Franchises: The Ring. Ring (1998)

If you were a horror fan in the early 2000's, you heard all about or, at least, were aware of The Ring when it came out around Halloween in 2002. I was fifteen at the time and definitely knew of it but, as I've said before, the private high school I went to was so demanding and unrelenting that I barely had time to take a crap, let alone see any new movies. In fact, unless they came out during the summer or our various holiday breaks, I didn't see any movies in the theater during my high school years. Save for the occasional TV spot and image, I never saw anything of The Ring until it was featured on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments, where the moment spotlighted was, naturally, the girl coming out of the television. I can't recall if I knew at that time that it was an American remake of a Japanese film, but I was definitely aware of the then popular trend of "J-horror." Not only did I know The Grudge was an American remake but, when Audition was featured later in the Scariest Movie Moments, Eli Roth said, "I think that, right now, the only people that are making real horror movies are the Asian horror films. Japanese horror films. They're so unbelievably terrifying." And, of course, being not only a big fan of the genre but having a soft spot for Japanese cinema and culture, I decided that I needed to seek out some of this stuff. By the following October, I certainly knew of the original Japanese version, having seen the DVD which proclaimed in big, bold letters how it was the inspiration for the American film, but it would be a few more years before I finally got around to seeing some of these movies. And I didn't start out with Ring; rather, the first I saw were Ju-On, both the original and the sequel, as well as the American remake and its sequel, and then, I went on to Dark Water and the Hong Kong movie, The Eye. In fact, I didn't see Ring until the early 2010's, when I found that DreamWorks DVD set that had it, its two sequels, and its prequel at McKay's.

Upon watching it, I thought it was pretty good. As often happens in cases like this, it had been a little too hyped up, so it didn't exactly blow me away, but I still thought it was a well-made, creepy little movie, with a good mystery, an eerie atmosphere, some truly freaky images and scenes, and an ending that effectively pulls the rug out from under you once you think you've figured out the rules to this curse. And make no mistake, it is, by far, the best film in this initial Japanese series. The others do have their individual merits, as we'll see, but I think the simple and ethereal nature of this first one works the best, whereas the others tend to make it too complicated and ruin some of that wonderful ambiguity.

Before we go on, I want to make two things clear. One, because the well-known English title, Ringu, is actually just a phonetic transliteration of the Japanese pronunciation of the word "ring," I'm going to continue to refer to these movies as Ring, as they're meant to be. And two, in regards to how many of these I'm going to review this particular month, I'm only going to do the four I've mentioned; namely, the ones you get in both that DVD set and Arrow Video's Blu-Ray set. For a while, I thought that's all there was, but when I went through the special features on that latter set, I learned there have been further films produced under the title of Sadako, the name of the ghostly girl at the center of these movies. There's Sadako 3-D, Sadako 3-D 2, Sadako vs. Kayako (a crossover with the Grudge series), and one simply called Sadako, as well as a TV movie adaptation of the original book that predates the 1998 film and two other television series, not to mention The Ring Virus, a separate South Korean adaptation of the first book. I haven't seen any of those movies (though I probably will at some point) but I think talking about these original four are more than enough to fill up some spaces in the calendar. So, for now, and for the sake of my sanity, we're going to stop at Ring 0: Birthday and move on to something else afterward.

Sunday, September 5th, 1997. Japanese high school student Masami tells her friend, Tomoko, an urban legend about a kid who died a week after watching a mysterious videotape recorded in Izu. When she finishes, Tomoko tells her that, a week before, she and her friends went on a trip together and watched a strange video themselves. Just like in the urban legend, the phone rang immediately after, but there was no one on the other end. Tomoko then says it was a joke, but when the phone suddenly rings downstairs, she admits it really did happen and that it's been seven days. Though the call turns out to simply be Tomoko's mother checking in, after she hangs up, the living room television turns on by itself and Tomoko dies after sensing and then seeing a frightening presence behind her. Several days later, Reiko Asakawa, a journalist and Tomoko's aunt, investigates the popular urban legend and learns from a schoolgirl that a high school couple did die a week after viewing a strange tape. She finds a newspaper clipping corroborating this story, and while attending Tomoko's wake, she learns that one of the victims was a classmates of hers and they, as well as another member of their inner circle, all died on the same day. Reviewing video of the police removal of the couple's bodies, Reiko sees a twisted look of terror on the girl's face, and when she speaks with Tomoko's mother, she tells her that she had the same expression. Finding a receipt in her room for photo development, Reiko visits the establishment and acquires the pictures. Looking through them, she learns the group stayed at a cabin at the Izu Pacific Land Resort, and sees that, in the later photos, the kids' faces are blurred and distorted. She drives to the resort, finds their cabin, and while speaking with the man at the reception desk, sees an unmarked tape in the video rental section. Taking the tape back to the cabin, she watches it and finds it to be a grainy series of random, disturbing images and scenes, accompanied by some unearthly sounds. As soon as it's finished, she gets a phone call and hears the same sounds on the other end, all but confirming the curse is real. Now, with only a week to live, she enlists the help of her ex-husband, Ryuji Takayama, a university professor and psychic, to investigate the curse's origins. And things become all the more urgent when their young son, Yoichi, watches the tape.

