Picture the scene. The horror genre is once again growing stale as the recent resurgence of slasher movies is already burning out. It’s obviously that the genre needs some sort of scary enema to help it once again reach harrowing new heights without the aid of a mask and a meta sense of humour – but where can it be found? What could possibly put the horror back into horror? It’s around about this point when the subgenre thst went on to be known as J-Horror strode into the room, flicked the TV over to static and stood silently in the corner not saying a word while its hair hung ominously over its face. Done deal.
Working from a novel from Koji Suzuki, director Hideo Nakata and screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi turned in a movie quite unlike anything that had been seen in Hollywood in quite a while. While the American slasher trend was fast and garish, Ring (or Ringu – or even リング if you wanted to go that far) offered up a galacial pace, creeping forms of existential dread and a new horror icon that killed it’s victims without a single wisecrack. The times, they were a’ changing – despite still being analogue…
After the mysterious death of her niece, Tomoko, at a sleepover, journalist Reiko Asakawa hears that her untimely and unfeasibly creepy demise may have something to do with an urban legend that’s been gaining prominence among the younger generation of the area. However, once she discovers that three of Tomoko’s friends have also died under peculiar circumstances all at exactly the same time, Reiko then ploughs into the story with added vigour to try and solve this disturbing puzzle.
She soon learns of an unmarked videotape her niece and her friends watched while staying in a resort hotel seven days earlier and that after watching it, Tomoko recieved a phone call informing her that she’ll be dead in exactly a week. The fact that she ultimately died of a stopped heart with a look of utter horror on her face seems to prove that whatever this urban legend is about, there’s obviously some truth to it so after practically abandoning her young, latchkey son, Yōichi, into the care of her father, the journalist forges on, finds the resort and even manages to locate the exact videotape the doomed teens settled to watch – however, the mood changes once Keiko decides to watch the thing herself.
After witnessing a recording of bizarre, seemingly unrelated, Lynchian images, Reiko finally realises how deep in shit she is when she gets that fateful phone call that informs her she’ll die in exactly a week. From there, the race is on and in an effort to try and solve the curse before it hits, the terrified woman recruits her psychic ex-husband Ryūji to help her figure it out before it hits. But while they struggle to untangle a mystery that contains murder, extra sensory perception, and a young girl named Sadako, the pressure is turned up even higher when little Yōichi watches the tape too…
While I have to admit that the years haven’t been exactly kind so some of the aspects of the original Ringu, you have to understand the impact the movie had on the horror comunity back in the days when it was starting to flag. While the foreign horror market has always been a wonderful place to go as an alternative to the to the more contemporary styles of American filmmaking, the release of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu help start an explosion of Japanese fright films that tackled much deeper themes as it presented stylish, creeping variations of the standard ghost film. Sure, it used some recognised horror imagery to get its point across, but while Poltergeist had already paired the supernatural with TV sets cracking with static and many films (including Scream) had shown the disadvantages of getting a threatening phone call when you least expect it, the movie presented these things in such a way that they all instantly felt new and – more importantly – bloody scary.
While its true that it was probably Gore Verbinski’s admittedly damn good remake that really pushed the “ghost curse” concept onto the masses (not to mention all those other J-Horror remakes that soon cluttered the genre just as the slashers had done years before), to track it back to it’s source reveals a slow burning, brooding film that moves at the pace of a sloth suffering from cramp, but still manages to evoke strong waves of existential dread as we watch a woman struggling with the knowledge that she’s going to die at the end of an alloted time. In fact, after the world moved on from videotapes and pale, long-haired ghouls, it’s probably the thing that stands out the most from the movie as Nanako Matsushima’s Reiko is forced to assess her life and the practical abandonment of her lonely child as she works to stop this unsettling glimpse into her own mortality. The film delivers a very precise detective story as picks its way backward from (figuratively) unraveling the images on that videotape to try and get to the bottom of what caused this ghostly curse, but some blighted with less patience may find matters a bit too slow and deliberate for their liking.
In fact, while weird viral trends such as the Momo challenge still proves that the concept of a murderous urban legend is alive and well thanks to social media, the fact that technology has moved on so far from 1998 as to make the film’s delivery system all but extinct does mean that aspects of Ringu have dated to the point where any newcomers may be a baffled at all the fuss. However, while it’s true that the fascinating corelation between “modern technology” (tapes, phones, televisions) now being used to infect people with death curses rather than the usual types of haunted mirrors, amulets and other such bric-a-brac Ed and Lorraine Warren would usually keep in their basement, has somewhat lost its sting over the years, the truly startling denouement still manages to pack something of a hefty wallop.
After suggesting that the rage consumed spirit of a psychic girl thrown down a well can be diffused by seeking out her waterlogged corpse and giving it a hug; we find that virtually all of the second half of the film is one, cruel, red flag as the vengful Sadako is about as appeased by an act of love as the Candyman would be if offered to cook him a nice, hearty meal. As Hiroyuki Sanada’s Ryuji chills out in the aftermath, Nakata delivers one of the most truly terrifying moments of 90s horror when Sadako suddenly crawls out of his television to carry that terrible promise of death. With her horrible jerking motions, torn fingernails and a horrific, vengful eye burning out from under her jet black hair, it may have lost some of its impact due to over-familiarity, but when I caught it accidently on TV at 2 in the morning (surely the cruelest time to watch it if you’re not expecting it), it was the closest a horror film had made me experience true horror in quite a while.
While there’s an argument to be made that time has eroded some of its threat the way it hasn’t to other, urban legend ghost stories (Candyman, for example), Ringu is one of those movies that genuinely changed the face of an entire genre and still, thanks to the likes of Smile, Drag Me To Hell and It Follows, has the ability to infect us many years later.
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