The Ring

Hello, Sydney. Who is this? It's your killer host! I got plenty of friends. I can name three right off the bat. My name is Parker, your resident horror fanatic. I'm Parker, Scaredy Scream Queen, and I'm Parker, Scary Movie Skeptic. And welcome to What's your favorite scary movie? What's your favorite scary movie is a horror film podcast where we're on a journey to find our favorite scary movie one at a time. Whether you hate them or love them, join us and discover yours. Spoilers ahead, so plan your movie screening every weekend before the episode release. Hello and welcome to another episode of What's Your Favorite Scary Movie? As you may have gathered from the intro, there have been some changes brewing in our personal lives, mine, Caroline, and Ian's.

And today it's just gonna be me and you, listener, on a journey through one of my most nostalgic horror movies, one of my favorites, The Ring. The Ring was released in the year 2002, and if you're my age, then it haunted many a middle school slumber party. It was directed by Gore Verbinski, who also directed three of the Pirates of the Caribbean films and Rango, which he won an Academy Award for. This film was written by Aaron Kruger, who I um have a bit of a love-hate relationship with because The Ring rules, but he was also the writer of Scream Three. The Ring stars Naomi Watts, who plays Rachel. She returns in the sequel The Ring 2 and is also famous for performing in Moholland Drive from 2001, King Kong in 2005, and Funny Games in 2007.

It also stars Martin Henderson, who plays Noah. He was in The Strangers Pray at Night from 2018, which is underrated. That film slaps. And uh Brian Cox as Richard Morgan. He's been in a lot of stuff, including Manhunter from 1986, Trick or Treat from 2008, and one of my faves on Netflix right now, The Autopsy of Jane Doe from 2016. The film also has David Dorfman playing Aiden, Shannon Cochrane as Anna Morgan, and Davey Chase as Samara. The bare bones IMDB summary of this film, we'll get into the details later, is quote A journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape which seems to cause the death of anyone one week to the day after they view it.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the critic score is 71%, and the audience score is 48%, which come on guys, this movie rules. The Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus says, with little gore and a lot of creepy visuals, the ring gets under your skin. Thanks to director Gore Verbinski's haunting sense of atmosphere and an impassioned performance from Naomi Watts. The Ring is based on the Japanese movie Ringu from 1998, which was an adaptation of a 1989 novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki. It is currently, as of you know, March 2020, the 18th highest grossing horror film of all time, with almost$250 million worldwide, so a bit of a phenomenon. According to Wikipedia, the franchise includes eight Japanese films, including one from last year called S uh Sudako, two television series, six manga adaptations, five international film remakes, the American ones, which we'll be chatting about, and two video games.

So there is no shortage of ring material out there if you want more of your fix. To start off the conversation, I think that it would be worthwhile to kind of jump back in time and look at the Japanese horror craze that was happening in the early 2000s. If you're familiar with kind of the timeline of horror history, or have listened to our episodes on Scream or Final Destination, or maybe even our coverage of The Grudge 2020 earlier this year, you'll know that the late 90s saw the Scream Slasher revival, and that by the early 2000s that was already becoming a little exhausted, and people were looking for something new. So in Japan, there was a bit of a shift in horror culture going on.

Their horror films had always centered more around Japanese folklore and history because Japan has a super rich culture of mythology and legends. In 1998, Ringu shifted the focus of J-horror to include fears of the modern Japanese consciousness, like the upcoming digital age and technology saturating their culture. I think that Ringu is particularly interesting to look at in Japanese culture because the film, the story, I I have not read the novel, so maybe that too. But it takes a classical element of Japanese mythology, a ghost known as, and forgive me, because I'm gonna butcher these names because I do not speak Japanese, but they call their ghosts Yurei, I believe. And that's kind of the general uh over umbrella name for their ghosts, but specifically an on-ryo is a vengeful ghost who is come back to uh seek vengeance for some sort of wrong done to them during their life.

