. The call is coming from inside the womb, and he rips the receiver out of his dead wife. The sounds of the phone ringing haunt him as he is questioned by police and then imprisoned. That knife hit knife. That night his wife's ghost visits him along with the creepiest, gooeyest fetus that crawls into his mouth and kills him. So that part's over. Back to Kiyomi, whose son Toshiki is hospitalized after Yurii cracks his skull with the telephone.

I'm noticing a theme here with phones. At the hospital, Kiyomi laments to the s the CPS worker, just when I thought I was free, this happens to my son. I'm going to redo my life, insinuating that she has been haunted and possessed by Juan this entire time. She becomes a prostitute and eventually kills her husband Yuji by injecting him with water instead of heroin and drowning him in their bathtub. She returns to the Juan house, breaking in through the window and weeps at the sight of her assault years before. The ghosts of Mai and Yoshie apologize for ruining her life, and when Kiyomi asks if she can return to high school times, they say yes and lead her off-screen to die.

While all of that is happening, researcher Yasuo gets a tip from serial killer M. He tells Yasuo of the Juan house's location and Haruka begs him not to go. They realize that if they do nothing though, someone new will move into the house and die like Haruka's fiancee Titsuya. The CPS worker tells them of a child in a coma who seems connected to the house. They search for Kiyomi, who earlier revealed that Toshiki, her child, was not Yudaii's child, but was delivered to her by the woman in white in the Juan house. They track Kiyomi down and a detective lets them into the Juan house where Yasuo discovers he actually lived there for five years when he was a child.

His mother died right after he was born. Coincidence? I think not. And through flashbacks, discovers his sister was abducted in the house by the woman in white, and his father attempted to escape Juan and combusted into smoldering Goo outside the house. Time's also super fluid in the home, so he remembers seeing Kiomi breaking the window when he was a child, and now sees her after she was assaulted when he's an adult. Final time jump. It's now 1997 and a new couple moves into the home. They will hear nothing about past hauntings, but after a pretty bumping night, call Yusuo for help. He brings Haruka and Tatsuya's clairvoyant mother to host a seance. Haruka, guarding the wife in bed, is attacked by the OG curse landlord's son and witnesses a reenactment of the original crime, but this time the wife lives and is taken to the hospital.

Her husband, however, isn't so lucky and combusts into goo when he tries to leave the property. Tatsuya's mother witnesses the true rotting corpse form of the woman in white and hears her whisper, bury together, which I personally interpret as her wanting to be reunited with her lost baby. Perhaps something that could cure the curse or solve the curse or end the curse in a future season. Afterwards, Yusuo meets with the detective from the 1995 case. He says the info about the phone in Chie's belly was never released. How did Yusuo know that for his book? He says he didn't. His books aren't exactly nonfiction. Throughout the show, Yusuo has been asked why he writes these books and he has never had an answer.

Now he says he thinks he writes them because he can feel the house. Perhaps the reason he and a realtor that we see in the series and this detective don't die is because they lead others to the Jewan house. The season ends with Haruka attempting to bury the recording she has of her haunting from 1988, and just when she thinks she's free, the ghost of the landlord's son runs up behind her and pulls her to the ground. Now, as I said at the beginning of this episode, I am absolutely in love with this series. I was a little hesitant because I've seen lots of the Jewan films. I've seen Jew on the Curse, The Curse 2, The Grudge, The Grudge 2, I've seen The American Grudge, I've seen The American Grudge 2020.

I would love to see more because actually I was quite enjoying the Japanese installments of the film. But I was a little hesitant just because the primary thought about the Jewan films is that there have been so many. They've been going on for about 20 years now, more than, and they've seen a little bit of fatigue. And so I thought going into the series, what what new things can they possibly bring to this? I was so surprised because I think that this is a very contemporary version of this story. The classic Juan films have, like I said earlier, the iconic Kayako and Toshio, who make cat noises and they're painted white or sometimes black, and the style of kabuki or Bhutto dance, which also informs the really spooky way that Kayako traditionally crawls around and chases people.