A 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, Ring was first adapted into a television film in 1995 that, while very faithful to its source material, much more so than the theatrical movie, was seen as a badly acted failure and has been virtually suppressed. It's never been released outside of Japan and, even there, it hasn't been seen on home video since 1996. Several years later, Ace Pictures, an independent film importer, teamed up with Suzuki's publisher, Kadokawa, to produce a theatrical adaptation. The head of Ace, Masato Hara, then chose young, up-and-coming filmmaker Hideo Nakata to direct. Nakata, in turn, worked closely with screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi in developing the script, and they made very significant changes to the story and characters. Not only did they change virtually everything about the protagonist, including their very gender and marital status, they also totally dispensed with the novel's science fiction qualities, of which there are many, and made it more of a purely supernatural story. This might've been for the best, as the sequel, Rasen, produced immediately after Ring and released on the same day, is much more faithful to its source material but flopped badly (more on that tomorrow).

Hideo Nakata was likely chosen to direct Ring because of his first two films: a 1992 anthology of ghost stories called Curse, Death & Spirit, and a 1996 film called Don't Look Up, aka Ghost Actress. But, while Nakata certainly knew what he was doing when it came to filming this subject matter, and the errors he felt made on Don't Look Up influenced the way he would approach Ring, its enormous success was rather bittersweet for him, as he's admitted he's not really a fan of the horror genre. In fact, he only did Don't Look Up because he was trying to fund a passion project, Joseph Losey: The Man with Four Names, which was ultimately released in 1998. Hearing him talk about how unexpected success in a genre he had no major interest in ended up typecasting him in it reminds me a lot of Wes Craven, who was truly interested in making art films and, instead, fell into horror immediately (Nakata himself has referenced Craven when discussing his success in the genre). But while Craven ultimately grew to respect and appreciate the genre, Nakata has made it clear that he'd rather be making other kinds of movies and he does it purely to keep working. Regardless of his reluctance, he would return to the world of Ring twice more, both in Japan and also in Hollywood.

It is a major plot convenience that Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) happens to be researching and investigating the urban legend of the cursed videotape around the time her niece dies of it, but it does make it a bit more personal for her. Even before she puts the pieces together, she comes off as a bit more open-minded about it than others would be, and while attending Tomoko's wake, she learns that other, recent victims of the curse were all connected to her, with one even being a classmate, and that they all died on the same day. Upon learning that Tomoko had seen the tape while on a trip somewhere with the group, and that she had the same horrified expression on her face as the other victims, Reiko eventually learns they stayed at a cabin at the Izu Pacific Land Resort. As the Izu Peninsula itself is connected with the legend, possibly even being its origin, she goes there, finds the cabin the kids stayed in, and also finds an unmarked videotape in the place's video rental section, which the man at the reception desk doesn't recognize. That's when she takes it and watches it in that very cabin. As soon as the unsettling recording is over, Reiko sees an eerie reflection in the blank television screen, and then receives a phone call, also part of the urban legend. Now thoroughly convinced that she's cursed and will die within a week like the others, she gets her ex-husband, Ryuji Takayama, a psychic, to help her. The two of them study the tape's contents, with Reiko creating a copy for Ryuji, and they discover a voice speaking a message in a dialect they don't recognize, at first. After more research, Ryuji discovers the dialect is from Oshima Island. They also find another connection, as kanji for "eruption" appears in the tape and old news articles point to a local woman apparently predicting an eruption of Mt. Mihara decades before. Before they leave for Oshima, Reiko takes her and Ryuji's six-year old son, Yoichi, to stay with her father. That night, she awakens after having a dream about both the tape and Yoichi, and is then horrified to see him watching it. Now guilt-ridden over prolonging the curse, Reiko is desperate to learn the truth in order to save Yoichi's life, only to grow more and more hopeless as it feels as though fate is working against them. Plus, there's no guarantee that it'll do any good in the end.

At first, when Reiko brings him in to help her, Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada) doesn't seem to take her claims seriously, joking to Reiko that she should have herself exorcised. Also, after he watches the video himself, he doesn't get a phone call, and he assures her that the tape must have some earthly explanation. But, when he first enters her apartment, he seems to sense something that disturbs him, and later, while sitting on a park bench, working, he has a vision of a woman whose face is left unseen and asks, "Was it you? Did you do this?" Plus, Reiko has him take a Polaroid of her and when it develops, her face is distorted, just like those who died before. By the time they've investigated the video further and discovered strange, difficult to explain aspects of it, as well as its connection to Oshima Island and a decades-old eruption of Mt. Mihara, Ryuji is now clearly a believer and feels they must go there and solve the mystery before time runs out. After Yoichi watches the tape, claiming that Tomoko told him to, Ryuji tells Reiko that he believes the strange presence he felt in her apartment was Tomoko, now an evil pawn of the curse. Having learned the possible identity of the woman who appears in the video, Shizuko Yamamura, they learn her backstory on Oshima, as well as that of her daughter, Sadako, who also appears on the tape and who Reiko has been having visions of. Using his psychic powers, Ryuji learns that Shizuko's cousin, Takashi, intended to exploit her own psychic abilities. Moreover, both he and Reiko see a vision of a Tokyo demonstration by Shizuko that ended in tragedy when Sadako used her powers to murder a man who called her mother a fraud. After that, both Sadako and Dr. Ikuma, the scientist researching Shizuko's abilities, as well as Sadako's father, disappeared. Knowing this, Ryuji concludes that the videotape is a literal recording of Sadako's rage and hatred.

