31 Years, 31 Screams: The Ring

Posted by J.D. Dunn on 11.01.2007

In the well, no one can see...

The Ring (2002)
Director: Gore Verbinski
Writer: Koji Suzuki and Ehren Kruger
Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox and Daveigh Chase.
MPAA: [PG-13]
Runtime: 115m.

Joe Lieberman must love this film. After all, a videotape that directly causes the deaths of the people who watch it. Finally, he has that link he's always been looking for. For those of us who realize that Reefer Madness was not a documentary, however, The Ring is nothing more than a nice, scary, competently made horror film.

Based on the Japanese novel and film Ringu, Gore Verbinski's ghost story ushered in an era of PG-13 rated horror that proved to be both a blessing and a curse for the genre. Teens and squeamish adults found the emphasis on atmosphere and storytelling refreshing, while hardcore genre fans derided the lack of visceral terror one comes to expect from a horror picture. They'd just have to wait until 2004's unsavory Saw hit movie screens.

Naomi Watts plays Rachel Keller, a reporter investigating the deaths of a bunch of unrelated people, all of whom have only one thing in common – they watched a videotape seven days before they died. Not only are they dead, but they all seem to have been scared to death.

Of course, Rachel is skeptical of the whole story. I guess you have to be a little cynical to be a single working mom. Her son Aiden (creepy little David Dorfman) barely has a relationship with his deadbeat father Noah (Martin Henderson), and it seems to be causing him all sorts of psychological problems in school.

Rachel tracks down a copy of the tape and watches it. It looks like nothing more than a pretentious student film. We see a black circle, a well, a horse, and some other seemingly random images. Certainly, there's nothing on the tape to get worked up about.

But Rachel begins to search through the backstory of the tape. Everything in the film has some significance. She traces it back to a woman named Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran) who lived on Moesko Island, raising horses with her husband Richard (Brian Cox). Unable to carry her own child, Anna adopted a young girl named Samara (Daveigh Chase).

Unfortunately, the Morgans adopted a child of pure evil. All of the Morgans' horses went crazy and died trying to escape the ranch. Anna went into severe depression after that. Also, Anna began to experience visions when Samara was around, so she took Samara and banished herself to a mental institution. Anna would later commit suicide, and Samara would wind up at the bottom of a well.

Rachel tries to get information out of Richard, but he gruffly refuses, only telling her that the child was evil. When Rachel goes back to press him on the issue, Richard electrocutes himself in the tub. Rachel investigates the barn where they used to keep Samara and finds the image of a tree – a tree that stands at the Shelter Mountain Inn.

Rachel races to the Inn and finds a well underneath the floorboards. She crawls down and finds Samara's semi-dead body in the water. Samara shows her how Anna dropped her into the well before finally, apparently, dying. Rachel informs the authorities and arranges for a proper burial.

And so, you'd think, they lived happily ever after. But this ain't that film.

I won't spoil the rest for you, but I will say that The Ring works perfectly for the home video era. The late horror icon Bela Lugosi once stared in a silly little programmer called Murder by Television in the 1930s. Of course, the general public couldn't be absolutely certain that this new technology wasn't able to send out death rays. So, for many, the film worked. The Ring is something of an update of that idea only with the idea of a ghost story grafted on. I suppose that makes it much scarier – after all, ghosts can do whatever the hell they want.

For the most part, The Ring gets by on atmosphere and implied violence. We never see what happens to Katie Embry, but we do see the horrific aftermath in a near subliminal cut. Like many of the most popular horror films in recent years, The Ring relies more on storytelling and the idea of the horrific rather than showing it.

The 411: Not a perfect film, but it's definitely one that touches all the horror bases and builds gradually. I can say it's one of the better paced horror films I've ever seen with an emphasis on mystery and discovery (like all great ghost horrors). A worthy film to start the horror revitalization of the early 00's. A-