10 Best Horror Movie Crossovers

The concept of this crossover began as a fake April Fool’s Day joke trailer on the Ju-On website in 2015, but then became a reality, released in Japan in 2016 and on the steaming, service Shudder a year later.

The film had a wonderful viral marketing campaign, including Kayako and Toshio’s Instagram page and Sadako and Kayako facing off in a Japanese baseball match!

The premise essentially tells a Ring film in parallel with a Ju-On/Grudge film. Two college students find and watch the cursed VCR in a thrift store after they had coincidentally just had a lesson on Sadako in their Urban Legends class.

At the same time a high school student goes exploring in the abandoned Saeki house and becomes the target of Kayako and Toshio. An exorcist and a psychic find out about the two stories and come up with a plan to pit the two horror legends against each other to end both curses for good.

The film takes the best elements of each franchise, with the blend of science and religion from the Ring and the use of foreground and background characters and sounds in Ju-On. It is beautifully shot and has some good performances and spooky music. The stakes are raised when one of the students uploads a copy of the video to the web, raising the number of potential victims.

The final fight takes a while to get to, but is instigated by watching the video tape in the cursed house. There are some especially good effects here, including Sadako dragging Toshio into the television and then making Kayako’s head explode by inserting her hair into her eyes and mouth. One of the students is used to lure the monsters to the well and they rush together, blending into a horrible deformed mass before being dragged in.

The film ends on a cliffhanger as the combined Kayako / Sadako (now looking a bit more normal) crawls out of the well and then the video is shown with the combined ghost staggering towards the screen.