Because of his own psychic abilities, and the feeling of being perceived as abnormal because of them, Ryuji clearly has some sympathy for Shizuko, whom he describes as badly slandered in the press and seen as creepy by those around her. He says her ability to read minds and hear thoughts that people kept buried deep down caused her pain, something he can likely relate to, as he has those powers as well. He seems to feel similarly about Dr. Ikuma, saying, "The papers praised him, then

trashed him. It was forty years ago, and the media still does the same thing." His insecurity about his abilities is shown to really weigh on him when he feels that Reiko is suggesting he won't go mad if he sees her die, like how Masami did with Tomoko, because he's not "normal." Also, while he has virtually no relationship with Yoichi (they only have one, silent moment between them), he worries if his son also has these abilities and that they'll make life hard for him as well. He goes on to rant, "Maybe all three of us should just die. Good idea!

We shouldn't have had a kid in the first place." But, once they see the vision of what happened in Tokyo, both of them become determined to get back to the mainland and find out what became of Dr. Ikuma and Sadako. Despite an approaching typhoon, they do find a way back, and decide to go back to the cabin at Izu Pacific Land, feeling it may be Sadako's resting place, since the phone only rang there. In the end, they do find her remains at the bottom of a well underneath the cabin, and when Reiko doesn't die when the exact hour of when she first watched the tape comes, they believe they've lifted the curse. But, of course, it's not as simple as that.

While Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka) himself seems like a normal, well-adjusted child, there is a sadness in how he's just six years old but, because of his parents' separation and his mother working so much, he's alone a lot. Reiko isn't oblivious to this, either, as she sadly tells Ryuji that Yoichi is used to being alone. Also, he obviously does have his father's psychic abilities, as he tends to sense and see things that others can't. When he and Reiko are at Tomoko's house for the wake (he was rather close to her), he wanders off from the adults and sees a glimpse of someone rushing up the stairs. He follows them up there and wanders into Tomoko's room, where he appears to feel a presence and stares intently at the television set. It's later revealed that was where Tomoko's mother found her body, and that Yoichi used to play there rather frequently. Not long after this, Reiko is horrified when he comes out and says that Tomoko died because of the cursed videotape. I'm surprised she also didn't ask him where he learned about it, as I doubt she would've let him in on this morbid mystery she's currently researching. Either this urban legend is so well-known that even kids as young as him are talking about it, or a more frightening answer is that he learned of it from someone who knows firsthand. Case in point, while he and Reiko are staying with his grandfather, she finds that he brought the videotape with him and watched it. When she asks why he would do such a thing, he simply answers, "Tomoko told me to watch it," corroborating what Ryuji felt. Yoichi remains with his grandfather for the rest of the film, unaware of what's going on with his parents and is also seemingly ignorant of the danger he's in after having watched the tape. When Reiko calls him before she and Ryuji head back to the cabin in Izu on what could be her last day alive, Yoichi says he's bored at his grandfather's and wants to go back to school. And then, at the end of the movie, Reiko has to take drastic action to save him from Sadako's curse.

There are several minor characters introduced here who would go on to have much more substantial roles in the following films. Chief among them is Mai Takano (Miki Nakatani), who would go on to play significant but very different parts in both Rasen and Ring 2. Here, she appears in two scenes as a student of Ryuji's, albeit one he's very close to, as she also acts as something of an assistant to him. She's also shown to be close enough to him to mess around with a complex formula on the chalkboard

in his apartment as part of a joke. Unfortunately for her, she finds his body after he's been killed by Sadako and is almost too horrified to tell Reiko about it. A similar fate befalls Masami (Hitomi Sato), Tomoko's (Yuko Takeuchi) friend, at the beginning of the movie, when they discuss the urban legend. After Tomoko reveals that she went somewhere with her friends and saw a strange video one week before, she then acts as though she were doing it just to freak out Masami, who wasn't taking it all that seriously anyway. But when the

phone suddenly rings, the terror on Tomoko's face proves it wasn't a joke after all. And though the call turns out to be Tomoko's mother telling her that she and her father will be home late, she succumbs to the curse immediately afterward. Later, at the wake, it's revealed that Masami went insane after this and is currently in a hospital, too terrified to go near a TV set. Meanwhile, Tomoko's spirit apparently becomes a pawn of Sadako's curse, talking Yoichi into watching the videotape.

One guy I feel really bad for is Reiko's father, Koichi (Katsumi Muramatsu), as he seems like a really nice old man who loves both his daughter and grandson. He's more than happy to keep Yoichi while Reiko and Ryuji travel to Oshima Island, with the two of them even going fishing in a creek near his house (although, Koichi proves to not be very good at it). But then, at the end of the movie, when Reiko learns that the only way to get around this curse is to copy the videotape and show it to someone else, she drives back to her father's house to pick up Yoichi and make Koichi watch the tape. She even calls him ahead of time, telling him, "I have a favor to ask you. It's for Yoichi." Since he's unlikely to believe in the curse, it's possible this poor old guy has no idea of the horrible fate that's about to befall him, and that's sad. And Reiko smiles as she drives down the road to do the deed, remembering what she was told about how this curse's cycle is never ending and that, if you were desperate enough to keep from dying, you would make someone else watch the tape, which is all the more unsettling.

