Horror was turning horrible. By the 1990s, the genre’s conventions were splattered with lots of gore but little guts; severed body parts proliferated as the psychology of fear retreated. American movies lacked the courage to face the darkness. Seldom were they even scary.
Ringu (1998) upended the new norm by recalling the genre’s essence of unease—the sense that anything might conceal something malign. The Japanese film and its sequels, Ringu 2 (1999) and Ringu 0 (2000), have been reissued by Arrow Video in a Blu-ray box set, “Ringu Collection,” along with an informative booklet and a profusion of bonus material.
Director Hideo Nakata and screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi turned their backs on Hollywood and drew from local sources. They derived Ringu’s story from Koji Suzuki’s novel and a millennium or more of Japanese folklore but placed it in the present moment. The prominent visual medium of that moment was VHS tape. With only a slight exercise of imagination, the tale can easily be reimagined for the era of YouTube and Instagram.
Ringu begins with a couple of teenage girls, home alone and scaring each other with spooky urban folklore. According to a story being passed word of mouth (it would go viral today), a “weird video” is circulating; people watching it receive a “prank phone call” telling them they will die one week from that moment. They laugh—and then the phone rings.
The story catches the eye of a young woman working in television, Reiko Asakawa. After the deaths of several teenagers were attributed to the “weird video,” the reporter decides to go beyond reaction interviews with local teens and travel to the alleged source of the video, a forested resort where the images might have first appeared on a local TV channel. Once there, Reiko finds a copy of the video. The surreal broadcast, spectral in its fuzzy, low resolution, concerns a girl in white, her face concealed by a mane of black hair. And then the phone rings.
The girl in white is a vengeful ghost, a familiar apparition from Japanese folklore. But instead of haunting a particular place, the restless entity, Sadako, roams a wider radius thanks to technology that visits her curse on people far removed from her place of torment. Accounts of who (or what?) she is vary, but abused child is a possibility advanced in the first film.
Subtle, often wordless and beautifully composed in the muted colors of twilight, Ringu creeps into the imagination like a silent stalker. The past haunts the present, but the dangerous ghost is enabled by the present-day’s unthinking embrace of technology. Is that prophetic?
