Contains spoilers for The Ring.
By the time we had hit the early 2000s, the horror genre of films was mostly on a downward trend. Most of what was being released at the time were crummy remakes like The Haunting, crummy sequels like Halloween: H20 (despite its cult status as being "actually okay"), satire like Scream (which had just released its rather awful third entry), and gore junkie fair like Final Destination. It was a world of primarily R-rated horror flicks doing okay at the box office, but wowing very few. There was one outlier in the mix, 1999's The Blair Witch Project, an ambitious and experimental horror film that is a lot better than you remember it being. But otherwise, things were ready for a change up.
Enter 1998's Ringu, a Japanese film meditating on the classic Japanese horror story of the yurei translated through anxieties about technology and the modern world. It was distinctly Japanese, with mild nudges towards reinterpreting classic folklore with a modern twist, and showcasing changing societal trends. This type of horror story wasn't entirely uncommon in the west, but it wasn't usually played precisely this way. Ghost stories in the west are traditionally about history, particularly the history of the worst our species has produced. In Japan, however, this type of story is about the long term affects of suffering, how the torment of one can cascade through time and place to affect those in the future. The past, in both cases, essentially never dies.
The Ring reinterpreted Ringu in beats, but not necessarily in themes. Much like Ringu, The Ring followed a reporter who begins investigating a mysterious video tape that supposedly kills those who watches it seven days later. She's a single, working mother stretched thin between her home life and her career, with her career often winning out. Her son, meanwhile, is left to deal with the trauma of his cousin's death - one of the victims of the video tape - on his own. The general themes of the American Ring are vague at best, ignored at worst. What the video tape contains - and why it exists - has tethering points with protagonist Rachel's story, but they are never tied off. The tape, it turns out, is a sort of psychic imprint of a dead girl named Samara who was killed by her mother. Samara had some sort of psychic abilities, and would often use them to torment others, particularly the livestock of local farmers. Notoriously, she was forced to live in the barn with the horses and the horses kept her up at night, so she forced all of them to break out of the barn and jump off a cliff. Her mother attempted to smother her and drop her lifeless corpse into the well somewhere in the Olympic Mountain range outside of Seattle, but unfortunately Samara did not die. Instead, she plummeted down the well and watched as her mother sealed the top of the well, making the glowing shape of a ring. She suffered down there - claw marks on the wall of the well where she broke her fingernails - until eventually she did die, but not until after a great deal of suffering alone.
The Japanese Ringu makes a better effort at connecting the two stories - that of the careerist single mom who has been absent from her young child's life, and of Samara and her mother, who seemed incapable of helping her troubled daughter and in trying to do so traumatized her further. Symbolism about how modernity may have repercussions on future generations - a symbol carried through plot and through the modern object and ancient folklore combined in the video tape - is almost entirely ignored in the American version (and, to be fair, though I have not seen Ringu in years, reading about it now it does come off as a bit sexist). For America, we got a simple ghost story with the suggestion there may be something symbolic rustling in the wings, but it is never addressed or expressed in any way.
The Ring hardly stands on its own as a film, even when grading on a scale as you do with horror films, since horror films are often less about stories and more about experiences. But, when grading on that scale, The Ring does get a slight nudge towards the more positive. The aesthetic The Ring carried over from Japan, with its own, unique touches in the color adjustment and direction of Gore Verbinski that would be copied for a large portion of the next decade. The Ring singlehandedly started the J-horror craze (and, in turn, the K-horror craze, since Americans can't tell the difference anyhow). In Japan, Ringu was followed up with a series of ghost story films, like Ju-On (The Grudge in America), One Missed Call, and Pulse (all of which are much better in their original Japanese versions). Each of these films would get remade in America as well, to much less critical praise but relatively good box office numbers early on. Each of these, as well, took a lot of influence in their visual style and general approach to horror from The Ring.
The Ring was incredibly mild on gore and jump scares, deciding to instead focus on tension and plot driven horror. It was the idea of The Ring that made it scary more than anything in it. Even the famous creepy girl with black hair over her face is only seen for a total of 30 seconds in the film, significantly less than you would find in films like The Grudge. The tension is palpable in parts, particularly in the beginning and in certain scenes where the tape is studied, but it is never particularly scary, especially to a modern viewer. The Ring was simply novel at the time, a creepy idea that hadn't been seen very often - especially with next to no gore - and it was that freshness that made it scary for the time. The film only feels less scary if you've seen the original Ringu, most notably when comparing the tapes. Ringu's tape is short and feels significant, like every frame is a reference, a snippet of something horrifying and unmentionable. Notably, the eeriest parts of the tape in The Ring take straight from Ringu's (there is one shot of a woman jumping off of a cliff that isn't in the original that is a worthwhile addition to The Ring). The Ring's tape feels to have too much filler. Changes were required for the remake given the changes in the script, but scenes of a spinning chair and a creepy ladder feel forced even as they are explained later in the story (and don't get me started on the bugs and that weird organ shot). The Ring just feels it is trying too hard to be creepy.
The Ring is a film that has cultural importance more than it is a good movie. There is quite a bit of skill in its creation, with the special effects generally still looking good to this day, and a style that both feels of that time and somehow effective, but the style doesn't overcome what is generally a mildly creepy movie without much in the way of substance. There are meaty bits here and there, a generally creepy premise that has promise, but what we have in totality is a fun popcorn horror flick from fall 2002.
6.5
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