As the mystery of the videotape is slowly but surely unraveled, you learn that its curse stems from a tragic set of circumstances that occurred in the 50's. The woman who appears in the video, brushing her hair while looking in a mirror, is Shizuko Yamamura (Masako), who had gained notoriety on Oshima Island when she correctly predicted that Mt. Mihara would erupt. She'd had these powers all her life and, even though she was from a wealthy and respected family, others found her creepy because of them. According to her cousin, the fishermen on the island especially hated her, as she would sit by the seaside and watch the ocean. Ryuji also guesses that her ability to see into people's thoughts caused her a lot of grief. Her notoriety soon caught the attention of Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma (Daisuke Ban), an ESP researcher from Tokyo who took her to the mainland in order to study her. Things came to a head when, during a public demonstration of her abilities, a journalist decried her as a fraud, only to suddenly drop dead with a horrific expression on his face. Initially thought to be Shizuko's doing, it was actually the work of her daughter, Sadako, whom she'd had with Ikuma, himself already a married man with a family. The revelation of this affair, coupled with the disastrous demonstration, led to him being fired from his position. Afterward, he and Sadako disappeared and Reiko and Ryuji eventually learn that he tossed her down a well in Izu and trapped her inside. As for Shizuko, she went mad and committed suicide by throwing herself into Mt. Mihara's crater.

Shizuko's cousin, Takashi (Yoichi Numata), is still living on Oshima Island when Reiko and Ryuji come, as his son owns and runs an inn with his wife. The pair see him when they first arrive at the inn but, when Reiko asks him about Shizuko, he refuses to say anything and denies that she ever had a daughter. But that night, his daughter-in-law gives them an old photograph of Shizuko and Dr. Ikuma, and the next day, Ryuji confronts Takashi at the seaside. He gets him to talk a little bit about Shizuko, but he then uses his psychic powers to probe his mind and learns he's the reason why her powers gained notoriety around the island. Moreover, he contacted Dr. Ikuma, as he felt he could make money off her, and was present at the public demonstration. When Ryuji sees a vision of Sadako killing the journalist who decried her mother's abilities, Takashi has no choice but to now acknowledge her existence, calling her a monster. After this scene, he reappears when Reiko and Ryuji try to get back to the mainland but, because of a typhoon, find no one willing to help them. He agrees to take them back himself, knowing that Sadako is the reason for their plight. On the way, he and Ryuji talk about how Shizuko would often talk to the sea while sitting on the shore and he mentions how, one time, he eavesdropped on her. Eerily, he adds, "But it wasn't a human language."

Later movies attempted to make Sadako (Rie Ino) more of a fully developed character, painting her either as absolutely evil or as more sympathetic, becoming this monster as a result of unfair persecution, but it's in this first film, where she's nothing more than a frightening and deadly figure with a dark and disturbing past, that I feel she's at her most effective. Though her identity isn't revealed until very late in the story, the videotape itself allows an early glimpse of her reflection when, in the shot of Shizuko brushing her hair in a mirror on the wall, the mirror suddenly disappears and reappears on the opposite side of the wall. Also, the kanji for the first syllable of her name appears reflected in a close-up of someone's eye, and after Reiko first watches the videotape, she's reflected in the television screen, standing behind her. And while I, at first, assumed the figure both Yoichi and Ryuji get glimpses of was Tomoko's spirit, now acting as part of the curse, it could also be Sadako herself, using their own psychic abilities as a means of showing herself and possibly pretending to be Tomoko to trick Yoichi into watching the tape. By the third act, you learn how Sadako, like her mother, had psychic powers, only hers were much more frightening in that she could make someone die just by wishing it, as she did to the journalist who called her mother a fake. Following that, Ikuma disappeared with her, and, at some point, he clubbed her over the head, dropped her into the well in Izu, and pushed the lid over it, sealing her in while she was still alive.

It goes without saying that, when she was alive, Sadako was seen as a terrifying and evil freak of nature. Takashi calls her a monster and Ryuji later suggests her very origin may have been unearthly, that her real father wasn't actually Ikuma but someone, or something, else. Given what Takashi says about how Shizuko would talk to the sea in a language that didn't sound human, it could be that Sadako's father was some sort of entity or demon from the ocean. When she died, she became a

frightening, vengeful spirit, or "onryo," who used her power of "nensha," an ability to transplant images from one's mind onto a solid surface, to create the cursed videotape. According to the urban legend around the tape, this first happened when a young boy staying in the cabin built above the well in Izu attempted to record a television show. Because of the differences in TV channels between Tokyo and Izu, nothing was recorded on that particular channel, allowing Sadako to project the

images and her curse onto the tape. The kid became the curse's first victim when he watched the tape back, and it went on from there. Of course, you know how the curse works: unless you copy the tape and show it to someone else, you die within seven days of watching it. Then, that person has to copy the tape and show it to someone else in order to save themselves, and so on and so on, in a never-ending cycle. The curse also seems to allow Sadako to screw with and influence people, even if they have no psychic abilities. Reiko, for instance,

has a nightmare concerning one of the figures who appears on the tape, as well as possibly Tomoko, as you hear a female voice say, "Auntie." She also later sees what happened both at the demonstration and the well herself, with Sadako grabbing her wrist in one of her visions and leaving marks on her in reality. Once it's been one week to the very minute you watched the tape, Sadako herself comes for you. She appears in the room with you, approaches, and kills you in some ambiguous manner, though I'm guessing it's through the same psychic power she had when she was alive, as the victims all have the same expressions on their faces as the journalist.

