[Jeff's mission to blog each day in March on the same topic has gotten handily derailed by the presence of Final Fantasy XIII in his household, but his stumble toward next week's finish line begins here.]
It’s unpopular opinion time: I love the American version of The Ring.
I’ve never been of the mindset that there is a contest between The Ring and its forbear Ringu and they are both effective, atmospheric ghost stories that are unique in their story strength and their overall quality – the truth of the matter is that J-horror, as much as or more than American horror, is a rushed, low-budget affair that often succeeds in spite of itself when it does in fact succeed (One Missed Call, Ju-On: The Grudge, Audition – and it’s no mistake that two of those films share a director).
Yes, The Ring Two is a more questionable film shaped from what feels like a phoned-in screenplay and it does not adhere to the complex and not-as-good-as-geeks-want-it-to-be mythology created by Ringu’s web of sequels and prequels. Cut free from its context, though, The Ring continues to stand on its own by following and revivifying genre convention right up until the point where the film twists around and gives convention the finger. I still remember the moment when it occurred – I was gathering up my discarded popcorn bag and empty ICEE cup, sure we were seeing the denouement, and then BAM – “Why would you do that?” with its delivery full of pitched terror and then you realize that you’ve only just now seen the climax, the hill at the top of the roller coaster. It is one of the only true “Wait, what?” moments in the last decade’s horror cinema and it is balanced by a masterfully parceled-out slow burn plot.
The real appeal of the film, beyond the manipulations of the director and the sense of looming dread, is the source of its horror – that we are bad parents. It is a thread that runs through the Morgans through Rachel’s sister and is carried for most of the film by Rachel herself – who is, after all, a legitimately neglectful parent who finds her television babysitter subverted to imperil her son. That we are unfit parents – something I’ve contended about myself for years despite not having a child to test the hypothesis on – is a cultural fear, one exacerbated by working single parents, a high divorce rate and a constant litany of derision from parenting gurus who claim that too much time unsupervised in front of the TV can be dangerous, at least developmentally. The Ring packages all of this in a horror story scenario, but at the heart of it is an absentee mother and another mother who wanted a child more than anything only to have their relationship not be the sugar and rainbows reverie that she dreamed. It is a human drama first, before there are even ghosts involved.
Another persistent element of the film, one that the short film Rings picks up on, is that the nature of the solution to the first film – that the tape is perpetually copied and circulated to forestall death – becomes the problem of the next step outward in the curse’s pathology. Rings focuses on one small clique that is part of a larger underground online community based around the distribution and viewing of the tape – a sort of game that develops into how long one can go into the infamous 7-day death spiral before caving and making a life-saving copy of the series’ evil videotape MacGuffin. Like Pulse (coincidentally another J-horror remake), Rings hints at a larger world that’s aware of the events that exists just outside the scope of the main story.
The Ring is nearly a decade old now, and it signaled a major change in the horror landscape – it killed the self-aware, nu-slasher as handily as the ghost resurgence of the first half of the last decade was subdued by Hostel‘s ‘torture porn’. It helped to legitimize the remake and opened the door on foreign horror for a lot of film buffs. It may be hip to dislike The Ring, but its influence can’t be denied.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I really dislike that movie. Not because it’s cool to dislike it, but because it scared me, a lot. Like sleeping with the lights on a lot.