Monday, April 18, 2016

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #20 The Ring

It’s sad to me how The Ring has fallen out of public awareness. I think the only parodies I’ve seen of it since the beginning of the decade have been jokes about how outdated VHS technology is. That’s sad, because there are so many other sequences in this film that deserve a place in popular consciousness. Disregarding the girl coming out of the television, there’s also the suicidal horse and the guy electrocuting himself with a horse bit in his mouth. (...If ever a scene has screamed “spoof me!” that was it.) But no! All anyone remembers about this genuinely creepy film is that they used VHS tapes to transmit the curse.



The story is that a tape has somehow started circulating with a series of bizarre images on it. Anyone who watches the video immediately gets a phone call, telling them that they will die in seven days... and so, they die. A journalist, played by Naomi Watts, watches the tape, and finds herself exploring the mystery of its origin. The search becomes more desperate after her young son (David Dorfman) sees the video by mistake, dooming him as well.



The eventual revelation is that a young girl named Samara (Daveigh Chase), with psychic powers, was thrown in a well by her mother, having driven the mother insane, and is lashing out at anyone who watches the tape. I understand that the original Japanese novel had far more in the way of explanation for how all this was possible, but it’s hardly necessary. In my ghost stories, I really don’t expect the ghosts to act rationally; the ghost of a deeply disturbed psychic girl least of all.



The movie serves mainly as a set-up to a series of horrific events, some caused directly by Samara, some in reaction to her. To list them all would waste a great deal of space on plot summary. Most of these events serve only to illustrate one basic point; Samara’s life sucked, but it sucked mainly because people were, quite reasonably, afraid of her. Her father raised horses which panicked when she was around and her mother received horrifying visions. Eventually, she was locked up in a psychiatric institute, filled with people who refused to believe the blatantly obvious fact that she had psychic powers and accused her of lying when she told them the truth.



This leads to a final twist: Samara was, and still is, evil. Even once her body is retrieved from the well, she continues her curse. The only escape is to copy the tape and show it to someone else. It’s something of a bizarre anti-twist, and you can debate how well it actually works. On the one hand, the film was clearly building towards the suggestion that Samara was an innocent little girl, and it seems a little too simplistic to close by saying she’s a cackling, Evil Bitch. On the other hand however, the idea that she was a helpless little girl was so thoroughly telegraphed and fully expected that it’s hard to deny that her being the exact opposite is shocking. And she had enough control over the events leading up to the finale that you can easily argue she manipulated the protagonists, and by extension the audience, into seeing what she wanted them to.



I’m not sure what I have to say about the final moments of the film. Naomi Watts’ character decides to save her son by having him make a copy of the film to show to someone else. The movie doesn’t go out of its way to condemn or condone this, just acknowledging that it is indeed the only way to save the child.



Above all, this movie holds the distinction of actually being visually different in a world of horror movies that all look the same. I at least partially attribute this to the fact that the movie actually had a surprisingly large budget by the standards of horror movies, so that it wasn’t limited to tiny sets, could afford known actors and its special effects consisted of more than splattering blood everywhere.



Watch the movie. Watch it and don’t talk about VHS tapes. This movie is awesome, and the format by which the curse is passed is unimportant.

No comments:

Post a Comment