Sadako's look, with the long black hair covering the face and the white dress she wears, has become something of a cliche now, as it's the standard appearance of ghosts in so many Japanese horror films, but the truth is that it's typical of yurei, the beings in Japanese folklore most akin to Western images of ghosts. And when you forget about the cliche and just focus on the character herself, it is a creepy appearance, made all the more unsettling by her unnatural, jerking movements (they had Rie

Ino, who's a professional kabuki actor, walk backwards in such a manner and then ran the film in reverse to create the effect), and the disturbing detail of her having no fingernails, the result of her repeated attempts to climb out of the well. What gets to me the most, though, is that big close-up of her wide, insane eye, the only glimpse of her face you ever get here. Those kind of expressions always send chills up my spine and seeing that beneath all that long, stringy, black hair is really freaky.

Chizuko Mifune

An interesting little postscript about these characters is that both they and their tragic past were loosely based on a little known incident in Japan in the early 1900's. Shizuko is based on Chizuko Mifune, a supposed psychic whose abilities garnered the attention of Prof. Tomokichi Fukurai, who was Assistant Professor in Psychology at Tokyo University (an obvious inspiration for the character of Dr. Ikuma). Like Shizuko in the film, Chizuko was declared a fake after a public demonstration of her abilities in 1910 and, just four months later, committed suicide. Fukurai went on to tout two more women as psychic, with the latter supposedly having the abilities of both "nensha" and foretelling the future. Also, that third woman's name just happened to be Sadako Takahashi. And like Ikuma, Fukurai was badly disgraced by these accusations of fraud and left Tokyo University in 1919.

While he may not really be a fan of the horror genre, Hideo Nakata knows how to create mood and spooky imagery, as well as takes inspiration from the horror films he has seen. Even before Reiko first watches the videotape, Ring is permeated with an eerie feeling of foreboding, like the characters are constantly being watched. You really get this feeling in scenes such as Yoichi wandering up to Tomoko's room during the wake and then standing there in the dark, looking around, obviously sensing something, or when Reiko goes

outside on her balcony while Ryuji watches the tape and scans the skyline amid the pouring rain, looking at another apartment building across from hers, as if she feels she's being watched herself. The way Nakata and his cinematographer, Junichiro Hayashi, shoot the film adds tremendously to its mood. As you can see, the scenes are often shot in a very dark manner, with the blackness looking very inky, which gives off a feeling of constant despair as well as creepiness,

and the film also tends to offer you fleeting glimpses of apparitions, like when Yoichi sees someone running up the stairs in Tomoko's house, Reiko glimpses Sadako in the TV screen after she watches the tape for the first time, Ryuji sees the figure that may be either Tomoko or Sadako from the skirt down (in that scene, they also had the ambient sounds fade out until they became garbled, echoing, and distant), and Reiko sees the man from the videotape reflected in Ryuji's television at the

end of the movie. Nakata also deftly makes use of the "less is more" approach, as we don't see what sneaks up on Tomoko before she dies but, rather, we just get an eyeful of her horrified face, which is more than enough; our first look at the hideous expressions on the victims' faces on a videotape is partially obscured by the static and break-up of the image; and, again, all we ever see of Sadako's face is that one, frightening eye.

Though Nakata's direction is pretty straightforward and low-key, despite these occasional creepy flourishes, he does play a little bit with the look of the film and the editing. During the opening credits, which take place over a panning shot across ocean waves at night, the image fades into a close-up of static on a television set, and right when Tomoko gasps upon seeing what's behind her, the image becomes negative. Later, when Reiko speaks with her sister about Tomoko, she tells her that she found her in her room's closet, and

we suddenly cut to a brief flashback of her throwing open the door and finding Tomoko's body in the corner, the same expression on her face. When Reiko first sees the videotape sitting in the rental section behind the Izu Land Pacific Resort's reception desk, the close-up of it becomes de-saturated and grainy. The vision of what happened at the public demonstration back in the 50's, as well as Sadako's earthly fate, is all shot in stark black-and-white, with a lot of grain on the picture, making it look like an old newsreel. And the film's very last shot turns black and white, perhaps alluding to the fate that's about to befall Reiko's father, as it did the same during Ryuji's death scene.

