The Saeki Murders and Peter Kirk
(Note: These events happen three years prior to the events in the film and several events portrayed in this section are shown in the director's cut, but parts of it are in the regular version.)
Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji), a young Japanese woman, is unhappily married to Takeo Saeki (Takashi Matsuyama). Kayako becomes obsessed with Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), an American college professor working in Japan. She chronicles her fantasies about the man she does not know in a diary. She follows him and sends him love letters. One night Kayako returns home and enters their bedroom at the end of the hall upstairs. She finds her husband reading her diary. His face is intense with fury as he bites his nails and flips through the pages. He glares at her and drops the journal on the ground. Takeo walks towards Kayako, cracking his knuckles. He charges; ripping her clothes and shoving her into the wall. She tries to struggle free and screams. Takeo shoves her to the floor, banging the walls while yelling and screaming. Kayako crawls down the stairs, but Takeo catches her at the bottom and snaps her neck to a 90 degree angle. She makes a croaking noise in an eerie death rattle that will become the notification of her ghost throughout the film. Takeo looks up to see their eight-year-old son, Toshio (Yuya Ozeki), at the top of the stairs; a witness to the murder. Takeo leaves Kayako dying on the floor, to drag Toshio into the bathroom and drowns him in the bathtub. Takeo also slits Toshio's cat's throat and tosses the carcass on the floor of the bathroom. He wraps Kayako's body in plastic trash bags and places the dying corpse far in the corner of the attic. He puts Toshio's body in his bedroom closet and tapes it shut, and then Takeo hangs himself.
Peter Kirk comes to the Saeki residence the next day with one of Kayako's love letters in hand. He sees Toshio's hands hanging out of the bathroom window, bruised and scratched. Peter goes inside and decides to stay with the boy until the parents return. He calls his wife to tell her while Toshio sits on the floor in his room, coloring. It is the same room where Takeo hung himself, but his body has disappeared.
Peter looks through the rest of the house, entering Takeo and Kayako's bedroom in back where he finds several family photos in a pile on the floor. Kayako's face has been torn out of every one of them. He finds Kayako's diary and thumbs through it, learning more about Kayako's obsession with him. The closet door catches his eye and, upon inspecting it, he finds the cut-outs of Kayako's face nailed all over the door and smeared with blood. He notices buzzing flies and opens the door. Kayako's lifeless body falls out from the attic and lands on the closet shelf. Peter recoils in horror after seeing his own reflection in her dead eyes. He runs into the hall and hears thumping noises coming from Toshio's room. He opens the door and sees Takeo hanging in not a noose, but Kayako's hair stringing down from the ceiling. His feet are swinging and banging against the wall due to a ghostly blue Toshio pushing them. Peter runs from the house. The next morning, in front of his wife, Maria (Rosa Blasi), he commits suicide by jumping off the balcony just outside his apartment bedroom.
[edit] The Williams Family
Matthew Williams (William Mapother), his wife, Jennifer (Clea DuVall), and ailing mother, Emma (Grace Zabriskie) move to Tokyo as a result of Matthew's promotion. His sister, Susan (KaDee Strickland), also lives in Tokyo and helps them find a home. Matthew and Jennifer decide on a suburban house despite Emma's strange reactions to the place. Emma's health and condition deteriorate rapidly following the move. Jennifer becomes disenchanted with life in Japan as she cannot sleep during (what she assumes to be) Emma's restless stirrings, cannot speak the language, and has gotten lost once on a walk. Matthew assures her things will improve and that if they don't, the family will return to the United States.
Jennifer falls asleep on a couch in the living room, after having eaten a bowl of ramen noodle soup, which she left on the table. The sound of the bowl hitting the floor wakes her. She scolds Emma for making the mess, but then sees a trail of wet footprints leading out to the hall. A cat leads her upstairs into their bedroom (Toshio's former bedroom). The door closes behind her.
Matthew returns from work and finds the house in complete disarray with trash strewn everywhere. He calls out to his wife, who doesn't answer. He finally finds her on their bed, unable to move or speak and struggling to breathe. Before he can call an ambulance, he is startled by the sudden appearance of a young boy making cat sounds. He backs up against the closet as something drops from above inside it, and Toshio appears overhead of Matthew.
Matthew's sister, Susan, is preparing to leave the office. She has made many unsuccessful attempts to contact her family and is growing concerned (This takes place while Karen Davis is in the house with Emma for the first time). She hears moaning sounds (the death rattle) in the hallway, so she quickly exits to the stairs. Her phone rings; the caller ID indicating Matthew. When she answers, the terrible death rattle is all that greets her. The stairwell lights flicker and shatter one by one, coming from the top down as well as the bottom up. Susan looks over the railing to see Kayako's ghost crawling jerkily up the stairs. Susan rushes out, but something grabs her phone accessory. It snaps off before she can shut the door. Susan flees to the security office, struggling with her panic and the language barrier to ask for help. Susan watches the monitor as the security guard investigates, moving farther away and past the area. Kayako's black ghost materializes in the hallway and walks toward the security camera. Susan runs from the building.
