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The Ring (2002 film)

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"The Ring" redirects here. For other uses, see The Ring (disambiguation).
The Ring
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Produced by Walter F. Parkes
Roy Lee
Laurie MacDonald
Michael Macari
Written by Ehren Kruger
Starring Naomi Watts
Martin Henderson
David Dorfman
Brian Cox
Daveigh Chase
Lindsay Frost
Amber Tamblyn
Rachael Bella
Music by Hans Zimmer
Cinematography Bojan Bazelli
Editing by Craig Wood
Distributed by DreamWorks SKG
Release date(s) Image:Flag of the United States.svg October 18, 2002
Running time 115 min.
Language English
Budget $48 million
Followed by The Ring Two
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Ring is a 2002 American remake of the 1998 Japanese film, Ring (which was also known as Ringu). It was directed by Gore Verbinski and starred Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson. This movie was number 20 on the cable channel Bravo's list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments.


Contents

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Image:Rachel Watches The Tape - The Ring.jpg

The story begins with two teenage girls discussing the events of the previous weekend, during which one of them, Katie Embry (played by Amber Tamblyn), went to a cabin in the mountains to spend time with some friends. While talking, the subject of a supposedly cursed videotape is brought up. The other girl, Rebecca 'Becca' Kotler (played by Rachael Bella), states that anyone who watches this video receives a phone call, in which a voice says, "seven days." Then, exactly seven days after viewing the tape, the viewer dies. Katie reveals in horror that she had watched that video at the cabin last weekend, exactly seven days earlier. After a series of unexplainable occurrences, involving televisions in the house turning themselves on and unexplained pools of water, Katie is mysteriously killed, while Becca goes insane.

The film then introduces Katie's aunt, Rachel, a journalist living in Seattle. Her son, Aiden, was not only Katie's cousin but also a good friend, and seems to be sensitive to psychic occurrences. At Katie's funeral Rachel begins investigating Katie's death and learns of the videotape. Her investigation leads her to the same cabin in the mountains where the teenagers had watched the tape. There, she finds the tape and eventually watches it. She makes a copy for Aiden's father Noah, and Aiden himself watches it a few days later.

Rachel's investigation then turns to the tape itself, which contains a seemingly random series of disturbing, grainy black and white images. Investigating those images leads Rachel to learn of a girl, Samara, who had been adopted and then murdered by those parents. They had killed Samara when they believed she had caused her mother to go insane as well as causing the deaths of several horses. Rachel is eventually led to where the girl was killed; a watery grave at the bottom of a well. Rachel notifies the authorities, and Samara is given a proper burial, presumably putting her spirit to rest.

However, just as it seems that everything is well again, Rachel informs Aiden that they will no longer be troubled by Samara. But Aiden quickly corrects her and says that Samara's spirit has been released, evident by the bruises on his arm. In the film's most unsettling and memorable scene, Noah is going over some film prints in his apartment when his TV turns on to static, in the same fashion that Rachel's niece, Katie experienced before her death. Noah turns it off casually before the TV turns itself on again, which alerts Noah. He is then treated to an image of a well, a recurring image of which a long haired female figure crawls out of the well and slowly walks toward the screen. It only intensifies as Noah quickly backs away when the figure literally crawls out of the television set. Noah knocks over a shelf in fear and crawls away before turning around, only to have the figure stare directly at him, causing his inevitable death which Rachel discovers after racing to his apartment. Rachel and Aiden realize that the only way to escape Samara after watching the video is to make a copy of the tape and show it to someone else, thus continuing the cycle.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Misc. Info

  • Produced by DreamWorks SKG, the film was a popular success, earning a total of US$129,094,024 in domestic box office receipts and a worldwide total of $249 million.
  • The success of The Ring opened the way for American remakes of several other Japanese horror films, including The Grudge. A sequel, The Ring Two, was released in North American theaters on March 18, 2005. It was directed by Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Japanese film.
  • Just before the release of the sequel, The Ring was re-released with an extra disc that had a fifteen minute short film, Rings, which was intended to bridge The Ring and The Ring Two. Rings is also included as a special feature in the DVD release of The Ring Two.
  • The Ring debuted on network TV on ABC on Monday, June 6, 2005 at 9 PM EST, 8 PM PST. It was rated TV-14 V (for violence) with a viewer discretion warning for violent content.