There are a number of images and sequences in the film that are so damn creepy, like the victims' aforementioned expressions and, also, the distorted images of their faces in photographs taken in the lead-up to their deadline. Then, there's the videotape itself, which is a bunch of bizarre, seemingly unrelated images that are made unnerving by the lack of sound, the blurry, static-filled, analog nature of the tape (which was added onto the 35mm film by a computer), and the eerie, low screeching noises on the soundtrack. You see

what's later revealed to be Sadako's POV as she looks up at the top of the well from the bottom, as Dr. Ikuma looks down at her; Shizuko brushing her hair in an oval mirror on a wall, which then briefly pops onto the opposite side, showing Sadako in the reflection, before going back over to her mother (that one was always especially eerie to me before I learned who Shizuko and Sadako were); a bunch of floating kanji that say something about an eruption; people crawling across the ground, apparently in pain; a shot of a man with a white

towel covering his head (we never find out who this guy is or what his connection is to anything); an eye with kanji that reads "sada" reflected in it; and finally, a shot of the well later revealed to be Sadako's final resting place. You don't realize it at first, and neither do the characters, but each time the tape is played, that last scene goes on longer and you see a glimpse of Sadako climbing out of the well. That leads into the movie's most famous scene and image, where Sadako completely climbs

out of the well, walks to the screen, and then, as Ryuji watches, actually crawls out of the television (Nakata has said this was based on David Cronenberg's Videodrome but, thanks to the popularity of the American remake, it's become an icon in its own right). I have no clue how they pulled that off, especially on the small budget they had, but it sure is effective, despite having been parodied to death.

In addition to the creepy stuff, Nakata shows he has a keen eye for cinematography and visuals in general, as he gets some nice shots of various spots in the city, like Reiko's apartment building, the city skyline, and Tomoko's house, and he's also able to create some nice images during the scene where it rains. But where the cinematography really shines is when the film moves away from the city and gets into more rural areas, like the resort in Izu, with its lovely cabins out in the countryside (it looks like a place you would find up north in the United States,

like in northern California and Oregon, or even possibly up into Canada), and especially Oshima Island. There's plenty of eye-candy there, with wide shots of the island's vast, fertile landscape, the volcano Mt. Mihara (which I knew about long before I saw this movie, and if you've been with me for a while, you'd know where I first heard of it), the traditional inn where Reiko and Ryuji stay, and wide vistas of the island's rocky shoreline, as well as the ocean when they're traveling to and from it. And they also manage to effectively capture the feeling of an approaching typhoon late in the film, with a lot of strong wind and gray, overcast skies.

Going back to the mood and tone, the opening is a prime example of how well-done the tension and sense of foreboding are. Though it starts with Masami jokingly telling Tomoko about the urban legend, things suddenly get serious when Tomoko admits she went somewhere with her friends and saw an unusual tape. The scene is completely silent, save for their hushed voices, as Tomoko says the tape's contents were hard to explain, that she received a phone call afterward, just like in the urban legend, and that, most significantly, it's been

one week. After several seconds of eerie quiet, Masami says Tomoko is just trying to scare her and Tomoko, in turn, admits it was a joke. The two of them laugh and playfully wrestle, as Masami tries to get Tomoko to admit what happened between her and the boy she has a crush on, when the phone rings downstairs (they combined various types of rings to make all the phones in the film sound unusual). Like before, Tomoko's demeanor changes to one of sheer terror and, as she looks up at the

clock with that expression, Masami realizes it wasn't a joke after all. The two of them go  downstairs to the kitchen where the phone is and tensely stand near it, exchanging glances, before Masami finally answers it. It turns out to be a false alarm, and the two of them laugh in relief, with Masami saying she's going to tell everyone about how scared she was. But then, when she leaves Tomoko alone to use the bathroom, the TV set in the living room turns on by itself. Tomoko tries to act blase and turns it off, but when she goes back into the kitchen and pours herself a drink, she hears a scratching sound behind her, leading to her turning around and dying at Sadako's hands.

The shot of the clock in Tomoko's room is indicative of something else the movie does well: create a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness. From the first day when Reiko sees the video, a figurative countdown starts, with each passing date displayed in captions on the screen, reminding us that time is slowly running out for her. Not only does it get into the growing fear she feels as her deadline draws near but, when things get worse once Yoichi is also marked, you see her despair and sadness over her being unable to do anything to lift

the curse, despite the leads she and Ryuji find in the search for the tape's origin. When Ryuji walks in on her while she's feeling this way, she asks him to be with her when she dies and to find a way to save Yoichi. And though they learn about Sadako the next day, they become marooned on Oshima Island due to an approaching typhoon. Even worse, Reiko's correspondent on the mainland is unable to find any trace of Sadako or Dr. Ikuma. When she hears this, she hangs up the phone and sobs for

Yoichi. But no sequence captures her desperation better than, with only hours left before her deadline, she and Ryuji go back to the cabin in Izu, find the well underneath it, and use a bucket and rope to drain the water, with Ryuji going down and filling the bucket, while Reiko pulls it up and empties it. As this goes on and on, lasting for hours, the music, the shots of the darkening outside through the thatched edges of the basement, and Reiko so exhausting herself that she's unable to

pull anymore bring home the feeling that time is running out, that it may already be too late, and that they, in fact, may just be wasting their efforts, as they're only doing this because there's nothing else they can do.