That's how we have Sudako. But then around her, she is dealing with technology like videotape, which was becoming more and more prevalent in the 80s, and then already, you know, VHS starts to feel a little outdated in the late 90s when Ringu came out, and especially in the early 2000s when the American remake came out. It's kind of like, uh, is VHS technology? But none the same, the idea and the theme is already there. It's curious to see how, especially like I just mentioned with time, but with different cultures, the ideas of this clash of um historical uh characters and modern technology uh might not translate into America quite the same way. Instead, what I think might have captured American audiences is just that this is a really good mystery.

And Americans love a mystery. So as more Japanese horror movies started being made in Japan that were related to Japanese culture, we started seeing that there are just good stories that can be made by people who aren't Americans. So obviously, they then remade those in America, and unfortunately, not all of them are as good as The Ring. So back to the history lesson. Ringu ignited a huge horror renaissance in Japan and led to the to a pack of now very recognizable uh J-Horror subgenre films, all of them kind of featuring the same kind of like uh very pale, squishy, watery girls. And those girls like Sudoku from the Ring or like Kayako from The Grudge quickly made their way over to America.

So after all the scream shenanigans were kind of wrapping up, the ring started its own craze of remaking Japanese horror movies for English-speaking audiences. The Grudge, starring Sarah Michelle Geller, Followed the Ring, and aside from sequels, we also saw remakes of Dark Water, One Miss Call, The Eye, The Uninvited, and even more. The American Jay Horror Craze lasted a few years, but was ultimately wiped out when Saw kind of led the Gore craze and then found footage, became an obsession with paranormal activity. So keeping that in mind, it's clear that Ring, Ringu, especially in Japan, but the Ring also had a huge part in beginning this craze in America. We're kind of looking at the um trailblazer here.

And I think that this film has a lot of elements that initially, when I first saw it and didn't kind of have this knowledge, I was like, uh, been there, done that. For example, you know, distorted faces in the images or the creepy uh scribbling out the faces in the photos, even Samara herself, and then there's a cabin in the woods, and there's this like crazy blue-green color grading. That all at this point is like, yeah, we've seen it so many times. But thinking back, these were all still kind of new and more uh exciting ideas. I think that overall, this movie still holds up as super scary. I think there's a lot of tension. The way that the days are counted down consistently throughout it really builds a lot of suspense because I'm always like, uh, she's not gonna make it.

I'm not personally as driven as Rachel is in this movie. If I got a phone call saying I was gonna die in seven days, I'd be like, well, I better stock up on candy and make sure I have a good seven days. Uh, but she is of a different mindset. So she's our protagonist, played by Naomi Watts, and she is a reporter for the Seattle P.I., she calls it. She is driven and on a quest after she hears of her niece's death to find out what's happened with this videotape that's become urban legend with all of the young people in this town. I really enjoyed the way that they played this out so that when they told us the legend of the Samara's tape, it wasn't like somebody just spouting off facts at the screen, but there was, you know, this already set up an established tradition of passing on this tale from person to person to kind of scare each other like a campfire story.

You know, we've seen that in films like Friday the 13th, part two, but I still thought it was clever and worked well here. I think that the other big thing that really pulls this movie together is Naomi Watts. She is pretty incredible and her kind of visceral reactions to things, you know, she's kind of cold, so I don't always feel the fear through her, but more the panic and the uh distress that she feels as she feels time ticking down, like I said, with those kind of uh big title cards jumping up with the days left. Uh, I think that her performance really feels that emotional dread and uh even physical like tingle of like, oh my god, is she gonna make it?

Beginning the movie, there's this cold open with the two schoolgirls watching TV. They start setting up kind of the theme of um technology as virus, which you know, we don't want to talk about viruses too much right now. I hate television. It gives me a headache. You know, I heard there's so many magnetic waves traveling through the air because of the TV and telephones. They're losing like ten times as many brains on what we're supposed to. Like all the molecules in our heads are all unstable. All the companies know about it, but they're not doing anything about it. It's a big conspiracy. We'll see what happens if you watch too many uh videotapes. Um, I think that this initial scene, which has been parodied, this film is a huge victim of the scary movie franchise.