That's all kind of done away with here and in lieu of a more sleek and spooky contemporary representation of these ghosts. All of the ghosts look like real people for the most part in this show, besides at the end, when we see the woman in white's true form and she very much looks like a rotting corpse. So I thought it was a really fresh take where they didn't feel obligated to show someone crawling down the stairs with hair hanging over their face, but they still give you the gist of that feeling while you're watching it. You know, one of our big complaints about Black Christmas 2019 was just that it didn't feel like a Black Christmas film.

This redo, however, very much still feels like a Juwan film. Like I said earlier with the style of the time period and of the time lines and the character stories kind of crisscrossing and jumping around and making you think about how about what's happening and how to follow. I also love how incredibly dark this show is. All of the Juwan series films are a little bit dark. They're not like your slasher where you have a final girl. A lot of times everyone dies because that's just how it works. You know this rage has pro has lasted so long in this house it infects everybody who comes in and they can't escape it. And this show is no exception.

You know it has a couple of new rules about if you lead other people into the house maybe that will spare you but that has a pretty insidious message as well. I think that the Juan films are really interesting to look at in terms of writing and character development because a lot of times the characters come in and service the story and we don't get to know a lot about them. But I think what's so interesting and fascinating about Juan is that the main character isn't the people investigating or suffering from Juan the Curse. The main character is Juan the Curse. You know we get to know the house and the way it affects its inhabitants and the crime that inspired it so much more than we get to see the characters.

And what I think is really incredible about Juan Origins is that I also feel like I know Haruka and Kiyomi and Yasuo very well and that through seeing them operate and be selfless sometimes or very selfish other times and how they react to the Juan's effects I think that you learn a ton about them and they all seem so fleshed out and personal and I really enjoyed those characters and felt like they were characters that I would like to know in person. Well not all of them uh Haruka and Yusuo I just want to be their best friends. I want to go hang out with them. I think they seem so cool and fun and ugh call me.

The series is also I think really beautifully constructed. It's really beautiful and yes it looks very slick but it also has texture to it. There's a lot of depth to the coloring and there's a lot of style to the shots especially you know there's the episode where we see Kiyomi in her new apartment where she is you know practicing her sex work and there's a lot of beautiful colors with the light. There's a lot of purples and blues and a lot of times things are very shadowy in the seance scenes I know this isn't necessarily a new style of depicting a seance but it's very dark and you can kind of see the the warm oranges illuminating people's faces and they still give you a little bit of that discolored skin on all the ghosts just through the lighting and not necessarily through the makeup and I think that's really beautiful.

And also on the note of construction I think that the series is paced really well. Right now in quarantine my attention span is not long and these just snap right along they are 30 minutes. I love that first of all but they are absolutely jam-packed with action. Like I said earlier basically this is a three hour Juan movie but it's also not because the way the episodes are constructed they have cliffhangers and they have things that give you a little tickle in your suspense and anxiety at the ends of them where it just kept me wanting to watch the next one. I was much more willing to watch six episodes of Jewan Origins in a row than I would have been to watch a three-hour Jew on film.

So I think that lends itself really well to this type of story. That also broke up the kind of confusing time hops and character hops that were happening that so many people had problems with it gave you time to finish an episode, sit down, process, think, oh, that was this person, this person was connected to this person that way, done. And I really thought that that was an excellent use of this serial format. Now something I did not love is that this film is a little unforgiving to people who are not familiar with the Juwan movies. Of course this does not really set up what Jewan is very well. Like all the other films start with like title cards that say what the Juan curse is and here you just know that it's a haunted house.