And then, we get false hope and a disturbing revelation. When she and Ryuji trade places, Reiko finds Sadako's corpse and lovingly embraces it. This seems to do the trick, as Ryuji tells her it's past her deadline and nothing has happened. They call in the authorities to perform an official exhumation and Ryuji takes Reiko back to her apartment. It's all nice and peaceful, but then, as Reiko sits around her apartment and Ryuji gets back to work at his, we get another caption telling us the date, letting us know that someone's

deadline is still drawing near. That leads into Ryuji's death when Sadako crawls out of his TV and kills him, after which Reiko deduces she had unknowingly saved herself all along by copying the tape and showing it to him, as per the urban legend, though she had forgotten that part of it from her interviews. Thus, when the film ends with Reiko driving off to show her father the video in order to save Yoichi, and the last shot turns black-and-white, we get one last date, as the never-ending cycle begins again.

I always like horror films that touch on the phenomena of urban legends, as I feel it makes the horror at the center richer and farther-reaching. Even more interesting, and inspired, is how, as Peter Jackson said on 100 Scariest Movie Moments when talking about the American version, this story does what past films like Videodrome and Halloween III: Season of the Witch have done in that it makes the simple, innocent act of watching TV a frightening and potentially dangerous experience. But while those movies did this with

cable television and advertising, Ring goes a step further and twists the concept of home media into something monstrous. Today, nobody rents physically anymore, and VHS is a long forgotten thing of the past, but a lot of people still watch DVDs and Blu-Rays, as well as record shows and movies, and this film suggests that watching home video in any form could kill you. It's the perfect concept for a modern age ghost story, and it makes sense that the urban legend of this cursed videotape would be most popular among high school

students, who typically spend a lot of their free time watching TV and, in the 90's, renting movies. Like all urban legends, it tends to change from person to person, with some adding details that a woman appears on the tape and directly tells the viewer they will die within a week, while others say that when the phone rings, a voice says, "You saw it," and still others say the frightening woman in question appears if you watch late night TV on a local Izu channel. Also, exactly how the urban

legend itself started is never given a definitive answer. Yeah, it's suggested that it started with the vacationing boy who unknowingly recorded Sadako's rage and curse while trying to tape a show in Izu but it's never specified if that even happened at all, and it could be just one version that Masami heard. Moreover, there could also possibly be various ways of breaking the curse and Reiko just happened to hear the correct one. As Ryuji tells Reiko, "Nobody starts these kinds of stories. Whatever people feel anxious about becomes rumor and starts to spread... Or people start them, hoping things will turn out like this."

The use of the videotape as the source of Sadako's curse has been discussed as being at the center of one of the movie's major themes. It's been read as a metaphor for Japanese traditions clashing with the modern era, with Sadako herself representing the repressed and forgotten past intruding on the present, both in her own horrific backstory and how she's depicted as a traditional "yurei" from Japanese mythology. Especially significant is how this figure of the past manifests through modern technology, both through the videotape and the

distorted photographs that act as a sign that someone has been marked by this curse. Moreover, some have read the ending as not only bleak in that Sadako's curse is going to keep being spread but also that the video is going to be continually copied, spreading technology further and erasing more of Japan's traditions. 

This theme of tradition versus modernity is symbolized by the film's two main settings. Modern-day Tokyo (it's never specified but, since Tomoko and her friends attended a school in Yokohama, and the Izu Peninsula is near Tokyo, I assume that's where this is) is depicted as very sterile and rational, filled with modern technology, such as advanced tape recording and editing equipment, with Reiko herself working as a news reporter and filming her investigation of the urban legend. Also, those who haven't experienced the

curse themselves view the legend as nonsense drummed up by rumor and hearsay. But, it's a different story on Oshima Island. While they do have modern technology like cars and telephones, the inn that Reiko and Ryuji stay at is very traditional, with no televisions or VCRs, and Takashi and his daughter-in-law are always wearing kimonos rather than modern-day clothing. Also, the people there aren't as quick to write off any strange phenomena. It's said they believed in

Shizuko's abilities enough to where they shunned her, and Takashi refers to Sadako as a monster, as well as suggests that Shizuko may have been talking with something inhuman when she would speak to the sea. Finally, where is Sadako's "grave," as well as where the terror began? A cabin at a resort that was built over the well Dr. Ikuma dumped her into.

I've already touched on the movie's mysterious nature when discussing the ambiguous identity of the woman Yoichi and Ryuji see, the possibility that Sadako's real father might not have even been human, and how the man with the towel on his head in the video is never identified, but it also includes the very title: Ring. While the American remake would make the title's meaning more blatant, it can interpreted in several different ways here. I always thought it alluded to the never-ending cycle of how people save themselves from

the curse, with it constantly looping back on itself. Others have interpreted it as actually alluding to the ring of the telephone that follows a viewing of the tape, though that's such a small part of the story that I kind of doubt it. And some have said it may refer to the first image on the tape, which initially looks like a ring but is actually Sadako's POV as she looks up at the sky from the bottom of the well. Again, I think that's a little too vague, but then again, it's so ambiguous that any suggestion could

be valid. Another big mystery is the identity of that man in the tape. Whoever he is, he seems to be aiding Reiko, as she and Ryuji hear him intone a saying in a dialect they later identify as from Oshima Island, and when she has a nightmare while staying at her father's house, she sees a vision of him pointing to Yoichi's empty futon, leading her to find him watching the tape. He also appears at the end, after Ryuji's death, pointing to his bag containing the copy of the tape, making her

realize what she did to unknowingly save herself, which Ryuji didn't. But what's really confusing is that, in the screenplay, the man himself is meant to be Ryuji... even though Ryuji is alive until the ending. And yet, when Reiko sees the man's reflection in the television in Ryuji's apartment, she actually says Ryuji's name and turns around in anticipation. I will say that he is wearing the clothes Ryuji had on during his death scene, and let's also not forget that we don't know if he

appeared on the tape when Tomoko and her friends watched it. In Ring's entry in that book on horror films from Virgin, they suggest Ryuji may have unknowingly been Sadako's pawn like Tomoko, even while he was alive, as all he does in the end is prompt Reiko to curse her father and keep the cycle going. Or maybe it's all meaningless and just meant to mess with your head, which is another possibility.

