David, for those people who haven’t seen The Ring in 19 years since it came out, can you give us a quick catch-up on the premise of the movie?
THE RING MOVIE MOVIE
Gilbert: I want to have words with the friend who told you that this was a movie about a girl coming out of a well. READ: 25 horror movies for every kind of viewer I think Ringu is maybe scarier in some ways, but honestly, the American remake does hold its own. And rewatching it as an adult, I’m surprised by how the things that terrified me are still scary, but I can appreciate some of the other elements of the movie now. And for the next two years, I basically had nightmares about The Ring.īut weirdly enough, I have rewatched it a lot over the years, almost as if to exorcise it from my mind. I probably should have left the theater, but I sat there and I watched the rest of it. And from the first jump scare, when the mom opens the closet door and sees her daughter, I thought, Oh, no, I’m screwed. One of my friends had told me that it’s about a girl climbing out of a well.
I don’t think I really knew what the movie was about. I was 12 and did not have much of a tolerance for scary things. Lenika Cruz: I saw the American remake first when it came out, also in theaters. It has held up quite well, in my opinion. And watching it now, I was sort of astonished at how well-made it is compared with a lot of horror of my youth-2000s horror. So I’ve always had a fondness for the original, and when I saw the remake at 16, I thought it would be watered down, I remember liking it at the time. Sims: So I thought, I’ll just watch this Japanese horror movie … and I didn’t know that she was going to come out of that dang television! And I have really never forgotten it. I had seen Ringu, the original film, and it had quite a profound effect on me because I rented that when I was 13 or 14 from the video store, knowing very little but being a pretentious little proto film-boy. I saw it in theaters and I remember it scaring the sillies out of me. I had not seen this film in quite a long time. David, are you a Ring fan?ĭavid Sims: I certainly am. In the almost-20 years since it came out, it has had a vast influence on horror movies, and we wanted to rewatch and see if it holds up as a modern horror classic. Sophie Gilbert: It was Halloween this weekend, so we decided to step away from new releases and watch what I think all of us consider a classic horror movie: Gore Verbinski’s 2002 movie, The Ring, which, of course, is the remake of the Japanese horror movie released in North America in 1998 as Ringu. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Lenika Cruz here: But in the “prestige horror” era, it offers a warning about the temptations and responsibilities of sharing.Īnd so, in the spirit of the Halloween season, Atlantic staffers revisited The Ring for an episode of our culture podcast, The Review. It set off a wave of J-horror remakes, rekindled the supernatural monster movie, and gave audiences one of the best shock endings of all time. The Ring was a phenomenon when it came out 19 years ago. And whether an urban legend whispered at a ’90s slumber party or a viral anecdote shared and reshared online, alluring half-truths present a certain danger when circulated. The threat at the center of the movie isn’t the technology it’s the spread of a story. As John Mulaney would say, that is a very old-fashioned sentence.īut while audiences today have little to fear from a ghost that travels by VHS and kills by landline, the terrors in Gore Verbinski’s modern classic are oddly resonant. The 2002 horror film The Ring can be summarized in a delightfully analog fashion: After finding a VHS tape and receiving a phone call, a local newspaper reporter searches library archives to solve a mystery.
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