Question: How exactly does the father kill the wife? I noticed when she comes down the stairs she comes out of a bloody bag. So how is she killed?
Answer: Another website states that after pushing her down, Kayako sprained her ankle and crawled down the stairs, only to realise Takeo was slowly following her from behind watching her suffer. He then snapped her neck, but she was still alive and could only make the croaking noise. It is also implied that he stabbed her multiple times afterwards, which could explain the bloody corpse.
Question: How come Karen goes into the past to see the husband kill his wife and son?
Answer: I don't think she actually went back into the past, I think it was just the house showing her what happened, or at least a type of visual echo of what happened. After all, some pretty strange stuff was happening in that house.
Question: Whenever the detective watches the surveillance tape from Susan's work, why does Kayako say "I know something about Peter"?
Answer: Because she was in love with him.
Question: Why was her face cut out in all the pictures? And why were they stuck onto the walls?
Answer: Kayako was murdered by her husband when he found out that she has romantic feelings for another man, since this would be a crime of passion driven by hatred the cutting out her face from all the photos then sinisterly pinning them to the door is another sign of his hatred. Like him removing her from the family and cause futher pain with the needles. Also to display her face would most likely be a way of shaming her further, insult to injury and all that.
Question: At the beginning of the movie, the elderly woman is being looked after in the house. How is this so when her son hasn't bought the house yet?
Chosen answer: The scenes showing her son buying the house later in the movie are flashbacks showing the viewers how they came to live there. The timeline of the movie goes back and forth several times.
Question: It is said in the movie that Japanese legend claims that when someone dies violently their spirit haunts the place where they died and kill anyone who enters that place (or something like that). Was this made up for the purpose of the movie or is this an actual Japanese legend? If so, is there a place on the Internet where I can read about the legend?
Chosen answer: A bit of both. A variation on a traditional legend. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onryou.
Question: How exactly did they make Kayako's croaking noise for the movie?
Answer: Someone - not specified so I assume a Foley artist - made the croaking noise. If you listen to the commentary Jason Behr talks about how he phoned his sister after she has seen the movie and made the croaking sound in his throat and freaked his sister out so that she wouldn't answer the phone.
Answer: According to Imdb and The Grudge Wikia, director Takashi Shimizu himself made Kayako's death rattle. Shimizu directed both the Japanese and the American version of the film.
Answer: In addition to what everyone else is saying, it's actually a remarkably easy sound to reproduce. You simply push air very slowly through the lower-back of your throat and can use muscle contractions of the tongue and throat, along with varying the speed slightly, to adjust the sound/pitch/speed.
Question: Was the spirit of Peter Kirk aware that Karen was in the same house as him? I noticed twice that when the little boy looked at her so did Peter. Karen and Peter also bumped arms when he dropped something.
Answer: No, Peter was not aware of Karen. Toshio is the only one who sees her because he is dead. Peter looks when Toshio does because he's trying to see what Toshio is looking at, but sees nothing. When Karen and Peter bump arms, he still doesn't see her even though he feels a weird feeling.
Question: Why did the man in the opening scene kill himself?
Answer: One popular theory is that Peter felt guilty for Kayako's death. The day before, he stopped by the Saeki house and discovered her and Takeo's dead bodies, right after he found Kayako's diary detailing her unrequited crush on him. Another theory is that since anyone who steps into the Saeki house dies, the curse is what drove him to suicide. Unlike her other victims, Kayako did not personally kill him, making it possible that she either still held affection for him after her death or that he killed himself before she could get to him, satisfying the curse.
Question: What is going on in the room where the professor left the little boy after he found the dead body and 'karen' goes into the room and all you hear is a thumping sound?
Answer: Its the thumping of the husband's legs against the wall from hanging himself.
Question: How does Kayako's body fall from the attic when Peter Kirk opens it, because in certain flashbacks it can bee seen that Takeo places Kayako's body in a corner of the attic?
Question: Why does the grudge seem to torture the elderly lady in the beginning and keep her alive but kill everyone else immediately?
Answer: It's not entirely accurate to say that the ghosts kill all their other victims immediately. They torment the other victims in various ways and definitely seem to drag things out with pretty much every victim. There are several opportunities where the ghosts could easily kill someone but choose to simply frighten them instead, killing them when they are at the height of their terror.
Question: Why is it that the grudge doesn't kill the old woman living in the house?
Answer: It does. They find her dead at one point.
Answer: Well, in the Japanese original (Ju-On: The Grudge), it shows that Takeo, the father, killed his wife by shoving a knife down her throat or something similar to that. When he was killing her, she tried to scream, except her scream came out all messed up (because the knife hit the vocal chords), which explains the horrible croaking noise. There's no doubt about it that it's the way she was killed in this version.