Ringu/Ring (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998) and Ringu 2/Ring 2 (Nakata, Japan, 1999)

WHILST THE SIXTH SENSE was making a huge box-office splash in North America and elsewhere, a low-budget Japanese ghost film was starting a cinematic cultural revolution. Although not released theatrically in the US – and not even released there on DVD until 2003, after the Hollywood remake had completed its theatrical run – RINGU is undoubtedly the film which has had most impact on the ghost melodrama cycle. It has produced dozens of spin-offs, and indeed dozens of websites devoted to its phenomenal impact.

RINGU is a hybrid, combining elements from traditional Japanese ghost stories with those from Western sources and mixing in a very contemporary concern with modern technology. In The Ring Companion (2005), Denis Meikle notes some of the sources informing the movie. Its basic narrative premise is similar to that of M.R. James's story ‘Casting the Runes’ (1904), filmed as NIGHT OF THE DEMON (Jacques Tourneur, GB, 1957), with the written curse of the original here replaced by a video curse – the crucial point in both stories is one can survive the curse only by passing it on (100-103). Certain motifs in the film are directly from Japanese tradition (the ghost's long, black hair and white dress; the well) (114), others from Hollywood movies, e.g. photographs which signal the impending death of a character from THE OMEN (Richard Donner 1976) (105). Above all, however, Ringu is not just a ghost melodrama, but a highly effective modern horror movie, with a powerful supernatural ghost monster.

Ringu began as a 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki who wanted his title to be Ring (in English). Ringu is simply the Japanese transliteration of Ring, but I will use it for the film to avoid semantic confusion with the Hollywood remake. The novel is essentially a supernatural story structured like a virus thriller. Four young people die of cardiac arrest in different places at the same time, all with expressions of terror on their faces. Asakawa, a reporter, discovers they are connected in that they spent the night together in a cabin at a resort on the Izu Peninsula. He wonders if they caught a virus but, visiting the resort, is led instead to a videotape.