Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) includes two scenes which feature videotape footage displayed on a monitor. The videotape footage captures a guard walking down a hallway to investigate a disturbance in a restroom. In both scenes, the camera films the monitor display, indexing the videotape footage onto analog film. On two separate occasions, the film intercuts between two people, Hitomi and Toyama, individually watching the analog film recording of the videotape footage on the monitor. 

In the first scene, Hitomi watches a delayed livestream broadcast to a surveillance monitor. The videotape footage on the monitor is the ordinary product of a video camera and videotape. The visual aesthetic of the videotape image appears to be something normal; videotape regularly presents information in the same manner as what appears on the monitor. The footage lacks spatial depth because video camera image sensors are less sensitive to short light wavelengths. This sensitivity to blue light tints the image blue, as blue wavelengths are shorter in the light spectrum and more readily detectable. Sensitivity to shorter wavelengths also reduces the image aesthetic, as more noise occurs as a result of the high-energy blue photons detected by the image sensor. Because the videotape footage in the film maintains this aesthetic and appears on a monitor, it gives the impression of surveillance footage.

In comparison to Hitomi, Toyama watches the recorded footage later in an investigation room. So, in the world of the film, Hitomi watches an image produced by a broadcast transmission, and Toyama watches images that exist on videotape. However, as noted, the film presents this videotape footage by recording a display monitor — a second layer of surveillance captured with an analog film camera. The audience looks through two cameras and two different styles of cinematography to watch the action unfold on-screen.

But Ju-On also incorporates a third media layer into its format to bring to life its star character, the ghost. The film implements computer-generated imagery (CGI), a type of visual effect created in an editing software program. CGI changes the aesthetic of a digital image by subtracting, or as in Ju-On, adding information to it that is usually impossible by practical methods. And although CGI is a tool for doctoring and rendering an entirely new digital composition, the original artifact used to record the image, in this case, videotape, remains intact and unchanged. In Ju-On, CGI is an additional component created after recording the footage of the guard on videotape. Editing software makes changes to the videotape footage digitally, and the monitor in the film displays a digital rendering of the videotape footage that includes CGI. So when analog film records the monitor display, it records a digital rendering of the videotape footage that includes CGI. This digital rendering marks the original footage in two ways. First, CGI doctors the image with distortive, shaky edits that crumple and blur pixels, creating the effect of broadcast interference. Second, it creates a black spectral image on the screen that gives the impression of an apparition. Both of these occurrences change the aesthetic of the image, and so they act upon the videotape format by means of metalepsis.

Metalepsis of media formats, the reference to one format by another related to it, sparks an interaction between the two. When one media format acts upon another, their functions combine to create a new one. For example, when analog film records images on a monitor originally recorded on videotape, as in Ju-On, the function of the analog film is to index the videotape recording. Doing so, the analog film comments on the videotape recording and leaves traces of the interaction between the two, as seen by scan-lines that appear on the analog film’s recording of the monitor. Further, some media formats depend on others in order to exist. CGI cannot function without a film or video format to composite. While the CGI in Ju-On produces distortions on top of the videotape recording, the CGI depends on the existence of the videotape recording to create this effect. Ju-On orchestrates the CGI to appear as if it interacts with the guard in the videotape footage, which gives the impression that the videotape format and the CGI digital format exist together as one media format.

The way in which CGI comments on video format is by digitally intruding on these images. Because information on the monitor behaves unnaturally due to the intrusion of CGI effects, the image produced is not regular or ordinary, but abnormal. By interrupting technologies and media formats, the CGI introduces a visual element that should not exist. Hitomi and Toyama act accordingly in the film, recognizing an abnormal occurrence when the CGI effect introduces itself. The abnormality is a product of the intrusion of CGI, and the recognition of this abnormality generates the idea of a spectral presence. CGI is the media format that enables the spectre to exist. Without the interruption of technologies, the spectre would not appear, and the videotape footage would maintain its original function of displaying only what it records rather than acting as a format for CGI to intrude upon. Thus, CGI effects make the spectre known to the characters in the film and to the audience by adding new visual elements to the videotape footage.