But this first opening, cold open scene, uh, I think kind of goes down in horror history with others like even Drew Barrymore's scream. I think it's extremely recognizable, and these two girls opening the fridge and closing it, and then the uh water on the floor and Samara kind of you know staring down the uh girl through the TV. That's something that I've remembered ever since I was a kid. Uh after this cold open, which is very scary, I think, there is setup for all of the characters, and my big thing about this movie is that Aiden is fucking creepy. He has his creepy drawings, he's talking about death, and he calls his mom by his first her first name like a freaking psycho.

And by the end of the movie, I was like, wait, this kid's good, he's not turning into the evil one. So, Aiden, I don't have time for you. But when they go to the funeral or the uh kind of morning ceremony, I don't know what it is, like a wake for um his cousin that he was very close to who died at the beginning of the film, there is one of the best jump scares of uh any horror movie when Rachel is talking to the uh her niece's mother, so I guess her sister, about what happened. Rachel, please. I saw her face. I jump every single freaking time I see that. This then goes into Rachel going to the cabin and the introduction of the scary VHS tape that she watches.

It's full of a lot of interesting imagery, I think, and a lot of grotesque imagery as well. I close my eyes every time there's the finger that kind of squishes down on the nail and it pops the fingernail up. That is just a little too far for me. And it pops up again at the end when she's in the well, and it freaking scared me. So uh then, you know, she has seven days to figure out what's going on. There's another scene that I want to draw attention to. It's when Rachel shows Noah the videotape for the first time. Obviously, she does not know the kind of extended lore that we're aware of now that we've had a sequel and you know, other this American sequel, I guess, is all that applies here.

That if she shows someone else the tape, then it kind of takes away the risk for her and finish stops the curse for her, kind of it follows style. So Noah's watching the film and she walks out onto her balcony and is looking around, and she sees through the windows of her neighbors, uh, because this seems like kind of a bougie complex with this balcony, that every single apartment has their television on. Even if it's just in the background background, like I believe one of the ladies is vacuuming, but other people are just on the couch watching. She kind of has this realization like this is something that could potentially not be stopped. And it kind of uh expands on this idea of technology as a virus, and whether you think of that as good, or maybe back in the 80s when the novel was written, maybe a little bit more uncertainty led to fear around technology.

The widespread reach of technology that maybe I'll discuss here in a second when uh I hit on Rings, the 2017 sequel to The Ring. Um, it's kind of an all-powerful presence in the world that could have pretty scary power if something like Samara's tape were to get into the wrong hands. Uh, something that has never really struck me well in this movie is the reveal that Aiden is the son of uh Rachel and Noah. I always thought this was bizarre because it's not necessarily pertinent information except to tell us that um, you know, Rachel and Noah have kind of a more intimate relationship than maybe we thought they had, just thinking they were kind of ex-boyfriend-girlfriend situation.

Because Noah's relationship with uh Aiden is very strange. They have a moment where they have a discussion in the car, and he's just kind of like, My dad was bad, so I don't want to be a bad dad to you, so I'm just not gonna be a dad. And he's like, Okay. Um, and by the end, you know, Rachel and Noah kind of bond through this shared experience, and they hold hands, and Aiden is like, Oh, I finally have a dad, but then that's pretty short-lived. So that twist always kind of threw me for a loop. Something else in this film that kind of is strange to me, which now that I've seen Rings, I've uh watched it today, and what a uh great time it was.

Uh, but that film kind of clarifies this a little bit more. But Noah goes to the deli to buy like some cigarettes, and he has this moment with the checkout girl who's like, You're gonna die if you smoke cigarettes, and it's like, okay, yawn. Well, he sees himself in the security camera and how his face is all swirly and you know, distorted, like the the ring curse does to you. And it seems the girl at the cashier counter either can't see what he's seeing and is like, you're crazy, or just doesn't know if that's what his face really looks like. Maybe she's been talking to a weird swirly face person the whole time. Uh now, having seen rings, they do make it clear that the person being haunted sees things that other people don't.

They have visions. So, I mean, that was clarified. But in the original, I was always like, What's going on here? I do think that the film really cleverly weaves the uh the tape into the movie. You know, we see the tape at the beginning, it's creepy, it's gross, and then throughout the movie, as Rachel sees the imagery, she kind of flashes and statics into the imagery from the tape. I think that a lot of times I would get, you know, exhausted or frustrated that it's like, yeah, we know, we can recall, or maybe even think that it's more exciting uh to try and remember those yourself, and then at the end it's like, uh, it all makes sense.

