THE RING
The Ring is one of my favorite horror films. It’s one of the best remakes, up there with John Carpenter’s The Thing and Cronenberg’s The Fly. No disrespect to the Japanese original (Ringu) or the creepy novel it’s based on, but there’s something about the remake that always makes me come back to it.
I’m a sucker for theme and deliberate use of it in movies (specifically horror movies), and The Ring uses it in spades: a world drenched in hues of aqua (the color of water, sickness, and video), as well as the circular nature of the curse and having to continue it by passing it forward. Most intriguing is the use of repetition: victims are forced to repeat Samara’s death sentence (7 days) and see her imagery over and over again.
I love the theme of a disassociation between children and their parents. Aiden is a zombie, doing his best to communicate with his career obsessed mother through drawings, the slenderest of bridges still remaining between the pair. It’s a parallel of Samara (another special girl) using her gift to attempt failed communication (and a weird form of empathy) with her parents. Best of all, it’s the boy at the end looking at his mother with an incredulous look and asks “why would you help her?”
Like Halloween with ’70s-’80s era slashers, The Ring introduced us to an era of J-Horror and possessed/cursed technology flicks. I think it goes beyond any of those labels and remains just a great supernatural yarn.
