The Ancient Fear that resides within the Ring.

Ring or Ringu as it is titled in Japanese has gone down in history as the cornerstone of Japanese horror. The film amounted in a time when horror was a genre that most of the Western world didn’t take very seriously. Horror had received a punishingly poor reputation for some time. Most people associated the genre with the low budget 80s slashers such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th. They were derivative and formulaic films that depended heavily on jump scares for the date-movie audience consisting mostly of teenagers. Darkly surreal and powerful films such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had become distant relics. However, this was only in the west. Horror has been a massive part of Asian culture for a very long time, particularly in Japan. Ghost stories with the exact same themes and imagery have existed in Japan from the feudal period in the forms of literature and theatre. Ring was based on a novel by Koji Suzuki but that novel was influenced by an old Japanese ghost story called Bancho Sarayashiki. So Ring may not be an entirely original film but it has adapted a fear that has haunted a culture for hundreds of years into a modern scenario. The way in which this fear has been so immaculately captured opened up a world of horror that was completely unknown to Western audiences.

Ring provided a kind of terror that was distinctive to Japanese culture. It ties in heavily with Japanese spirituality, particularly the belief of vengeful spirits and how they transcend into our world. Japanese horror is a unique form of horror. It almost never resorts to jump scares, as the intension of the film is not to be thrilling or fun. Instead the sense of fear and dread is built from the atmosphere and so much of that comes from what they don’t show or tell you. There is a never-ending, brooding, underlying darkness to the films that leaves the audience completely suffocated. The films are often unexplained and unresolved leaving you with a bitter feeling at the end. The ghosts are characterized through different techniques such as the use of contrasting black and white, abnormal body movements and faces that are either completely hidden or reveal very little. Japanese horror is a minimalist genre, the most effective films require very little to be utterly chilling. The horror is broken down to its purest form, a fear of the unknown that resides within all of us. Fear is the most powerful emotion and Ring exploits it for all it is worth.

Ring is my favourite film. I must have seen it ten times and still it draws me in and leaves me bewildered. For those who are not familiar the story follows Reiko, a reporter investigating an urban legend surrounding a cursed videotape that is apparently linked to a string of deaths. The scene when the footage on the tape is revealed is amongst one of the unsettling in the whole film. There had been so many questions built up around the tape and after it was revealed there was only more. The footage contained several shots including one of the sky as viewed from down inside a well, people in agony on the beach, a woman with cloth covering her face pointing in a direction off screen, the reflection of a woman combing her hair while the camera cuts to another clip of the mirror at a different angle revealing a girl with black hair completely covering her face, a strange looking eye and then finally a well in woods. This imagery ties in with the themes and lore of the film but nothing is too direct. It remains possibly the most ominous and confronting scene that I have ever seen in a film to date. The way that the woman combing her hair stares into the camera is almost as if she is breaking the fourth wall and looking at us.

Every time that I return to Ring I feel like I am gaining something new from the film and there are still so many layers of content that I am yet to discover. It is not an abstract art-house film but it is by no means a conventional horror film. However, the American version titled The Ring is standard horror film with a Japanese taste and it winds off feeling cheesy. The film is clear proof that Hollywood has appreciation for Japanese horror but attempting to re-create one of the films through their terms is futile. The Ring depends on horror clichés and special effects to make up for the lack of imagination. The end result is a film that is feels bland and pointless. The imagery shown in the tape from The Ring feels vacuous and tacked on. It is essentially a collection of shots containing surreal or revolting imagery. It just feels like a montage that was put together of inconsistent things that only shared the quality of being horrific. Gone was the dark and ominous feeling from the tape in Ring. This short clip alone displays how misguided the filmmakers of The Ring truly were. Ring is such a difficult film to Westernize because it is such a Japanese film. It reflects the phobia of a country that is just as immersed with tradition and spirituality as they are with technology. Years later Hollywood has continued to release countless remakes of Japanese horror films and in general the films are failures in the eyes of critics. It does say something about our unique fascination for Japanese horror though. Somehow the Japanese have managed to capture a mysterious fear that resonates with us all and it continues to remain a form of horror that only they can master.