If you remember anything about Gore Verbinski’s cursed videotape chiller,ring,” was released on Tuesday 20 years ago, and it’s probably a threat in a whisper. seven days.
Or it could be the eyes of a creepy girl peering out from behind a curtain of stringy black hair. Or the bizarre images that make up a movie within a movie: fiery red trees, dead horses littering the shore, fingers stuck in rusty nails. In “The Ring,” any unlucky soul who sees this strange videotape receives a menacing phone call as soon as the noise breaks, and within a week is at the hands of a waterlogged ghoul who crawls out of the TV. put away.
“The Ring” is a blockbuster novel by Koji Suzuki, 1998 film adaptation By Hideo Nakata, for horror, it doesn’t rely too much on high body numbers or on the shape of blood or internal organs. , taps into the familiar sense of ambient anxiety and unexplained anxiety.
In fact, it’s astonishingly restrained, unfolding like a terror-stricken waking dream. Watts) is tasked with uncovering the truth behind the sudden death of her teenage niece, Katie (Amber Tamblyn). Faces horribly contorted, frozen in anguish, like in “The Scream.” When Katie’s classmates suggest a ghost video is the culprit, Rachel tracks it down and watches it, starting the countdown to her own death. A sort of vengeful Samara story is revealed, but these revelations do not break the curse. A prisoner can be released simply by showing the tape to others.
Audiences at the time wanted to see the tapes with their own eyes. ‘The Ring’ became a sleeper hit and was eventually accepted Approximately $130 million domestically And started a series of American remakes of Japanese horror films. This is his one of Hollywood’s most defining and representative trends of the 2000s. Along with his 1999 hits “The Sixth Sense” and “The Blair Witch Project,” the popularity of “The Ring” represented a shift from his teenage hitman charm that had dominated the past three decades. .
When Dreamworks approached him about remaking a Japanese movie, Verbinski said, “wind-up bird chronicleHaruki Murakami’s surreal epic novel. By the end of the 1990s, Japanese pop culture had made its way into the United States. Think of the rise of Nintendo and the Pokemon frenzy. No wonder Hollywood executives jumped at the opportunity to remake for American audiences the highest-grossing horror movie ever released in Japan at the time, The Ring. “The Ring” was one of the key traits he unleashed on J-Horror. It’s a Western term for the subsequent cycle of Japanese horror films, partly characterized by the relationship between traditional folklore demons and spirits and new millennium technology. .
“The original is beautifully abstract and moody, but American audiences want some kind of solution or a straight path,” Verbinski said in an interview. “They want to follow the breadcrumbs.” So we created a more linear story, and the advantage is that it meets that expectation.”
Other remakes of the J-horror sensation followed, such as ‘The Grudge’ (2004) and ‘Dark Waters’ (2005), but none achieved equal success or the same level of cultural impact.
“The Ring” might even be considered a millennial horror classic. Older millennials born in the ’80s were teenagers then, but younger generations turned to video stores or relied on the words of older siblings who lived to tell their stories. Children in those days were not forbidden to enter the theater. “The Ring” was rated his PG-13, but its disturbing atmosphere, the sudden change in sound from loud to quiet, and the ominous Hans-Her Zimmer score set it apart from epic violence. It’s spooked more effectively than other movies full of.
The frenzy surrounding J-horror remakes may have been short-lived, but what made 2002’s “The Ring” so terrifying, and how the novel and original film were set in Japan’s social disintegration in the ’90s? Central to the disturbing depiction of the death penalty is the transferable nature of the death sentence, which makes even the victim complicit. Several American horror films since “The Ring” have adopted similar formulas to critical acclaim and commercially fruitful results. David Robert Mitchell’s 2015 “it lastsA teenager tries to inflict a supernatural STD on a sexual partner. The sexual partner takes the spell upon completion, followed relentlessly by the murderous undead entity. “smile, the current box office heavyweight, gets even closer to “The Ring” by taking the perspective of a cursed woman desperate to find a solution before time. She committed extravagant bloody suicide. She has only one way out of this curse. to kill someone else.
Last October, Cristina Cacioppo said, nighthawk cinema Brooklyn screened “The Ring” as part of a series dedicated to 2000s horror remakes. “Remakes can have a stigma,” she said. Of “The Ring,” she recalls: When I finally saw it, I realized it was very original – it’s good!”
She also credits a performance by Naomi Watts for enhancing the film.Mulholland Drive”
And, of course, there are videotapes that resemble experimental short films. Early in the film, we see the whole thing through Rachel’s eyes. Depending on my mood, it may play like a taunt in a silly student movie. At first, Killer Tape is treated like a high school urban legend. The inability to determine if a threat is legitimate is one reason the videotape never goes away.
“I wanted it to be unforgettable, but I wanted it to be a little dismissive,” Verbinski told me. “I degraded the image until it felt like it was shot by an amateur with a Super 8 camera. It’s like dreaming, but when you wake up there are matches on the table.”
For Verbinski, the film’s appeal is bound up with the zeitgeist. It was released in 2002, but the director and his crew were in preparatory stages when the events of 9/11 occurred, forcing filming to move from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest.
“There’s an element of randomness in the film, and the loss of control and the breakdown of balance make it work,” he said. There’s no sense.It’s terrifying when your belief system collapses, leaving you in this existential free fall.”While the film is clearly not a direct result of 9/11, it does have a “similar crisis.” It’s very clear,” he added. will make you complete
Maybe that’s why ‘The Ring’ — even though its legacy includes some truly terrifying sequels and endearing but contracting parodies. “Scary Movie 3” — especially haunting for those of us who remember the now-distant world of landlines and cassette players.
“2002 was the year we started to lose our sense of loss and meaning,” says Verbinski. “There was a real sense of before and after, but now it’s all a blur and we swim alone every day in that crisis, but we’re still looking for something to share.”