You don't necessarily get that it's the grudge that is the haunting that's lasted at least not from what I can remember. Also this does apparently this is the air quotes true story of the Juwan movies and there are a lot of crossovers to things that happen in the first Juan movies to the events that happen in this movie. So people obviously have a lot to say about how gratuitous the violence is in this movie. And I can't disagree with that. Like I said it's one of the most violent and gory things I've ever seen. I was absolutely shocked watching episode four the first time when that huge murder massacre happened. I like my jaw was on the floor I was cringing kind of looking away at some points because it is truly revolting.

And so I'm not gonna tell you that that's not over the top and that you can't be you know upset by that. I think that everyone has their own capacity for what they can handle in a horror movie. But people who are calling for Netflix to put a warning and try and like deter people away from this, I think that's so silly because I think that there's such a rich experience around that one event that is so worth watching and I would hate for something to be done to make people hesitate before watching this. Yes if that scene starts click away go for it but I think that the entire experience of the show to me was so intriguing and stimulating.

It really got my cogs turning and thinking about themes and why these things were happening that I love that I hope more people watch this show. And also if you're thinking that crime had absolutely no place in this movie or this show, well it is that type of crime that event is so related to the events of Jew on the curse and Jew on the curse too where very similar things happen where uh a baby is removed from a womb and even I think in a more disturbing scene put in a duffel bag and like beat against walls and things so I think that it was not a completely uncalled for turn of events and I actually um and joy is not the right word but there was it was so emotional there was so much pain and heartache wrapped up not just in that but in so many of these characters my poor Kiyomi my heart just goes out to her so I was absolutely enraptured in this storyline.

I loved it. Now if you're looking for a little background on Jay Horror and where it started and what were the events leading up to the boom of the Jewan franchise here is a clip for you from our Patreon episode on Juan the Grudge Up until 1998 when Ringu was released Japanese horror had always focused solely around folklore and history because Japan has such a rich culture of mythology and legends. But then when Ringu was released in 1998 the focus of J horror shifted to include modern Japanese culture. That's why that was such like a showstopper for Japanese audiences and it became so popular and got its American remake. So immediately classical lore intertwined with the digital age and created the perfect recipe to take not just Japan but America by storm.

Ringo's a very obvious influence on Juan and these two movies created the craze in Japan that we've discussed that like Halloween created in the US in the 80s movies like Darkwater, Suicide Club, the pulse followed expanding the rich J Horror canon before inevitably falling victim to the movie Trans Fate. Exhaustion eventually those J Horror movies they just couldn't keep turning them out because people were like we've seen it quote from Koji Suzuki author of Ringill in an interview with Kategahu magazine. Quote in America and Europe most horror movies tell the story of the extermination of evil spirits. Japanese horror movies end with a suggestion that the spirit still remains at large that's because the Japanese don't regard spirits only as enemies but as beings that coexist with this world.

Yeah and even these ghosts are strongly based on folklore. So in Japan there is something called an onry a traditional Japanese onry are the malicious subsect of a larger spirit system called Yurei. Seeking reparations for their intensely emotional deaths they can enact physical damage on their victims and take their souls from their bodies in some mythologies they can even cause natural disasters. So that's already an immediate departure from what we view as like an American ghost where maybe you can like walk through them or uh like in the Conjuring or uh popular American ghost movies like you know we watch The Conjuring those ghosts don't typically do very much violent harm to the victims in those horror movies.

But in Juan I think like what 15 people died? There were a ton of deaths in that movie. And a big part of it I think is just that you know there's no way out. They will find you yeah they're gonna die there's no way to get away from it. And if you enjoyed hearing that little snippet from one of our bonus episodes on Patreon you can go hear us discuss Jew on the grudge and many other movies from this past year and classics alike at patreon.com slash scary movie pod. Of course that is a history of jay horror and I want to take a little look at how Jewan Origins fits in with Japan today.

I've done a lot of research on gender equality in Japan in 2020 and have come up with a few thoughts relating to Juan origins and how this might be a more contemporary take on Juan origins coming out or on the Juan franchise coming out in 2020 based off of these ones that were coming out in the early 2000s. The hashtag MeToMovement had a pretty slow start in Japan. According to a 2018 Washington Post article by Keori Shoji, the fight against harassment has proved difficult to rally in the country. According to a 2017 survey only 4% of assaulted women were willing to come forward with their case. Consider this in the context of Kiyomi's rape in the Juan House and her air quotes friends threats to out her and shame her by spreading the pictures of the assault.

