A "Ring" of truth

Few films ratchet up the creepiness factor quite like "Ringu," the original Japanese version of "The Ring," which we dissected last evening at CineVerse. Here's what we learned about this flick:

HOW IS THIS FILM DIFFERENT FROM TYPICAL HORROR MOVIES AND FROM YOUR EXPECTATIONS?

·       It builds a steady atmosphere of moody dread, tension and fear with minimal cheap scares and shocks.

·       It contains very little graphic violence, blood or gore. Instead, it relies on tone, atmosphere, smart sound design, crude effects like negative photography and freeze frames, and simple but disturbing imagery to unnerve us.

·       It also refrains from revealing and showing us too much, including the ghost girl’s face; instead, we are only shown her eye and are forced to conjure up the rest of her horrible visage in our mind’s eye.

·       It’s an interactive horror experience in that it involves the viewer as part of the film: we’re watching a scary video of people watching a scary video that brings a curse to the viewer, which adds a creative creepiness to the proceedings.

·       For a modern color film, the color is very muted; the picture relies on subdued grays and harsh blacks and whites, giving scenes like the haunted videotape screening a surreal feel.

·       The film was extremely popular worldwide (becoming the highest-grossing Japanese horror film in history) and proved to be very influential:

o   it spawned two Japanese sequels and a prequel, a 12-episode TV series

o   It was remade in both Hollywood and South Korea

o   It kicked off the “J-horror” fad of the late 1990s/early 2000s, which included American remakes of The Grudge, Pulse, One Missed Call, and Dark Water

o   The ghost character Sakado, has become a massively popular horror icon, like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, in Japan.

WHAT INFLUENCES DOES “RINGU” DRAW UPON?

·       According to writer/researcher Mark Frey (see his article at http://www.jetaanc.org/ringu/), Ringu was inspired by many earlier sources and “drawing from centuries of Japanese cultural history:

o   Previous Japanese classic horror films and movies featuring ghosts, including Onibaba, Kwaidan, Ugetsu, Kuroneko, House, Tomie, Chakushin Ari, and Honogurai mizu no soko kara.

o   Butoh, a strange, grotesque dance form that originated in Japan following World War II

o   Classic yuurei ghost stories. Frey says “yuurei are usually women with a white face, long black hair, and a long, white kimono that trails off into mist where her legs should be. This is how Japanese women looked when they were buried.”

o   Japanese urban legends and horror tales of people dumping bodies into wells and women committing suicide by leaping into wells. “There is a deep connection in Japanese culture between wells and troubled women,” Frey says.

o   The long-held Japanese belief that water (represented in the well) is the pathway to the land of the dead.

o   Special Japanese ghosts called onryou who want revenge; these were “women who were done wrong by a man. Often, the man cheated on these women and then killed them.”

o   The women wrongly accused of and killed for witchcraft during the Salem witch trials

RINGU HAS BEEN DESCRIBED BY SOME CRITICS AND SCHOLARS AS A FEMINIST FILM OF SORTS. WHAT FEMINIST SUBTEXTS CAN YOU READ INTO THIS MOVIE?

·       Writer Mark Frey says Sadako’s story carries on the tradition of Japanese ghost stories involving a woman being abused and killed. “Sadako’s rage avenges the injustices committed by men against women throughout history,” he says.

·       The image of the well itself is a powerful motif that stands as a Freudian symbol: a dark, wet, deep, mysterious place that represents the mysteries of female power, female genitalia and the womb; in this reading, it would be a particularly frightening motif for men.

WHAT OTHER FILMS DOES RINGU REMIND YOU OF?

·       Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon, in how the twist endings of both films resolve.

·       Mystery films like The Eyes of Laura Mars and Sensation, where supernatural forces are at work, but the main characters are sidetracked in the straightforward solving of a whodunit mystery.

·       Poltergeist and Videodrome, other movies where evil and supernatural forces emanate from a video screens.

·       Horror films whose premise is based on an urban legend, such as The Blair Witch Project.