A "Ring" of truth
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Few films ratchet up the creepiness factor quite like "Ringu," the original Japanese version of "The Ring," which we dissected last evening at CineVerse. Here's what we learned about this flick:
HOW IS THIS FILM DIFFERENT
FROM TYPICAL HORROR MOVIES AND FROM YOUR EXPECTATIONS?
· It builds a steady atmosphere of moody dread, tension
and fear with minimal cheap scares and shocks.
· It contains very little graphic violence, blood or
gore. Instead, it relies on tone, atmosphere, smart sound design, crude effects
like negative photography and freeze frames, and simple but disturbing imagery
to unnerve us.
· It also refrains from revealing and showing us too
much, including the ghost girl’s face; instead, we are only shown her eye and
are forced to conjure up the rest of her horrible visage in our mind’s eye.
· It’s an interactive horror experience in that it
involves the viewer as part of the film: we’re watching a scary video of people
watching a scary video that brings a curse to the viewer, which adds a creative
creepiness to the proceedings.
· For a modern color film, the color is very muted; the
picture relies on subdued grays and harsh blacks and whites, giving scenes like
the haunted videotape screening a surreal feel.
· The film was extremely popular worldwide (becoming the
highest-grossing Japanese horror film in history) and proved to be very
influential:
o it spawned two Japanese sequels and a prequel, a
12-episode TV series
o It was remade in both Hollywood and South Korea
o It kicked off the “J-horror” fad of the late
1990s/early 2000s, which included American remakes of The Grudge, Pulse, One
Missed Call, and Dark Water
o The ghost character Sakado, has become a massively
popular horror icon, like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, in Japan.
WHAT INFLUENCES DOES “RINGU”
DRAW UPON?
· According to writer/researcher Mark Frey (see his
article at http://www.jetaanc.org/ringu/),
Ringu was inspired by many earlier sources and “drawing from centuries of
Japanese cultural history:
o Previous Japanese classic horror films and movies
featuring ghosts, including Onibaba, Kwaidan, Ugetsu, Kuroneko, House, Tomie,
Chakushin Ari, and Honogurai mizu no soko kara.
o Butoh, a strange, grotesque dance form that originated
in Japan following World War II
o Classic yuurei ghost stories. Frey says “yuurei are
usually women with a white face, long black hair, and a long, white kimono that
trails off into mist where her legs should be. This is how Japanese women
looked when they were buried.”
o Japanese urban legends and horror tales of people
dumping bodies into wells and women committing suicide by leaping into wells. “There
is a deep connection in Japanese culture between wells and troubled women,”
Frey says.
o The long-held Japanese belief that water (represented
in the well) is the pathway to the land of the dead.
o Special Japanese ghosts called onryou who want
revenge; these were “women who were done wrong by a man. Often, the man cheated
on these women and then killed them.”
o The women wrongly accused of and killed for witchcraft
during the Salem witch trials
RINGU HAS BEEN DESCRIBED
BY SOME CRITICS AND SCHOLARS AS A FEMINIST FILM OF SORTS. WHAT FEMINIST
SUBTEXTS CAN YOU READ INTO THIS MOVIE?
· Writer Mark Frey says Sadako’s story carries on the tradition
of Japanese ghost stories involving a woman being abused and killed. “Sadako’s
rage avenges the injustices committed by men against women throughout history,”
he says.
· The image of the well itself is a powerful motif that
stands as a Freudian symbol: a dark, wet, deep, mysterious place that
represents the mysteries of female power, female genitalia and the womb; in
this reading, it would be a particularly frightening motif for men.
WHAT OTHER FILMS DOES
RINGU REMIND YOU OF?
· Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon, in how the
twist endings of both films resolve.
· Mystery films like The Eyes of Laura Mars and
Sensation, where supernatural forces are at work, but the main characters are
sidetracked in the straightforward solving of a whodunit mystery.
· Poltergeist and Videodrome, other movies where evil
and supernatural forces emanate from a video screens.
· Horror films whose premise is based on an urban
legend, such as The Blair Witch Project.