The Ring: 31 Days of Horror
For all of October, we will review horror films. Submit your requests here, and you may see your picks selected!
Something we take for granted is how we all survived the J-horror American remake fiascos of the 2000’s. The only film worth bringing up in any positive capacity is Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, but even then it’s a mediocre film salvaged by some properly fantastic scares. I don’t even know if there is a hell of a lot to discuss with this trend or with The Ring at all. Outside of this remake, every single other attempt was dreadfully bad. This is the best of the best, folks, and it still warrants a 3 out of 5. That’s barely a passing grade. At the same time, despite being the greatest film of one of the worst cinematic niches, you can look at The Ring and identify exactly why every single American remake of contemporary Japanese horror films (at that time) were garbage.
What’s the one positive note I brought up? The scares? Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s as if the original Ring by Hideo Nakata was watched, and all of its greatest moments were jotted down onto a notepad. A realization was made: what if we brought this to Hollywood? Wouldn’t this do well in America? Well, whoever thought it up (Verbinski, either of the producers or writers, et cetera) was right, since the film earned two hundred million dollars after recouping its budget costs; it was a box office and pop culture success. Even now, I genuinely feel creeped out by the film’s shocks and scary images, particularly the footage on the forbidden videotape (something about that thin, see-through wall of scan lines makes the content even more disturbing). On those fronts, The Ring is a fantastic horror film, noteworthy in the batch of films of that genre of the new millennium.
The horror in The Ring is still creepy, to say the least.
Outside of that, what do you have? Nothing. Disposable characters. A tabula rasa lead played by Naomi Watts which feels unimpressionable at all (totally in how she was written in this case). A wait for the inevitable (the playing of the videotape that kills viewers in a weeks time). The Ring is like a restaurant franchisee that is on their way out: too obsessed with atmosphere to realize they lack everything else. This is exactly what happens when you remake films for the wrong reasons. Imagine someone retelling an event you were a part of, but their racing heart and excitement gets the better of them, and they tell the story very poorly. This usually happens with the highlighting of specific moments, and the absence of vital details.
A good story isn’t just one’s favourite parts, or the standout sequences. It’s everything. The Ring doesn’t have everything, because it is so fixated on being a highlight reel. Sure, these “highlights” are still great, but a steak is worthless if you’ve trimmed off all of the fat and are left with barely any quality meat (sorry, vegans). I can use all of the analogies in the world, but you get my point. The Ring started an unfortunate trend of copycats trying to follow the same formula, and the rest is history; a besmirching of the name of horror for an entire decade. These followup films are that steak meal microwaved, so even the “best” moments are terrible.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.