Ring (film)

Ring
Japanese theatrical release poster
リング
Directed by	Hideo Nakata
Produced by	Takashige Ichise Shinya Kawai Takenori Sento[1]
Screenplay by	Hiroshi Takahashi[1]
Based on	Ring by Kôji Suzuki
Starring	Nanako Matsushima Hiroyuki Sanada Rikiya Ōtaka Yoichi Numata
Music by	Kenji Kawai[1]
Cinematography	Jun'ichirō Hayashi[1]
Edited by	Nobuyuki Takahashi[1]
Production company	Ringu/Rasen Production Committee[1]
Distributed by	Toho
Release dates	January 31, 1998 (1998-01-31) (Japan)
Running time	95 minutes[1]
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Box office	¥1 billion[2]

Ring (リング, Ringu) is a 1998 Japanese psychological horror film directed by Hideo Nakata, adapted from the novel Ring by Kôji Suzuki, which in turn draws on the Japanese folk tale Banchō Sarayashiki. The film stars Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Rikiya Ōtaka. The film follows TV reporter and single mother Reiko who is caught up in a series of deaths surrounding a cursed video tape.

Production took approximately 9 months.^[3] Ring and its sequel Rasen were released in Japan at the same time. After its release, Ring inspired numerous follow-ups within the Ring franchise and triggered a trend of Western remakes, starting with the 2002 American film The Ring.

Plot

Two teenagers, Masami (Hitomi Satō) and Tomoko (Yūko Takeuchi), 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.

Days later, Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), a reporter investigating the popularity of the video curse, discovers that her niece Tomoko, and her three other friends, 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.

Reiko goes to Izu and arrives at the rented cabin, where she finds an unlabeled tape in the reception room of the teenagers' rental cottage. Watching the tape, Reiko sees a series of seemingly unrelated disturbing images. As soon as the tape is over, Reiko sees a mysterious reflection in the television and receives a phone call containing the screeching sounds from the tape. Disturbed, she flees the cabin.

Reiko enlists the help of her ex-husband, Ryūji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada). They take a picture of Reiko and find her face blurred in the photograph. Ryūji then watches the tape, against Reiko's objections. A day later, Reiko creates a copy for Ryūji for them to study. They find a hidden message embedded within the tape saying "frolic in brine, goblins be thine". The message is in a form of dialect from Izu Ōshima Island. That night, Reiko catches her young son Yoichi watching the videotape, claiming that Tomoko had told him to do it. Reiko and Ryūji sail for Ōshima and discover the history of the great psychic Shizuko Yamamura, who was accused of faking supernatural powers; and thus committed suicide.

With only a day left, Reiko and Ryūji discover that the videotape was made psionically by Shizuko's lost daughter, Sadako Yamamura, whose supernatural powers surpassed even those of her mother. The two go back to Izu with the assumption that Sadako is dead and her vengeful spirit (Onryō) killed the teenagers. They uncover a well underneath the cabin and through a vision see the circumstances of Sadako's murder by her father. They try to find Sadako's body in an attempt to appease her spirit. Minutes before her seven days are up, Reiko finds Sadako's corpse, and they believe that the curse is broken.

The next day Ryūji is at home and his TV switches on by itself, showing the image of a well. The ghost of Sadako crawls out of the well, out of Ryūji's TV set, and frightens him into a state of shock, killing him via cardiac arrest. Before dying, he manages to dial Reiko's number; she hears his last minutes over the phone and realizes the videotape's curse remains unbroken. Desperate to save her son, Reiko realizes that copying the tape and showing it to someone else saved her. With a VCR and Ryūji's copy of the tape, Reiko travels with her son to see her father in an attempt to save him, realizing that this is a never-ending cycle: The tape must always be copied and passed on to ensure the survival of the viewers.

Themes

Critics have discussed Ring’s preoccupations with Japanese tradition’s collision with modernity. Colette Balmain identifies, “In the figure of Sadako, Ring [utilises the] vengeful yūrei archetype of conventional Japanese horror”. She argues how this traditional Japanese figure is expressed via a videotape which “embodies contemporary anxieties, in that it is technology through which the repressed past reasserts itself”.^[4]

Ruth Goldberg argues that Ring expresses "ambivalence about motherhood”. She reads Reiko as a mother who – due to the new potential for women’s independence – neglects her 'natural' role as martyred homemaker in pursuit of an independent identity, subsequently neglecting her child. Goldberg identifies a doubling effect whereby the unconscious conflicts of Reiko’s family are expressed via the supernatural in the other family under Reiko’s investigation.^[5]

Jay McRoy reads the ending hopefully: if the characters therapeutically understand their conflicts, they can live on.^[6] Balmain, however, is not optimistic. She claims that the characters' survival relies on reassertion of patriarchy and she reads the replication of the video as technology spreading, virus-like, throughout Japan.^[4]

Cast

• Nanako Matsushima as Reiko Asakawa, a journalist who investigates her niece's death and finds the cursed videotape.
• Hiroyuki Sanada as Ryūji Takayama, Reiko's ex-husband, a former medical student turned university professor. He has a degree of sixth sense that detects supernatural auras.
• Rikiya Ōtaka as Yōichi Asakawa, Reiko's young son who also has a sixth sense like his father.
• Miki Nakatani as Mai Takano, Ryuji's student.
• Yūko Takeuchi as Tomoko Ōishi, Reiko's niece who watches the cursed videotape and is amongst its first victims.
• Hitomi Satō as Masami Kurahashi, Tomoko's best friend.
• Rie Inō as Sadako Yamamura, the antagonist of the film. A woman with psychic powers who was thrown down a well where she died, but her spirit lived on within a videotape.
• Masako as Shizuko Yamamura, Sadako's mother. She too had psychic powers but a disastrous press demonstration led to her suicide.
• Yōichi Numata as Takashi Yamamura, Sadako's uncle who runs an inn on Oshima Island.
• Yutaka Matsushige as Yoshino, a journalist associate of Reiko.
• Katsumi Muramatsu as Kōichi Asakawa, Reiko's father.

