Instead of Rika rushing into the house to chase after her friend Mariko, it is instead Karen (Gellar) and Doug (who decides to pay a visit to the house after seeing the paper trail of detective work that his girlfriend left lying on her desk). A timeslip occurs with Peter, the professor, and we see the daisy chain of events that led him to toss himself off a building in the opening scene. As Gellar dashes out of the house after realizing the source of the curse, she passes by the entryway mirror, and feels something strange. She looks into the mirror, and...

Doug, her boyfriend, suddenly clutches her feet, gasping for air. Kayako is now crawling down from the second floor, croaking loudly and advancing on the two. Despite Karen's best efforts to pull her loved one away, the ghost grabs Doug, sucks the life clean out of him, then immediately sets her eyes on his significant other. But Karen, in a show of bravery, decides to set the house on fire, using two conveniently placed gasoline tanks (left there by another character, earlier in the film) and a lighter. Fade to black.

The last scene occurs in a hospital. Karen apparently survived the blazing inferno, and we overhear, so did the house (good job, firefighters). She's brought in to identify Doug's corpse, which lies on an examining table, underneath a white sheet. After the medical staff leaves, she thinks she sees it turn blue for a second, and black hair begins to grow at a tremendous rate from underneath the sheet. Karen senses something ominous lurking behind her, and sure enough, there's Kayako, waiting to pounce. Fade to black, roll credits.

I personally think this hokey ending isn't nearly as good as the original's, which had Rika entering a timeslip of sorts and re-living Kayako's murder at the hands of her husband Takeo. I found this to be a very harrowing denouement. I only wish the filmmakers were brave enough to duplicate it.