Susan takes a taxi cab back to her apartment. She enters an elevator, and it ascends several floors. She does not notice Toshio who appears on every floor, watching her through the elevator glass. Toshio is not on the floor of her apartment. Susan makes it safely inside when her phone rings. It is Matthew claiming to have forgotten her apartment number and asking to be buzzed inside. She tells him where to find her and activates the buzzer with the phone. Before she can hang up, the doorbell rings immediately. Thinking Matthew couldn't possibly have had time to arrive, she checks the peephole of the door. It is Matthew, so Susan thinks he's been pranking her. She angrily throws open the door, but no one is there. The death rattle sounds loudly through the phone in Susan's hand. She throws it to the ground, ejecting the batteries, but the sound still comes. Cowering in bed, Susan reaches beneath the covers and pulls out the rabbit's foot phone charm from her phone and drops it in fear. A lump billows from underneath the covers and moves toward Susan. She lifts the sheets and finds herself staring into the face of Kayako's ghost. It yanks her under the covers, and the sheets fall flat upon the now empty bed.
[edit] The Social Workers
(The events in this section are shown throughout the film, though they take place in time shortly after the Williams move in to the house.)
Yoko (Yoko Maki) is a girl whose work is taking care of Emma and cleaning the house. Yoko takes the phone and talks to a friend. She goes to a room and takes balls of paper when she hears noises from the ceiling. She is new to this house so she didn't know where these strange noises were coming from. She opened a closet and saw an attic door. She opens it and her hands get dusty because the attic was dirty. Yoko reaches into her apron and grabs a lighter. She lights up the light and climbs up into the attic. Then she sees something to her left. When she turns around she sees Kayako. Kayako rips her jaw off which kills her ( although it isn´t actually seen at the time : we only see her legs being pulled inside the attic).
When Yoko does not show for work the next day, her boss Alex (Ted Raimi), asks Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) to cover for her. Karen enters and finds Emma on the floor of her bed area in a catatonic state. Karen cleans her and makes her comfortable before cleaning the house, which is filthy again. When she enters the upstairs bedroom (Toshio's), she finds a closet that's been taped shut and sounds coming from within. She is shocked to find a Japanese boy and a cat inside. Karen immediately calls her boss. When she finishes the call, she looks up to see the boy at the top of the stairs. She asks his name. "Toshio," he says, in a toneless, eerie voice. Emma begins stirring and muttering in the other room. As Karen calms her, a dark shadow of hair emerges from a corner of the room, terrifying Emma. Karen looks up to see Kayako reaching for Emma. Karen draws Kayako's attention. Kayako's hair, which was covering her face, flies back to reveal the whites of her eyes. The irises roll into place and focus on Karen as she backs away in fright.
Alex finally arrives to find Emma dead and Karen in a state of shock. Karen is taken to the hospital while detectives question Alex. Detective Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi) asks Alex about the people that lived there, and tell him that Yoko has been missing from work. The detectives notice that the phone handset is missing from the cradle and push the page button. They trace the sounds to the attic where they discover the corpses of Matthew and his wife. They also make the grisly discovery of a jaw (Yoko's) and wonder to who it belongs and where the rest of the body might be. Later in the movie, Yoko is spotted again by Alex as she is shuffling down the stairs of the caretaking facility at which Alex works. Alex calls out repeatedly to Yoko, who does not answer in any way until she reaches the bottom of the stairs. She then turns around to reveal her face, now horribly disfigured by the absence of her jaw and nothing to support her tongue hanging out of her mouth.
Karen tells her story to detectives at the hospital, emphasizing the appearance of a boy. She is constantly tormented by Kayako, in her shower, on a bus, etc. In the days following her experience in the house. She researches the house and learns of the murders.
Detective Nakagawa becomes convinced that the rash of deaths and missing people is connected to the house when he views the entire security video taken at the workplace of Susan. He watches as Kayako proceeds down the hall, then to come face to face with the camera, issuing her famous death rattle as the video fuzzes out. He then returns to the Saeki house with two cans of gasoline, intent on burning it down. He is distracted by sounds of Toshio drowning in the bath tub. He enters and finds a boy, and tries to revive him. His eyes snap open, and Takeo appears behind him. He shoves Nakagawa into the tub and drowns him like Toshio.
Karen questions Peter Kirk's wife who does not appear to know anything about the house, its occupants, or why her husband killed himself (This scene is also extended in the director's cut). She allows Karen to search through old photos. Karen discovers a living Kayako in the background of every photograph, clearly following the couple. Karen returns to the house after learning that her boyfriend, Doug (Jason Behr), has gone there looking for her.
Inside the house, Karen experiences a flashback of Peter Kirk's visit. She watches him, reliving the experience with him finding the body of Kayako and leaving the home. Karen flees downstairs. Doug grabs her ankle before she leaves. He is incapacitated and she tries to drag him to the door (here is another shot only in the director's cut showing Takeo slitting the cat's throat, drowning Toshio and putting Kayako in the attic). A door opens upstairs. Kayako's ghost crawls down the stairs toward them and Doug dies in the same way Jennifer Williams did. Karen opens the door, but Kayako's ghost is suddenly there. She slams the door and kicks over one of the gas cans. She takes Doug's lighter and tosses it onto the gas as Doug suddenly becomes Kayoko. The screen goes white (in the director's cut, there are shots of Karen being put into an ambulance van).
At the hospital, Karen learns that the house was saved from burning and mourns Doug's dead body. Suddenly, Kayako's arm comes from beneath the sheet that covers him, and then Kayako appears again behind Karen.
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