What a view | Ju-On: Origins – Netflix show tells the horrifying backstory to Japanese fright fest franchise

Haunted houses can seldom have been so injurious to health as the suburban fun palace that stars in Ju-On: Origins (Netflix).

As implied, the six-part series tells the backstory that underpins all those franchised Ju-On films – specifically how the notorious Tokyo residence first affected those tainted by it, even if only by association, in different, wildly destructive ways. It’s the sort of house, housing the sort of neighbours, that sends property prices through the floor.

But bricks and mortar don’t become evil without being marred by some initial human depravity. So here, in the same location as an unspeakable but forgotten desecration of mother and baby, comes the schoolboy rapist attacking a female pupil; a hanging or two; multiple slashings; psychological meltdowns; a literal, corporeal meltdown; and recurring hauntings.

As it plays chronological hopscotch, Ju-On: Origins becomes a difficult watch: the particularly squeamish might care to view episode four from behind the sofa.

So what does all this tell us about the human condition? That it has a tendency, revisited across decades, towards grisly violence? That we are addicted to icy-veined moments of terror?

As we accompany paranormal researcher Yasuo Odajima (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) on his obsessive quest to find the house in question, seemingly identifiable from grainy newspaper photographs and rambling testimony only, the extreme horror of grim goings-on there becomes apparent. The questions that creep out, however, touch on just how Odajima has managed to remain immune to the curse of a house in which he lived briefly as a child: is he somehow complicit in the psycho-sadistic happenings? And does his family history poison the lives of later occupants?