Good movie but one problem.

It's not just that, but the dead girls all look the same. And that isn't a knock on the myth that all Asians look the same. The ghost girls literally all look the same, and usually all have their long hair covering their face, or obscuring their face. I wonder if that's a cultural thing, considering I've seen some anime and manga that revolved around spirits and had some various spirits that looked like that, but Japan has a wide assortment of spirits to choose from. Why they keep on using THIS particular one is beyond me. And some Japanese spirits look freakin creepy.

Then again, yeah, it's always girls who are the spirits. You never see a teenage boy who's a spirit, or a middle aged man. It's always girls or women with long hair. And in some cases, you kinda wonder WHY, even though if they go through something traumatic, it's grounds for them to become vengeful. You'd think, since a lot of people go through things, there'd be more vengeful spirits running around, killing people. Though, that might be an interesting basis for a Japanese horror spoof.

"Oh yeah, this girl in my class jumped off a building. Turns out she left an email to her boyfriend, telling him he's going to die. He did! Oh, and my cousin's best friend was killed by a serial killer, and now she's haunting an entire city block on the east side! Me? My eccentric aunt just hung herself. I had a dream about her, and her ghost told me that she was going to come and kill me tonight! Just waiting..."

It's almost like, in J-Horror, if you ARE a girl and you are, at the very least, some what sensitive, you WILL become a vengeful ghost after you die.

You guys are missing the point. The Japanese ghost which features in all these films is called a Yurei and is of great cultural signifigance in Japan.

Read up on them here if your interested...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABrei

This is where Japanese films get lost in translation for Western audiences (no pun intended). Having this haunting figure in Japan does not seem cheap or unoriginal as it simply sticks to the tradition of their ghost stories. Western audiences were scared of the girl with the long dark hair because she looks creepy but for Japanese audiences it probably goes much deeper than that and the concept is probably alot more scary.

To me, at least, it seems like the little girl ghost with long hair is Japan's equivalent to the U.S.'s serial killer. Look how many films they have of little girl ghosts with long hair, and how many films we have of serial killers. Maybe I'm stretching, but that's my thoughts on the subject. And, like djfrancophilippe said, they're based on the Yurei spirit which is of great cultural significance.

My DVD collection:
http://mrdudeman.dvdaf.com/owned

So why were the victims killed?

As others have addressed, the type of ghost you're seeing is a specific entity called a yurei. Imagine it like a vampire or werewolf or something along those lines where filmmakers are simply using it as a basis for their stories. A lot of movies in hollywood present vampires in the same way (well before the horrid Twilight days). Now imagine you're in a foreign country not familiar with vampires and you keep seeing vampire movies...you're going to be like "enough already!" That's the situation we have here. Japan is making horror movies without "ghost girls" but that is what is hot and so we're seeing it go international without the context. As for other Asian countries, they also have similar versions of the yurei, but even those countries are in a situation like Japan where their non-ghost girl movies are not getting big while the yurei-themed movies are a success. I hope that explains things.

Don't Western zombies always look the same too? And it's always the same rules, "you gotta shoot them in the head", blah blah...