When viewed through a modern horror lens, The Ring feels as outmoded as the VHS tape at the center of its creaky plot. Released in the same year that DVD first overtook VHS in home movie sales, Gore Verbinski’s loyal 2002 remake of the 1998 J-horror film Ringu revels in the vestiges of 20th century tech, media and research methods, which were already sustaining heavy casualties to the Internet Age.
Like more recent films which are now given the much-maligned “elevated horror” descriptor, The Ring doesn’t rely on gore or jump scares. It derives a sense of dread from psychological factors and, like Final Destination (2000), the inescapability of death accelerated into a much tighter timeline. Yet, when held up alongside the past decade’s artsier mainstream horror films that emphasize dramatic and thematic elements over cheap thrills, The Ring’s overreliance on prosaic plot and an overall lack of character development still leaves it feeling like a relic.
A journalist named Rachel (Naomi Watts, fresh off a far more frightening and career-defining role in Mulholland Drive) investigates the mysterious sudden death of a young family member (Amber Tamblyn), the preamble to which is depicted in Scream-like landline-horror fashion in the film’s opening scene. To get to the bottom of things, Rachel does what any researcher of the time would likely be forced to do and heads to the library. There may still be some nostalgic comfort in the analog-tech horror movie (see: The Conjuring universe). But for the most part, watching ludicrously protracted scenes of Rachel pulling newspapers from the library stacks, scrolling through sheets of microfiche and rifling through encyclopedias is about as exciting as watching paint dry. That such mundane activities as reading at a library are given the slightest bit of verve from an effectively pensive Hans Zimmer score really only amounts to unintentional comedy here.
However, in 2002, a VHS tape containing a disturbing short film that, precisely seven days later, prompts the death of anyone who views it was a hell of a plot hook. Throw in a long-haired ghoul that can break the fourth wall in the most violating way possible by climbing out of a TV screen to murder you, and hoo-boy! Audiences ate it up, earning The Ring a quarter of a billion dollars in worldwide box office receipts, spawning two sequels and throwing open the Hollywood doors for various other J-horror adaptations such as The Grudge.
And in fact, the deadly short-film-within-a-feature-film ends up being The Ring’s most effective element and sole upgrade from its source material. In Ringu, the actual contents of the VHS tape are given relatively short shrift onscreen, and creepy as the video is, it never comes near the unsettling Buñuelian surrealism found on the tape in The Ring. That Rachel and her ex, Noah (Martin Henderson), both view it (on separate occasions) and thereby overturn the hourglass on their own fates sets the plot into motion, and this atmosphere of dread allows the film to work as well as it does, for its time.
The Ring also leans heavily on the creepy-kid trope. The monster at the heart of this deadly video is a murdered, paranormally powered little girl named Samara (Daveigh Chase), who was capable of searing horrific images into the minds of anyone she wanted to. Meanwhile, Rachel and Noah’s young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), possesses the kind of uncanny prescience and saucer-eyed, humorless demeanor that would serve him well on a playdate with The Omen’s Damien. Add to this the fact that Samara was murdered via her psychically tormented mother (Shannon Cochran) dumping her into an extraordinarily deep well (in which she, not coincidentally, languished for seven days). It’s little wonder that such a fate compelled her to imprint doom onto VHS and communicate it through landline phones (each viewer of the cursed tape receives a telephonic confirmation of their impending death). That makes for a nifty enough urban legend that unfortunately just doesn’t resonate 20 years later.
In an age of inescapable viral videos, it feels quaint to imagine an erstwhile world in which making a copy of a videotape is a heavy enough lift to save Rachel (and eventually Aidan) from a demon child’s wrath. The onetime reality that lurid media would take conscious effort to proliferate simply doesn’t exist 20 years later, an idea that not even 2017’s still-VHS-reliant third film Rings could effectively convey (it holds an 8% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes for a reason). The Ring’s spiritual successor may actually be It Follows (2014), in which the otherwise doomed individual must find a way to circumvent the rules and pass off impending death through the morally dubious act of intentionally infecting someone else. Go watch that. Unless you forget what libraries are like, there’s no need to rewind this one.
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