Okay, I think I've got it. The vengeful ghost in The Grudge 2 is a yūrei — definitely. Telltale signs are the long black hair that hangs disheveled, and the dangling; you know, the twisting, floating, sort of lopsided walk most J-Horror apparitions do when staring you down, or just before they ring your neck into a pretzel.
And the wide-eyed, gray-skinned ghosts definitely haunt a particular place. No, wait a minute. They tend to leave the house a lot, even in The Grudge, and in this sequel they've hopped all the way over to Chicago. So they are now haunting at least two places at once. There's nothing about yūrei haunting two places at once. Damn. And what's with that little gray boy that meows like a cat, and the cat that doesn't meow at all? Damn again.
The Grudge 2 starts out promisingly enough. It's a bit confusing at first, as director Takashi Shimizu weaves his continuing tale of blind rage and death between three plotlines: three school girls in Japan dumb enough to go into that house, Aubrey Davis (Amber Tamblyn) traveling to Japan to find out why her sister (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is accused of murder and arson, and a romantic relationship in Chicago that escalates into darkness, as witnessed by a frightened young boy.
The opening breakfast scene jars you to attention, and before you can say "We should have gone to IHOP," we cut to Japan, and three school girls; one Japanese, two American, and all three heading for a major bad hair day. The tall, not-so-hip Allison tags along as they enter the haunted house where it all started. On a dare, she enters the closet. Yes, that infamous closet. Shimizu does a good job of building this claustrophobic scene to it's expected climax with real scares. Closets can be very scary, whether you are hiding in them, or hoping nothing pops out of them. And the way you can never find things in closets — yeah, they reek of evil, pure and simple.
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