August 2007 - Horrorphile

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Horrorphile - August 2007

Ringu (Ring)

August 31st 2007 03:35

Ringu (1998) is the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history. It’s based on a novel by Kôji Suzuki and has a sequel and a prequel, and a Hollywood remake (and sequel). Curiously, it originated as a made-for-television movie which aired in 1995 called Ring: Kanzen-ban (but this bawdy low-fi version is generally considered risible, sexploitative trash).

Nanako Matsushima as Reiko

Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) is a journalist researching a story on a 'cursed video' and interviewing teenagers about it. When her niece Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi) dies of apparent sudden heart failure Reiko investigates. She finds out that some of Tomoko's friends who had been on a holiday with Tomoko the week before had died on exactly the same night, same time, in the same exact way. Reiko checks out the cabin where the teens had stayed and borrows a curious unlabelled video tape from reception. Much to Reiko’s dismay it is the cursed videotape.

Hiroyuki Sanada as Ryuji

Her ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada) helps Reiko try and solve the mystery. Reiko makes a copy for him. The investigation takes them to a volcanic island where they discover that the video has a connection to a psychic, who died 30 years earlier, and her child Sadako (Rie Inou).

The cursed teenagers

Director Hideo Nakata achieved a genuinely outlandish and frightening movie. Yet it’s surrealism and inherent silliness somehow never capsizes the movie, and it features one of modern horror’s creepiest sequences: the grainy black and white video footage of Sadako emerging from the well, her long lanky black hair obscuring her face as she slowly, jerkily approaches the camera, and then steps through the lens and climbs out of the television! Yikes!

Reiko embracing death in the well

Apparently the novelist was inspired by Poltergeist (1982), which was one of the scariest movies I saw as a young lad, so I can relate. The premise of an urban myth: a sequence of images cursing whomever watches them, but pronouncing a length of time (a week) before a phone call and subsequent death strikes, is a little tenuous, but when dealing when the Japanese supernatural, all bets are off.

The cursed videotape

Ringu is a richly atmospheric film that lingers on images, yet its contrivances solidify its cumulative effect. What makes Ringu so unnerving is what the audience don’t get to see as much as what they do. There is as much darkness is there is light. The fabric of a dream stretched into reality and inverted into a nightmare; Ringu is a plague of visual doom.

It was Ringu that spearheaded the Western fascination and admiration for Japanese horror movies and it was Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge (2003) which cemented the respect. The Hollywood remake, The Ring (2002), starring Naomi Watts, certainly doesn’t possess the same dark other-wordly vibe which permeates Ringu so succinctly, but it does garner some scary moments.

Rie Inou as Sadako

If you’ve never seen any foreign horror movies Ringu is a great place to start … because it never ends.

Here is the cursed video footage ... beware!

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