RINGU (THE RING)
Japan, 1998, 96 minutes, Black and white/Colour.
Directed by Hideo Nakata.
The original film of The Ring was a great commercial success in Japan at the end of the 1990s. The director went on to make a sequel – and a prequel is in preparation for 2008. The film was also adapted for the United States and Naomi Watts starred in both The Ring and The Ring 2.
The Ring contributed to a change of mentality in many of the producers and directors in Japan and the United States. Instead of gory horror, the focus was on atmosphere, the mysterious, the transcendent bursting in, especially through evil, into the ordinary world. The Ring also used contemporary technology to contribute to the atmosphere of horror: the telephone as well as the video cassette and player.
The film is set in the present – with an increasing number of mysterious flashbacks to the treatment of a young girl, her death, her reappearing for vengeance and the nature of her destructive power.
Hideo Nakata also directed the Japanese film, Dark Water, adapted for the United States and directed by Walter Salles, starring Jennifer Connelly.
The film is strongly atmospheric, emphasises family relationships, especially the mother and son, draws on Japanese superstitions as well as belief in ghosts.
1.The reputation of the film? In Japan? Worldwide? Its influence? On horror trends in films at the beginning of the 21st century? American adaptations?
2.The nature of the horror film, the psychological horror, the ghosts, in the Japanese context of superstition and belief?
3.Contemporary Japan, the homes, villas, the coast, the island? An authentic atmosphere of realism for this kind of supernatural fantasy?
4.Editing, pace, effects? The video sequences in black and white, amateur style, eerie? The eerie musical score?
5.The title and its ambiguities, the ring as a circle, the phone call and its ring? Symbolic?
6.The plausibility of the plot, in Japan, elsewhere?
7.The opening with the girls, their talk, the joke, the video, the information, the phone call, the talking about death? The madness of one of the girls, the asylum?
8.The journalist and her work, her colleagues, her relationship with her son, her connection with the girls, the story, going to the funeral?
9.The research, her friend, going to the villa, watching the video, the phone call – and the solution to copy the video and show someone else?
10.The scenes of research, going to the mysterious place? The professor and the discoveries? The island? The affair, the flashbacks, the test, the hostility? The young daughter and her death, wanting to kill?
11.The time structure, the haste, the well, the deaths in the well?
12.The return, sending the video, willing the deaths? The television?
13.The shock for the journalist, studying her son, the effect on the son?
14.How well did the film visualise the mysterious nature of ghosts, of spirits? In the well, their appearance, in the black and white photography? Their effect as ghosts on ordinary people, belief, destruction?
