Shutter

10/5/2014

A heavy burden. American remakes of Asian horror films have mostly struggled to win grace and favour with horror fans. Shutter is no exception, it has been met with the usual howls of derision, claims of it being pointless, loosing the horror essence of the original and etc. But what for someone like me who hasn’t seen the original? I found Shutter to be much like how I found The Ring, the Naomi Watts starrer from 2002, a very effective chiller with a solid mystery to be unravelled at the core. The ghost is creepy – as are the various photographic links, the scares handled professionally by the makers, and the finale pays off with a startlingly chilling revelation that freaked me out; and I’m a middle aged man! It’s far from perfect, the pace is a bit haphazard, logic goes out the

1/16/2020

Shutter takes Polaroid remnants of the original without the stunning flash. This is a peculiar remake. During the towering heights of Hollywood westernising world-renowned Asian horrors, mostly from Japan and South Korea, Japanese director Ochiai opted to alter the story of Thailand’s arguably most famous eponymous horror with American actors, set in Japan. Western audiences apparently wouldn’t be spooked if the ghost haunting the main characters wasn’t a pasty white Japanese girl with luscious black hair and masses amount of eye liner. It’s a cluster of cultures, and whilst the end result isn’t exactly terrible, it’s far from being tolerably good. Because much like ‘The Grudge’, ‘One Missed Call’ and ‘Pulse’, the underlying sense of pointlessness becomes an overburden for everyone involve