As reported in savvy Tokyo the low rate of filing accusations isn't surprising due to traumatic and difficult police procedures as well as various legislative loopholes in defining assault. The age of consent in Japan is currently 13 years old that absolutely blew my mind Shoji, the Washington Post author blames Japan's historically intensely patriarchal culture which calls on women to be demure and pleasing to men. However in 2017 the women's rights movement gained more attention when Shiori Ito brought allegations against a prominent TV reporter to court after police refused to take action against him. Ito received public backlash against her outspokenness but continued to fight. She became one of the prominent faces of Japan's contemporary equality movement. Her case continued for two years and she only saw victory in the form of monetary reparations last December.

The slow rise of steam for Japan's Me Too movement in 2017, partly thanks to Ito's bravery caused a revision of Japan's penal code expanding the definition of rape and the minimum sentence for its perpetrators. Unfortunately there are still many aspects of this law that make accusing perpetrators difficult. However, Shoji writes that the increased attention now given to sexual harassment has added to different unhealthy workplace practices. Genders have become increasingly segregated and men continue this ooh poor me argument that they fear speaking to women in general because they might accuse them of doing something horrible. To that I say that is ridiculous and just don't harass women and you should be fucking fine. This could stand in the way of women's upward progress in an already unequal work culture in Japan.

According to a New York Times article the Japanese favor inflexible and long work hours traditionally more easily accommodated by men who are rarely expected to participate in household chores or childcare. According to a 2019 finance and development article Japan ranks 110th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2018 gender gap index the pay disparity between genders is a staggering 24.5% as of 2018. This is partially because of the Japanese job market's prioritization of youth and their preference for hiring recent graduates this directly affects the hire ability of women returning from maternity leave. In a country that values family and exerts immense pressure on women to bear children young and in high numbers the Japanese population is falling women are left in a pretty tough pickle now putting this into context a major fix of all Juan films has been domestic violence since day one.

Juan the Curse and Juan the Grudge focused on the tale of Kayako Saki and her husband Takeo's insane jealousy at her desire for another man, leading him to kill her, their son Toshio and their cat. As mentioned in the articles that I just discussed, the prevailing expectation of women in Japan seems to be submission. Men are culturally the ones allowed to be the breadwinner creating a power dynamic from the get-go. Women are expected to bear and tend to their children. I would think this is also why the franchise always revolves around pregnancies or frequently revolves around pregnancies at least. According to Kyoto News each year the number of domestic abuses reported increases and 2019 was no exception, rising by over 70 cases.

Now amidst the global pandemic Japan's cases are expected to rise. Juan Origins takes an interesting and decidedly more contemporary approach to gender. After Keichi kills his wife and removes the baby from her womb he finds the phone has replaced the child in her belly he cries out when he hears it ringing and later is killed by the spooky fetus that he killed earlier. This points to a male fear of childbearing something that I haven't seen explored in other entries where women are so connected and indebted to their children. And to me this very much contrasts the macho reasons that Takeo kills Kayako in the Juan films. This second take may be a bit of a more dicey one but women in the Juan films always seem to be the victims of the crimes and then the villains raised by the curse.

In the horrific fourth episode of Juan Origins, Chie actually seems to be the one orchestrating that crime and instead of man kills wife it becomes a battle between them although the result is actually the same so don't push me any further on that idea but do know that we see many more male ghosts present here than I've noticed in past films. Finally when examining gender politics in Juan origins I think the most interesting character is Kiyomi. The show's first OMG is the cliffhanger of episode one where she is the victim of the very dark and horrible prank her friends bring her to the house and have Yudaii rape her. This is particularly tragic considering her home life where her mother is obsessed with her sexuality with her daughter's sexuality and consistently wields it as a tool of shame and abuse against Kiyomi.

