BEST AND WORST REMAKES: BEST #6 THE RING
I hadn’t seen Hideo Nakata’s Ringu at the time, so when I sat down to the American remake and was immediately introduced to two teenaged girls talking about boys and weekend trips to a cabin, I grimaced. I count a lot of Dead Teenager Movies (as Roger Ebert called them) as my favorites, but if you watch as many horror films as I do, you come to realize for every It Follows there’s ten Unfriended’s clogging up good distribution.
I’m generally more likely to gravitate to horror tales that center on adults. Most deal with personal failure, or protecting an innocent, or surviving their own obsession. Movies like The Shining, The Changeling, Don’t Look Now, and Rosemary’s Baby. There’s more meat to the bone in motivation than, say, wondering where’s the best place to hump in the woods.
The Ring is one of the greats. It manages to hit every mark on the list. The supernatural curse (immediately copied & pasted into similar films) sent a collective shiver down our spines; the ghost girl was visually striking and evil (I love that she has no desire to be “saved”). The look of the film — filtered in aqua-blues — remind us every minute of its themes of cold technology and drowning water. Its unraveling storyline shows us two extremely different and similar mothers, failing to raise their emotionally distant children.
And the scares. Video visuals that precede the curse, or the warped reflections of those who’ve seen it, those are one thing. Watching a horse panic to the point of galloping off a ferry, breaking its legs on the way down, and then turning into mulch from a swirling propellor… Jesus, that’s the very definition of horror.
I really don’t want to end writing this. I‘m convinced the phone will ring as soon as I do.