Production

After the moderate success of the Ring novel, written by Kōji Suzuki and published in 1991, publisher Kadokawa Shoten decided to make a motion picture adaptation of Ring.

Screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi and director Hideo Nakata collaborated to work on the script after reading Suzuki's novel and watching Ring, Fuji Television Network's 1995 made-for-TV film, directed by Chisui Takigawa.^[7] However, the TV version was re-edited and released on VHS under a new title, Ring: Kanzenban (Ring: The Complete Edition).^[7] Nakata did not state which TV version he and Takahashi watched.

In their film script, Takashi and Nakata changed the protagonist's gender (from male to female), name (from Kazuyuki Asakawa to Reiko Asakawa), marital status (from married to divorced) and child's gender and name (from daughter Yoko to son Yoichi).^[7]

With the budget of 1.2 million USD, the entire production took nine months and one week. According to director Nakata, the script and pre-production process took three or four months, shooting five weeks and post-production four months.^[3]

The special effects on the cursed videotape and some parts in the film were shot on a 35 mm film which was passed on in a laboratory in which a computer added a 'grainy' effect.^[3] Extended visual effects were used in the part in which the ghost of Sadako Yamamura climbs out of the television. First, they shot the Kabuki Theater actress Rie Ino'o walking backwards in a jerky, exaggerated motion. They then played the film in reverse to portray an unnatural-looking walk for Sadako.^[8]

Sadako's eye, which appears in close-up towards the end of the film and on Tartan's UK DVD cover,^[9] was that of a male crew member rather than Ino'o herself.^[8]

Release

Ring was released in Japan on January 31, 1998 where it was distributed by Toho.^[1] Upon release in Japan, Ring became the highest grossing horror film in the country.^[10] The film was shown at the 1999 Fantasia Film Festival where it won the first place award for Best Feature in the Asian films section.^[11] On its 1999 Hong Kong release, Ring earned HK$31.2 million (US$4.03 million) during its two-month theatrical run making it Hong Kong's highest-grossing Japanese-language film.^[12] This record was later beaten by Stand By Me Doraemon in 2015.^[12]

Reception

Ring was released to critical acclaim. Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 97%, based on 36 reviews, with a rating average of 7.6/10.The site's critical consensus reads, "Ringu combines supernatural elements with anxieties about modern technology in a truly frightening and unnerving way."^[13]

Sight & Sound critic Mark Kermode praised the film's "timeless terror," with its "combination of old folk devils and contemporary moral panics" which appeal to both teen and adult audiences alike.^[10] While Adam Smith of Empire Online finds the film "throttled by its over complexity, duff plotting and a distinct lack of actual action,"^[14] Kermode emphasizes that "one is inclined to conclude that it is the telling, rather than the content of the tale, that is all-important."^[10] Variety agrees that the slow pace, with "its gradual evocation of evil lying await beneath the surface of normality," is one of the film's biggest strengths.^[15]

Ring was ranked #69 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010.^[16] In the early 2010s, Time Out conducted a poll with several authors, directors, actors and critics who have worked within the horror genre to vote for their top horror films.^[17] Ring placed at number 61 on their top 100 list.^[18]

Influence

The international success of the Japanese films launched a revival of horror filmmaking in Japan that resulted in such pictures as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse (known as Circuit (回路, Kairo) in Japan), Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge (呪怨, Juon) (2000), Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から, Honogurai mizu no soko kara, literally From the Depths of Dark Water), also based on a short story by Suzuki), and Higuchinsky's Uzumaki (2000, aka Vortex, based on the Junji Itō horror manga of the same name).

Influence on Western cinema

Ring had some influence on Western cinema and gained cult status in the West.^[19]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood horror had largely been dominated by the slasher subgenre, which relied on on-screen violence, shock tactics, and gore.^[19] Ring, whose release in Japan roughly coincided with the stylistically similar film The Blair Witch Project in the United States, helped to revitalize the genre by taking a more restrained approach to horror, leaving much of the terror to the audience's imagination.^[19] The film initiated global interest in Japanese cinema in general and Japanese horror cinema in particular, a renaissance which led to the coining of the term J-Horror in the West. This "New Asian Horror"^[4] resulted in further successful releases, such as Ju-on: The Grudge and Dark Water.^[6]

All three of these films were remade in the US. Released in 2002, The Ring reached number 1 at the box office and grossed more in Japan than the original.^[4]

Sequels and remakes

Japanese prequels and sequels

Korean remake

Video game adaptations

• The Ring: Terror's Realm (2000)
• Ring: Infinity (2000)

American film series

The American remake follows the original closely although plot elements are altered or added in and Sadako Yamamura is reformed into Samara Morgan. Ring has been described as the most frightening film of all time by Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's film critic.^[20] Ring is also listed as the twelfth best horror film of all time by The Guardian.^[21]

• American remake: The Ring (2002)
• American short film: Rings (2005)
• American remake’s sequel: The Ring Two (2005)
• American remake's second sequel: Rings (2017)

Crossovers

See also

• List of ghost films
• Yotsuya Kaidan
• Kayako Saeki
• Don't Look Up

Notes

References

External links

• Ring at the Internet Movie Database
• Ring at AllMovie
• Ring at Rotten Tomatoes
• Snowblood Apple's Ring Cycle article - an overview of all Ring films.