Ring (Rungu)

Dir: Hideo Nakata

1998

*****

It’s fair to say that director Hideo Nakata changed the world of horror dramatically when he released his 1998 adaption of Kôji Suzuki’s novel Ring. The impact of the film was huge but its origins are easy to spot. The themes deal with folk-tale devils and simply mixes mythology within a contemporary situation. Suzuki was inspired by two things; the story of Chizuko Mifune 1982’s Poltergeist (although he clearly saw David Cronenberg's Videodrome)  Mifune was born in 1886 in Kumamoto Prefecture and was rumored to have the gift of foresight. After a demonstration in 1910, she was proclaimed a charlatan and committed suicide a year later by ingesting poison. It is essentially Mifune’s ghost that our protagonists are being haunted by. The story begins with two teenagers, Masami and Tomoko, who talk about a videotape recorded by a boy in Izu which is fabled to bear a curse that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Tomoko reveals that a week ago, she and three of her friends watched a weird tape and received a call after watching. Tomoko goes downstairs and witnesses her TV turn on by itself. She later hears startling noises and turns around, only to be killed by an unseen force. It’s a classic horror opener, highlighted by the film Scream that was released two years previous and every bit as compelling. We then follow Reiko Asakawa, a reporter investigating the popularity of the video curse who discovers that it was her niece Tomoko, along with her three other friends, who mysteriously died at the same time, on the same night, with their faces twisted in fear. She also discovers that Masami became insane from witnessing Tomoko's death and is institutionalised in a mental hospital. After stumbling upon Tomoko's photos from the past week, Reiko finds that the four teenagers stayed in a rental cabin in Izu. It all gets a bit ‘Evil Dead’ from there on in but with a certain X-Files vibe. It’s quite a slow-building film with many gaps between horror but it has an eerie quality that influenced many horror films that followed. However, the now infamous scene whereby the film’s evil spirit breaks down the wall between recording and reality is iconic. Sure, Pennywise did it eight year before to great effect and it has happened elsewhere in sci-fi many time over, but somehow Nakata made it his own and the most terrifying it had been. Many have speculated was Ring is about, with a majority agreeing that it is an exploration of contemporary anxieties, technology being the method in which the repressed past reasserts itself. It’s tradition vs technology, old Japan fighting against new. Others have suggested that it is about ambivalence about motherhood and the dangers that come from it – again, a bit of old world thinking. I think its just a neat idea, and not really original. The 90s saw the rise of home video to the high of its success. What is scarier than watching a video come to life and kill you while you are yourself watching a similarly themed video. It’s like that scene in Arachnophobia when the spider comes out of the popcorn – I’ve never heard screams like that come from a cinema, a brilliant and simple move. It is Ring’s simplicity that make it so clever, indeed, it was simplicity that saw a resurgence in modern horror rather than technology – technology making things simpler. The special effects are very simple too, Nakata being the first to develop the now overused method of filming backwards and forwarding the tapes during the editing process. I also think the found footage horror sub-genre owe a great deal to Ring. I’m not too sure what is so scary about long-haired Japanese women and pale Japanese boys that have seen them appear time and time again in such horror movies but somehow they become more frightening the more we see them. I found Hideo Nakata's Dark Water to be a more intriguing film and Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge far more terrifying but you have to give credit Ring for upping the game.