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A while back I decided to watch every single Ju-On movie. I am generally a pretty big fan of j-horror movies. I think horror movies generally reflect the things that a culture is afraid of at any given moment and this is very obvious in American horror. American horror movies are almost always about people invading on the spaces of ghosts or unhinged madmen indiscriminantly murdering people (mostly women). It's pretty clear that us Americans have a dark, bloody history with the land we occupy, and though I doubt horror directors are thinking about that, it's something which haunts our cultural subconscious. The killers angle is probably just because American's are so often taught that crime and murder are these random indiscriminant acts. Probably copaganda at the end of the day. Anyways Japan seems to be afraid of emails, videos and curses. The Ju-On series is about a house with a curese (important distinction! in American horror it's always the home of the spirit, but in Japan the spirit is the settler).

More or less, the story of Ju-On is the same in each movie and is as follows: Kayako and her husband Takeo move into a house together to start a life. Kayako eventually has a baby, Toshio, and her husband absolutely loses his mind because he's convinced that Toshio is not his kid. The curse of the house is his "rage" and it's clear that it completely absorbs the family before he eventually brutally murders his wife and kid, stuffing Kayako in the attic and Toshio in their bedroom closet. He vanishes (though it's actually unclear what happens here) but the curse of his rage lives on in the house since they all died with it. Now everyone entering the house more or less relives the fear that Kayako and Toshio experienced before they died, often eventually leading to them dying as well, often continuing the curse. These continued curses are very common in j-horror (obviously Ringu, being the biggest one)

Here's a list of the movies:
Ju-On: The Curse (2000)
Ju-On: The Curse 2 (2000)
Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003)
Ju-On: Black Ghost (2009)
Ju-On: White Ghost (2009)
Ju-On: The Beginning of the End (2014)
Ju-On: The Final Curse (2015)

Full transparency: I haven't seen any of the American remakes of this. I think with my hypothesis in the beginning, it would be interesting to see that angle but idk I find it kind of racist that these movies needed to be remade with white people (see the American Godzilla for a very blatant example of this).

Anyways these are pretty good. I love the first two "Curse" movies. They don't get really any recognition because they were made-for-tv movies but they're awesome, short and great companions to the Grudge when it eventually came out. After that almost every movie is identical. They all follow a non-linear plotline of people entering the home, only to lose their minds and eventually succumb to the curse. Many of them try to tackle the original story like The Beginning of the End but none of it is particularly interesting backstory (exception being The Curse series which rule).

My highlights would be The Curse series, the first Ju-On, White Ghost (at one point there's a fucking terrifying old woman ghost who holds a basketball, actually scared the living hell out of me but its funny too). Okay doubling down on White Ghost - that movie was actually quite different than the others in this list while still keeping the same core which makes Ju-On great. Hightly recommend. I also liked The Beginning of the End. It's funny because Kayako (the iconic woman who curses the house) is VERY scary in this one, but only when she's not acting like a monster. But oh my god when she's just in the house she's scary as fuck. Her journal is great too.