The movie starts out as a classic haunted house yarn exploring the conventions of horror cinema. Writer/director Takashi Shimizu shakes things up when he plays with the sequencing of events, a technique popularised by Quentin Tarantino. When social worker Rika Nishina checks up on a family, she discovers a distraught old woman, a child named Toshio inside a closet duct-taped closed and a curse that touches all around her. The family of ghosts and their house are the main characters in Ju-On, and the series of vignettes slowly reveal the mysteries behind them.