The Ring (2002) Review

CLAYTON'S CREEPY CINEMA!

WEEK 4: CREATIVE KILLERS

The Ring (2002)

                                    

The Ring is a remake of the Japanese film Ringu which came out in 1998,  and was released around the time VHS was starting to die off and DVD was taking over. Despite this, it still managed to be extremely terrifying and remains so to this day.

The film begins like a typical horror film, with two teenage girls alone in a foreboding mansion in a rain storm. They start talking about the legend of a “cursed” video tape that, if you watch it, the phone will ring afterwards and a voice says: “seven days”, then a week later, you die. Absurd, right? Wrong. One of the girls dies and the other becomes so traumatized she later ends up in a mental institution. The film switches gears and we meet the main character Rachel, played by Naomi Watts, who’s a journalist and the aunt of one of the two girls. To add more turmoil to her already complicated life, her son Aidan, played by David Dorfman, has started drawing disturbing images at school. Rachel starts investigating her niece’s mysterious death, and in doing so, comes across the alleged cursed tape. She watches it, and the phone rings, telling her what the voice tells all its victims: seven days. She brings the tape to her ex-boyfriend Noah to see what he can make of it, which only drags him into the circle of doom as well. As Rachel probes the history of the strange girl in the well on the video, she discovers who the little girl was, her untimely fate, and just exactly how evil she and this video tape really are.

The Ring is both a visceral and haunting horror experience. Instead of relying on gore and violence and elaborate deaths, director Gore Verbinski creates a terrifying atmosphere and delivers some incredibly stunning and unforgettable visuals, all enhanced by Hans Zimmer’s musical score. The entire film has an unsettling eeriness to it, and the scares come in many forms. It has one of the most gut wrenching and shocking jump scares of all time, where you see the first girl who dies huddled in a closet with a contorted expression of horror, yellow eyes, green skin, and her head falls forward with a sickening crack, but its shown so briefly and so swiftly you almost can’t even comprehend it. Normally I don’t like jump scares, but this is one that I think works effectively—almost too effectively. It reminds me of a similar jump scare in American Werewolf in London, which, interestingly enough, featured makeup effects by Rick Baker, as does The Ring. Baker’s subtle but expert work to bring Samara (the little ghost girl in the well) to life is surely the scariest aspect of the film. Samara is definitely the central scare element of the film, but numerous other details are sometimes just as frightening, whether a fly crawls out of the TV, or Samara herself does, there’s no shortage of creepy moments.

 

Upon initial viewing, The Ring is a very disturbing and effectively chilling movie, but it’s also re-watchable thanks to the not-so-straight forward plot and villain. I’ve never seen the entire Japanese film which this is a remake of, but from what I gather, The Ring is one of the best horror movie remakes in recent memory.