It's hard to overstate the impact this film had on modern horror and Japanese cinema in general. I think it would be fair to say Ring reinvigorated horror at a time when the increasingly tedious poststructural agenda of self-awareness had it gripped by the throat. Ring was a bolt out the blue, a back to basics horror that re-affirmed the original principles that make it such an enduring genre. It's almost unbearably tense, creepy and downright terrifying.Ring spawned an industry within Japan but also brought J-Horror (dim lighting, grubby kids, face-obscuring hair, bloody-minded weirdness) to the attention of Hollywood, becoming the first in a string of films to inspire American remakes.
But what the remakes lack is what Ring has in spades - otherness; a kind of indefinable and intrinsically unsettling Japanese-ness that is the DNA of the film and makes it what it is, certainly for Western audiences. Ring is really a modern take on ancient fears - contagion, in the form of video, and the fundamentally terrifying prospect of the supernatural becoming flesh and blood, dissolving the comfortable boundary between the real world and the imagined, through the medium of the television screen. Literally.
The best human-shaped screens since Videodrome - it'll leave you scared of your TV for weeks.
リング
Dir. Hideo Nakata, 1998
While I don't disagree with any comments on the brilliance of the film, the whole J-horror, girl in white with long black hair wasn't, as far as I'm aware, in any way an original concept to Japan. It's an old, old image; their boogieman. It was just placed in a movie concept that translates very easily.
ReplyDeleteThe Korean remake's fairly poor, undeniably the weakest version, but I actually quite like the US remake. Inferior, yes, but still bloody good and better than most subsequent J-horrors from Japan.
Yeah, but the archetype of the vengeful spirit hadn't really been seen in cinema since the Kaidan movies of the sixties. I think Ted is saying that Ring brought it back to public conciousness as well as a lot of other baggage that went on to instruct J-Horror as a genre, the originality of Ring comes from it's embedding of this folklore into modern technology (TV and video!).
ReplyDeleteIt would be like if there was a British horror film made where an old man wreathed in chains and dust emerged from an iPod touch. I'm not sure that would work as well though.