Some thoughts on a couple of your thoughts . . .
Masterofoneinchpunch wrote:
--- spoilers below
I always hate when writers state an analogy or reference to another film and do not explain the two. The scenes most like Juon in this film include the crawling around of the “black” ghost as well as the closest scene with the slithering “black” creature (this was also somewhat reminiscent to some scenes in Ringu) and that same ghost in Juon had a broken neck just the same as in this film. The kid under the sink had the same feel as several scenes in Juon as well (though having a third party see the kid when she was having a seizure was just interesting and scary as well).
I'm not certain TWO SISTERS is necessarily riffing on the likes of JU-ON, thus I don't think an explanation on the part of the filmmakers would have been necessary. The timing of the buzz for TWO SISTERS in the U.S. -- coming as it did amid the upswing in interest in J-horror movies featuring creaky, long-haired, pasty-faced ghost girls -- could have lead the uninitiated down that path, and perhaps convince them that the tropes were relatively recent constructs that were already playing themselves out. But this kind of imagery goes way back in Asian cinema, particularly the ghost stories native to Japan and Korea. KWAIDAN could be considered an antecedent, but I doubt it was the first as much as it was the earliest many of us in the west were able to see thanks to The Criterion Collection (and where IS that Blu-ray by the way?). The broken necks, creaking bones, clicky groans and whatnot do seem to be shared among the more recent films, but I have a hard time believing one simply begat the other due to some prevailing trend at the time. I'm betting even those elements can be traced further back in Asian horror cinema history, but it's just not that easy to get ahold of all the films needed to prove it.
I posted some clips on YouTube from the 1967 Korean horror film A PUBLIC CEMETERY OF WOL-HA which illustrate certain touchstones which were already well-established even then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi5OLsVCw1M
(more relevance in related clips in the sidebar)
Don't expect to see direct copying from WOL-HA to something like TWO SISTERS (or JUON) in these clips, so much as certain imagery and the apparent ubiquity of it to the cultures as a whole (it's a creative well deep enough to have spanned the 36 years between the two pictures, and reaches beyond them in both directions). TWO SISTERS has the benefit of improved filmmaking and performance techniques to sell the shock moments to jaded contemporary audiences. Thanks to a rather narrow selection of titles from a relatively narrow period of time made available to Western viewers by European and North American distributors, I think there was created an understandable ignorance on the part of western viewers about the long history of these recurring visual motifs (in cinema, literature, art) that led to a preponderance of internet reviews and discussions wherein the phenomena is discussed as if it began, peaked and died (creatively speaking) on its home turf within a short period of time, say between 1999 and, say, 2006, once Hollywood had remade its fill. Those remakes, compounded by an increasingly similar parade of cherry-picked titles on DVD from U.S. distributors, cashed in on the "newfound" popularity of Asian ghost stories and unfairly made them seem faddish even though they were little of the sort back home. The concepts continue to infuse Korean and Japanese horror cinema even today (not to mention Thai cinema, Malaysian cinema, even the Chinese cinemas), and will continue to do so. Regardless of the varying quality of the finished films that toy with such tropes, they're part and parcel of the mythological fabric of the cultures. Westerners may decree that their time has come and gone, but I think they're viewing the concepts through an inappropriate set of filters.
As to the "third party seeing the kid" I remember making the case for her only thinking she sees the whatsit under the kitchen cupboard because of her heightened state of emotion due to the lack of her pills and the deliberately skittish nature of her character. There was even more to it than that, but damned if I can remember it all these years later, or even what forum I posted it on. Probably Koreanfilm.org, back before they lost years of forum discussions in the blink of an eye.
). So if I was to do an official review (remember these ones are done a little quicker than the one's I publish 
with those I tend to do a lot more research) I would probably take out the JUON reference (the RINGU one I would watch both scenes back to back) unless I use it to discuss trends and/or analogies.