But I think that this isn't hitting you over the head in any way, and it kind of adds an interesting visual element to the movie where you never know when that's gonna kind of cut in and give you a little like uh jar. Or um, you know, sometimes it has these more artistic shots of like the ladder against the wall or the red leaves on the tree outside of the cabin. I think it kind of adds to the whole atmosphere of the movie as like a more visual work than just uh, you know, thriller. At the end, I never really understood the twist when I first saw this when I was a preteen. Rachel falls into the well and she recovers Samara's body after discovering kind of the dark backstory of Samara being adopted by Anna and Richard Morgan, and then she maybe has these brain powers that I think we hear more about in the sequel that she uses to convince the horses to kill themselves or, you know, bring terror on this small island that she lives on, which I looked for a lot on Google Maps before just Googling it and figuring out that it is not a real place.

She thinks that Samara wants to be saved from this dark past that she has because she's been so tortured by her family. You know, she's lived in this little apartment out in their barn and she's afraid of the horses at night, they keep her up. Um, and so there's this twist where Aiden is in bed and Rachel's like, we set her free, she doesn't have to be scared anymore. And Aiden's like, uh, dude, she doesn't want to be free, she doesn't want to be saved. And Rachel's like, What? You know, I just did all this work, what are you talking about? It hit me recently, and I have to give a little bit of credit to this to the Dead Meat podcast because they mentioned it too, but that Samara is kind of set up as a sympathetic character throughout the whole mystery.

It's like, oh, what have these parents done that have created this tape? You know, and then as we discover that Samara has these powers to fabricate things like the x-ray images, we, you know, start to assume that maybe she also fabricated this video tape. And what's so genius about this is that they flip Samara as a sympathetic crying out for help character in an instant to she is just purely evil. And she says in the interview in the asylum that you don't want to hurt her anymore now, do you? You don't want to hurt anyone. But I do, and I'm sorry. And I think that this is such an incredible, powerful twist in a horror movie where you think that it's a race against time to save someone when really the whole thing has been wasted because they're trying to save someone who just wants to hurt them in the end, and that is pretty tragic and a little bit bleak and sad.

And we see the payoff for that with Noah's. Which I think is equally iconic as the cold open. He's in his uh studio, which is bougie as fuck, and very nicely furnished, and also his workspace, so get out of town. He, you know, tell his television turns on, he's like trying to turn it off, water's leaking out everywhere, and Samara crawl out of the TV in that image that I think everyone knows, whether you watch horror movies or not, of her hair kind of slithering out and then her hands crunching, and then she stands up and is kind of jumping towards him, and he crawls through the glass and it scratches up his hands, which is always icky.

And then for the second time in the movie, you know, Naomi Watts comes and she sees the horrifying face of Noah dead, and uh, you know, it's just life sucks in the end. Everyone dies. Then we discover with Aiden that the way to get rid of the curse is to show the tape to someone else. This kind of, you know, leaves the end open for a sequel, which, spoiler, happens. And uh also ends on a more sinister note of, you know, what are you willing to do to survive? Will you show other people the tape? I think Aiden even says, you know, what happens to the person who we show this to? And I always love leaving a horror movie on a bit of a spooky note like that, where you have to think about like the intentions of humanity.

The other thematic idea that I've had tossing around in my brain is we have two very different families represented in this movie. We have Rachel's family, she's a busy mom. They kind of set her up as the like, is she a bad mom? Is she uh just busy? Does she care about her son? And her son's kind of like, I just want to spend time with you, and then the dad isn't present, and uh they even fight throughout the movie. And then on the other hand, we have the Morgans, who from the outside seem like a normal family. They have their little horse business on this island. Uh, it seems like Richard and Anna probably work from home, besides when they're out, I guess, showing their horses, and so they have they've always wanted a child and they finally have one.

