What do we want out of a Halloween movie?

That, dear Hamlet, is the real question. Do we want cheap thrills or creepy ambiance? Psycho killers or monsters? Do we want to be scared while in the theater or for hours after we've left?

To answer this puzzle, I decided to look up the movies that have come out in theaters around Halloween weekend for the past few years.

As it turns out, most of these entries were movies like House on Haunted Hill (1999), Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) and Thirteen Ghosts (2001).

So what am I looking for in a Halloween movie? Really, just anything better than those would suffice. Does The Grudge pass this litmus test? Yeah, but not by much.

The film is actually a remake of a 2003 Japanese movie of the same name and, amazingly, the same director, Takashi Shimizu.

So really, it isn't a "remake" as much as it's a do-over on Shimizu's part. I couldn't tell you if he got it right the first or second time, because I haven't seen the original, but I think I can still safely say that the American remake wasn't entirely necessary.

Both films are based on a Japanese proverb, which says that if someone dies in a state of extreme rage, that rage will permanently imprint itself on the place of death.

The manifestations of this rage are the tattered bodies of the dead who are not only angry but blue. Why blue?

Because, duh, in horror movies, blue skin equals scary. Haven't you seen The Ring? Wait, what am I
saying? Of course you have. Everybody saw it, because no studio would have approved remaking a gruesome Japanese horror flick without the out-of-nowhere success of that film, itself a rehash of the Japanese horror film Ringu.

Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Sarah Michelle Gellar-in-Tokyo for the purposes of The Grudge, and Jason Behr plays her handsome, if slightly aloof, boyfriend.

Sarah's problem is that, while on duty as a traveling nurse, she stumbles upon a house where the previously mentioned rage curse lingers. This doesn't mean that she herself becomes enraged by the curse a la 28 Days Later.

It just means that angry, blue-skinned ghosts with bad spectral hygiene bother her all of the time by popping up in embarrassing situations.

Other characters are connected to this rage-house, too, including Bill Pullman (Independence Day, Sleepless in Seattle), who is an odd choice, since the actor's other roles have veered less toward rage and more toward the schmaltz area of the emotive spectrum.

What's good about The Grudge has less to do with what it is than what it isn't.

Shimizu has made a rather bold decision to eschew typical American horror movie subplots, be they romantic, pop cultural or comic relief, and replaced them with straight horror, no chaser.

Pretty much everything that happens in the movie is either creepy or serves the functional purpose of leading to more creepiness.

This sounds a little better than it ultimately is, however, because the director unfortunately does not have enough versatility in his horror.

The various kill scenes progress almost exactly the same as one another, leading eventually to a feeling of tediousness, out of which even its more shocking images can't jolt it.

By the end of The Grudge, you're not so much scared as you are disoriented and moody ... kind of like you were after watching that Blair Witch sequel, actually.

Which leads me back to my original dilemma. Why is it we can't see good horror movies in movie theaters on Halloween?

I'm personally holding out hope that Saw reverses that trend this weekend, but I think I'll rent Rosemary's Baby or something just to be safe, er, not safe.