The Japanese word for “chill” is kyougaku, and rest assured, you'll get more than a few kyougakus from “The Grudge,” a knee-buckling haunted house yarn from Japanese director Takashi Shimizu.

“The Grudge” is an Americanized adaptation of a low-budget Japanese horror hit — in this case, Shimizu's own "Ju-On" (translation: “One who dies in the grip of a powerful rage.”). It features a creepy little kid in black eyeliner who literally scares unsuspecting adults to death. Note to parents: Keep junior away from mom's make-up drawer.

With a few alterations here and there, “The Grudge” is essentially a beat-for- beat remake of “Ju-On,” with American characters swapped in for the Japanese. Shimizu paints a waking nightmare involving an expatriate social worker named Karen (“Buffy” star Sarah Michelle Gellar) who lives in Tokyo with her architecture student boyfriend Doug (Jason Behr from “Roswell”).

Barely capable of navigating the unfamiliar city streets, Karen is dispatched to a house in the suburbs where she finds an elderly American invalid (Grace Zabriskie of “Twin Peaks”) writhing pathetically on the floor, apparently neglected by her family. Searching the home, Karen finds a strange, ghastly Japanese boy crouching behind a closet door sealed with duct tape.

The little ragamuffin has a tag-team partner: a floating, wild-eyed woman who appears in beds, showers and other traditionally ghost-free places. Battering his actors with high-pitched squeals, ominous rasps and blood- curdling caterwauls, Shimizu constructs a genealogy of the house, using interconnected vignettes to show how each member of the family — and a tweedy American college professor (Bill Pullman) — fall prey to the spirit of vengeance infesting the home. The rules of space and time don't always apply: in one Escher-like sequence, Karen encounters the professor in the house, even though he died long before she arrived in the country.

Gradually, Shimizu traces his way back to the hideous act of domestic violence that christened this particular haunting, and the finale — to his credit — is punchier and more lucid than it was in the original version. Still, “The Grudge” lacks compelling structure. With its skipping, back-and-forth plot, it often feels like an arbitrary collection of scare scenes. Gussied up in places with special effects too expensive for the original production, "The Grudge" loses just a bit of the original's refreshing low-tech texture.

With its predominantly American cast, something else is lost in "The Grudge" — an expression of social breakdown particular to Japan. In its place, Shimizu ponders themes of isolation — the horror flip side of “Lost in Translation.” Instead of Bill Murray karaoke-ing to Elvis Costello, we get Gellar in a supernatural catfight.