Save for a few brief moments, this is not an effects-heavy film. Visual effects-wise, the most startling one is Sadako coming through the television; otherwise, aside from the film and editing tricks, the only ones worth mentioning are these digital storm-clouds that appear in a couple of shots. And another thing this film definitely isn't is gory, as Hideo Nakata especially despises that. Aside from the detail of Sadako not having any fingernails, and the disturbing imagery of her fingernails stuck in the well's walls (which make me wince, as I hate

anything having to do with finger- or toenails), the most noteworthy makeup effect is Sadako's corpse, which Reiko finds at the bottom of the well. You don't see much detail in the face, as her hair covers it up even in death, but when Reiko attempts to part it, the rotten flesh comes off on either side, revealing the skull beneath, which is really slimy and has green goo pouring out of the eye-sockets.

Composed by Kenji Kawai, the music score to Ring starts out very subtly, with creeping electronic sounds mixed with low-pitched strings, gongs, and what sounds like human voices over the opening credits, but once the credits have finished, you don't hear much music for a while, save for an eerie, discordant, electric sound you hear whenever a date appears onscreen, and a threatening sound that transitions into a "dong" when Tomoko is attacked. For a while, the music, if you can even call it that, as a lot of it sounds more like sound effects, is often lurking in the background, like when you hear more electronic creepiness when Yoichi snoops around Tomoko's house during the wake, subtle, screeching strings when Reiko first spots the videotape, the unearthly noises when she watches the tape, which start out subtle but become more overt as it goes on, with a mass of voices and coarse strings, and similar sounds when she stands on her balcony and looks out across the city skyline. There are also instances of louder, frightening sounds, like freakish strings when Reiko sees the distorted image of her face in the Polaroid Ryuji takes of her, a really weird one when Reiko spots the newspaper clipping about Shizuko's prediction, a full-on blast of freakish music when she catches Yoichi watching the video, followed by subtle, lurking sounds when he says Tomoko told him to watch it, and more screeches when they recognize a room at the inn as being the same one with the mirror in the video. During the second half, we get instances of more traditional score, like a subtle, sentimental piano piece that plays when Reiko worries about what will happen to Yoichi, an eerie but less electronic-sounding piece for the flashback to the demonstration (only Sadako's appearance brings back those freakish sounds), and another bit of piano for Reiko and Ryuji's journey back to the mainland.

My personal favorite parts of the score are during the third act, when Reiko and Ryuji go to uncover Sadako's grave. Their drive to the Izu resort is scored with a constant, rhythmic beat, accompanied by some anxious-sounding strings, and the flashback to Sadako being dumped in the well is scored in an especially creepy fashion, but the sequence of them emptying the well has my favorite theme from the entire score. It's this desperate-sounding, unrelenting mixture of a constant electric keyboard base, eerie background noises like a gong and haunting, moaning sounds, and a really poignant, hopeless string accompaniment, all of which, like I said, perfectly capture this feeling that time is running out and that this may, in the end, prove to be an exercise in futility (Arrow Video must've realized its power, as they put it on the main menu of their Blu-Ray release). Things go from eerie to sentimental and touching once again when Reiko pulls Sadako's corpse up out of the water and embraces it, and this music continues for what seems like the ending. But then, we hear that eerie accompaniment to the date captions, and when Sadako kills Ryuji, the music is pure nightmare fuel again. The final piece of the score is a more low-key but still ominous and urgent version of the music that played when they drove out to Izu. A techno-style "song," called Feels Like Heaven and performed by a group called HIIH, plays over the ending credits. I put song in quotation marks because it's little more than the same phrases repeated over again and again, with some actual lyrics near the end. In the Virgin book on horror films, author James Marriott really blasts the song, describing it as, "Awful, dodgy trance pop that seems to belong to a different film altogether." I can't argue with it feeling out of place in this film but, I have to admit that I do like the way it sounds.

While I may have waited too long for it to really knock my socks off, Ring is still a very well-made, low-key but effective, spooky film. It's got a good cast, an interesting story and concept that touches on themes of urban legends and tradition versus modernity, an intriguing mystery, an ambiguous nature about the film itself, deftly-created instances of suspense and atmosphere, well-done cinematography and creepy images, fleeting but effective special effects work, a great, eerie music score, and an ending that fools you into thinking everything's alright when, in reality, it's anything but, all packed into a brisk, 95 minutes. If your only frame of reference for this story is the American remake, I highly advise you to go to the source, as I doubt you'll be disappointed.