So from the outside, they're just a little nice traditional family. However, when you look underneath the surface, you see so much love and uh attention in Rachel's family. Everything she's doing, she's kind of doing to save her son. Maybe she would have given up on trying to solve the mystery by the end of the movie if Aiden hadn't accidentally watched the uh the tape. But instead, he has, and so she has to keep fighting for her son. On the other hand, the outwardly like normal family, underneath the surface, they're um, you know, killing each other. Richard hates their daughter Samara. We don't know how they even adopted her, and Anna has just been driven crazy by her in this, you know, suburban, rural life, and in the end, you know, drops her in a well and jumps off a cliff.

So I think that there's also something to be said about this movie kind of depicting how just because the idea of a traditional family isn't what you're seeing doesn't mean, you know, that's that has any reflection on how the family operates, or that you need to feel an obligation to follow the tradition of family because sometimes what works for you works for you, and love is love. My final thought about the ring has to do with the well. The well is such a huge part of Samara's imagery. Her crawling out of the well in the sequel, her crawling up the walls of the well. When she kills, and you see her staticky image on the screen, the well is such a part of it.

The ring that you see, you know, before you die, you see the ring is the tagline of the movie. The ring is the lid of the well being closed. The well, obviously, as I said earlier, Samara was pushed into the well and she survived at the bottom of the well for seven days before she died. When Rachel goes to the cabin and discovers the well, it's been built over with the cabin in the woods because wells are obsolete. So if we go back to what we were discussing earlier with Japanese horror and how this movie Ringu was a clash of old Japan and New Japan, I think the well really symbolizes that whole idea that Samara was c killed in the well, but her new well is the TV, it is the technology, because the well is no longer a necessary part of life because, you know, plumbing, faucets, whatever.

And she is switched to technology, and that's why there's that strange contrast of seeing the image of the static y televised well, you know, not matching up something so old in something newer. And then I briefly just want to touch on the sequels. So The Ring 2 came out only a few years later in 2005. It is also just very fun, a great movie to watch at a party. Um, but it does not have the same emotional depth as the first movie. I think a lot of people are still fans. It's a little bit scarier, it's a little bit jumpier, but it doesn't pack quite the same uh psychological punch. It explores the lore of Samara a little bit more.

We meet her mother, played by Sissy Spacic, at the asylum, and we get to know a little bit more about her backstory and powers. Now in 2017, there was another American sequel called Rings. I watched that for the first time today, and man, what a freaking doozy. I think this movie misses a huge piece of what the uh psychological aspect of the ring is. It kind of reduces it to just, I don't even know what to say because it's not a slasher. I was gonna say final destination, but final destination is at least fun. And so this one is just kind of a group of people being picked off by the curse of the ring because they're trying to synthesize the uh effects of the ring tape into like a collegiate academic study.

It's bizarre. I don't think that the writing is that good and the performances aren't that great either. Um, but the opening scene of it is hilarious. I thought that was pure camp and actually was ready for a pretty funny movie, and uh unfortunately did not get that. Now, slight spoilers for rings, I don't necessarily recommend watching it, but if you want to maybe skip ahead a couple of minutes, because earlier I said that, you know, technology has become ever-present and omniscient in pr uh everyday society now, and something smart that I think rings does tap into, even though it doesn't really utilize it, is the way that with computers and email and social media well, they don't really touch on social media, but texting and phones, that you can share these videos so easily.

And the movie even ends with um one of the characters' computers being hacked and the ring video being sent to everyone in their contacts, and it's kind of the same dread, doom, and gloom of what will happen if, you know, something that has become so so much a part of everyday life infected like this. So wrapping up this movie, I think the most memorable murder of this film, which you may say isn't a murder, but you know, Samara's doing it through the airwaves, I guess, uh, is the fucking horse on the ferry to the island. Rachel looks at this horse, he flips out, jumps out of the um I don't know, trailer that he's in, and runs around.

This poor little girl is like, Daddy, my horse. And then I think that the horse falling over the edge of the ferry is extremely upsetting. I actually was choking back a little bit of like a tear there, and then it's sucked underneath, and uh blood comes out behind the ferry. It is very um physical the way that the horse is banging against the uh ferry and then sucked underneath the water, and I thought very distressing. Uh so my condolences to that horse. I also have to say that I've watched this with other people before, and everyone always thinks that this scene is funny, and if this were a cat or a dog that were thrown off of this ferry and sucked underneath, people would be up in arms.