After the events at the house it seems Kiyomi is possessed or marked as a haunt of Juan, influencing her to seduce Yudaii and convince him to murder her mother. She is freed of one oppressor but then delivered straight to another because they get married and have a son and her story never sees much happiness. Also note that it's curious that she becomes a sex worker. While prostitution isn't legal in Japan, legislation is super vague and it is a booming industry in the country. After her son Toshiki is comatosed, Kiyomi uses her sexuality the thing that has plagued her life with so much suffering as her means of survival. I guess you could read that as either a way of taking back control over men or of her inability to escape the curse I have no answers.

Decide for yourself facing her death Kiyomi only wishes to return to a time of innocence before everything was taken away from her. I think that's a really beautiful metaphor for the diminishing value of women in Japan and the way in which their air quotes use is depleted as they age and have already buried their children. This idea can actually be applied to all of the women killed by Juan. The continued murder of wives by jealous or angry husbands is a sickness that the show depicts spreading throughout Japan if you think of all the TV reports of various incidents and disasters. The main ghost scene throughout the series is a mother looking for her baby and in the final episode we see her true depiction which is disgusting and decayed which mirrors the way culture might view that same character.

So this was a bit of a bummer episode but maybe let's take a turn and discuss something a little more fun which is what is my most memorable murder actually when I say it out loud that does not sound fun but the answer has to be keichi because when he is in that prison cell and he turns around and sees that spooky fetus eating his dinner and then crawling up his leg, opening his mouth and crawling in absolutely revolting and that whole sequence from the moment that his wife pours the wine to then is absolutely burned into my brain I can never see it. I think that it's a little bit of like a cinematic masterpiece.

I think it's pretty incredible the way that they pull that off and just barely straddle that line of too much or not and I don't think it is I think that that is a masterfully constructed horror sequence that really, really disturbed me. On a scary scale one to five that's a really tough question because I want to give it a five and say that this was one of the more disturbing and like emotionally distressing things that I've ever seen but since there's not a lot of like jumping and scaring and hiding my face I'm gonna give it a four. This is an extremely disturbing show it is not for the faint of heart it is not for the queasy stomach.

So take that into consideration it's a four from me. As you might be able to tell from the way I've discussed this show in a game of smash or slash I would 1528 billion bajillion percent give Juan Origins a smash. I thought that this was such an exciting way to revisit the Juan franchise yes we miss Kayako yes we miss her crawling down the stairs but we get the hallmarks of the structure and even the death sound in the best places like when Chie was murdered or we hear Tetsuya kind of give a similar sound from one of his ghosts. I think that they hit all the right notes to make it Juan but still give us something new and fresh that I actually want to see more of.

I know there have been 13 movies but I want a season two of this show and that's so exciting to me. Bum bum ba big news Jewan Origins is now my favorite scary movie. Yes Candyman is incredible but I picked Jew on Origins because I am so excited to see where this show might go in the future. Next time on what's your favorite scary movie it is actually the season two finale yes just like last year we are taking the months of August and September off but don't worry because we have plenty of goods to spill next week when Caroline and Ian rejoin me to discuss Piranha 3D for a nice summer romp. So go ahead and check that movie out and join us next time for all the tea you can head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and a review while you're waiting.

That would be extremely helpful to help us spread the word of what makes what's your favorite scary movie so fun. And if you want to join the what's your favorite scary movie community and be able to have more open dialogue with us, catch up on some past entries in the Patreon feed and even get a very special August newsletter from us you can head on over to patreon.com slash scary movie pod to subscribe to all that great bonus content. My name is Parker Heron you can find me on Instagram Twitter and letterbox at ParkerDelray and like I mentioned you can find what's your favorite scary movie on Patreon at patreon.com slash scary movie pod. You can find all of our news on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at ScarymoviePod.

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