So, everyone give this horse a little bit of respect. It is my winner for most memorable murder for the ring. On a scary scale of one to five, I would actually rate the ring relatively high. I think that it's like a three, three and a half, uh, because I think that this movie is pretty emotionally distressing and disturbing. It's scary, it kind of brings to mind ideas that you don't want to think about about the intentions of people that are supposed to be close to you, like your mother, or just kind of the uh existence of evil in the world, Samara's pure evil, and what will you have to do to get rid of her curse?

I also think this movie comes up a lot when people are having the discussion about whether or not a PG-13 horror movie can be scary. I think that the answer to that is yes, obviously. This movie is very scary. And but I think that you can't just throw around movies like this whenever you want. In my opinion, like The Conjuring, the first film, could have been rated PG-13, but they just were like, oh, it's too scary, we're rating it R because there's nothing in that movie that actually is like this is an R-rated movie. And the same thing here, where if things had been pushed a little bit further, you know, they easily could have had a little bit more language or something.

This I think could have easily been an R-rated movie, but it's PG 13. I think where the argument kind of falls behind is, you know, people were bringing up movies like The Ring when people were upset about the Black Christmas 2019 movie being rated PG-13, and they're like, well, the ring is scary, so everybody calm down. The ring is not a movie that's focused on gore or killing. Whereas Black Christmas is a slasher. I don't want to get into Black Christmas 2019. You can listen to our episode on it. It's got a lot of other problems besides besides its rating. But in a movie that is a slasher that's focused on killing, I think that, you know, it's hard to get away with a PG-13 rating.

Prove me wrong, show me the receipts, but for certain movies I like to see a little guts and gore. But the ring doesn't need it. So now you may be wondering, would I give this movie a smash or a slash? I would definitely give the ring a smash. This movie is really incredible. It's one that I saw when I was a kid. Actually, it was um when I was in junior high, we had kind of like a mock prom and uh so a bunch of my friends and I went and we danced at this party that my school put on, and afterwards we all went to one of our uh one of my friends' houses, and we kind of pulled a bunch of chairs and cushions together, and we all kind of huddled up on the couch and we watched The Ring.

And it's one of the first horror movies that I ever saw, and we just screamed and had the living daylight scared out of us. It was so scary, and I think that this is the perfect movie for that kind of teen slumber party situation. It's serious enough that you could still watch it as an adult and be like, oh, such drama, such artistry, but it's also fun enough that you can watch it when you're just wanting to have a good time. To wrap it all up, I'm going to say that The Ring is not my favorite scary movie. With our season two selection, I am still sticking with Scream 4. Now, next time on the podcast, we're still a little bit disorganized, plans up in the air because of all the things that are going on in the world right now, all the movies being cancelled, and actually horrible timing.

But Caroline, Ian, and I, uh, our lease has ended for our apartment on April 1st, and we've all been, you know, booking it in crazy chaos, trying to move into our own separate apartments. So you might notice a few changes to format. I had an episode last week that was awesome on the hunt with guest host Julianne Marie. Uh today I'm doing one solo, so who knows? We'll be mixing and matching in the future. Bear with us. I hope you keep listening and you keep enjoying because I'm really excited to keep talking with you guys about horror movies. So you'll have to stay tuned with our social media accounts to find out what we'll be covering next.

But until next week, you can always go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and a review. We actually have a very um relevant one from Alex WhitK that says, Love the pod, five stars. What a great find for quarantine. So I completely agree, Alex, and I hope everyone else does too. Keep streaming our episodes. You can go back through the uh old episodes. A lot of these movies are streaming. Watch them, have a little ski, what's your favorite scary movie? Party. Alright, my name is Parker Hair. And you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, Letterboxd, and the Slasher app at Parker Delray. And you can find what's your favorite scary movie on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at ScarymoviePod.

You can find our website at scarymoviepod.com where we have reviews going up occasionally, as well as our calendar that we're gonna try and keep updated with what's going on. You can also send us requests or feedback at scary moviepod at gmail.com. Until next time, stay healthy, stay safe, and stay spooky.