[edit] Pop Culture references

Family Guy
In the Family Guy season 5 episode "Mother Tucker," a cutaway scene shows a girl telling Peter not to watch the video tape because afterwards one dies. Despite this he turns it on and it turns out to be Mannequin. Peter dies shortly after he watches the tape.
The Suffering
In the PS2 version of The Suffering, there is a level with a hole blown in the wall. When the player crawls through the hole, he or she ends up in an office that has a static filled closed circuit monitor, and a red phone on the guard's desk is ringing. By answering the phone, a little girl saying "Why you take her?!!!!" is heard.
Will & Grace
In an episode of Will & Grace when Jack and Grace are cleaning Will and Grace's apartment, one of them happens to come across a water ring left by a glass on a wooden table. When Jack realises how Will will not take kindly to this, he exclaims, "Oh my god! First he sees the ring, and then we die..."
Rugrats
The Interview with a Campfire movie in the Rugrats series featured a scene in which one of the friends went missing. When Angelica wandered around the area where the person had disappeared, the television burst into static and a cartoon version of the cursed videotape began to play.
Shark Tale
A newspaper appearing in the DreamWorks film Shark Tale features an "upcoming movie" called The Hook; the ad for which looks very similar to The Ring.
Robot Chicken
A man goes into a video dating room and picks out a video that happens to be the cursed videotape. He sits down and he sees a well, with a ghostly figure coming out. The figure comes out of the TV screen and lifts back its hair to show that it is Samara, who goes on about her interests and typical date video content. It concludes with her running back into the TV and the man saying "I think I just shit my heart out!" and then states "I wonder if she puts out."
Scary Movie 3
The whole movie parodies The Ring and other popular films like 8 mile
TimeSplitters Future Perfect
There is a television early on in the 'Haunted Mansion' level of the story mode, on which the circle of light shown in the American version of the film is played. Also, a ghost girl appears twice who bears a distinct resemblance to Samara.
Silent Hill 4: The Room
When the main character crawls through a tunnel early in the game, the tunnel looks like the well from the film complete with a bright white light at the end. Also, if the character tries to turn the television on it shows nothing but static. One supporting character gets killed and returns as a ghostly figure with long black hair covering her face just like Samara.
We ♥ Katamari
In one of the outdoor levels, there is a female ghost that rises up and down out of a well, which is reminiscent of the character Sadako in the Japanese horror movie Ringu.
Great Teacher Onizuka
In episode 23 two of the main characters walk through a movie theater where the movie being shown is clearly the Japanese horror movie Ringu.

[edit] Differences between The Ring and Ringu

  • All the actors were changed from Japanese to American, with names also changed to fit. Curiously, however, many of the American characters' hairstyles match their analogues in the original film, even minor ones like the photographer ex-husband's assistant.
  • The strange images on the tape. (See: the Cursed Videotape)
  • In Ringu, the ghost girl's victims just have their mouths open with fear, with the cause of death being a sudden stopping of the heart. In The Ring, the ghost girl's victims look bloated and rotten with a pool of water around them, as if they've been rotting underwater after some time and just brought out.
  • In Ringu, the mother jumped into a volcano, while in The Ring, the mother, Anna, jumped off a cliff.
  • In Ringu, the ghost girl's family owns a large fishing business. In The Ring the family's business is breeding race horses.
  • In Ringu, the ex-husband possesses psychic abilities, to offer an explanation as to why the son possesses them as well.
  • In Ringu, the ghost girl is 19 and is murdered by her father. While in The Ring remake, she is only 8 and is murdered by her mother.
  • In Ringu, the main character consensually enters the well to help find the ghost girl's body. In The Ring the main character is knocked into the well, by a TV pushed by paranormal force.
  • When the main character found the well in Ringu, the well was bailed out by a pail for some hours before Sadako was found. In The Ring, Samara floats to the surface.
  • Certain paranormal events, such as coughing up an oximeter sensor and a horse inexplicably breaking out of its horsebox and jumping off a ship only occur in The Ring.

[edit] Trivia

  • There was a subplot that was dropped from the film, having been written and shot that featured Chris Cooper as a child murderer. Cooper's villainous character appears in the beginning of the film, who tries to convince journalist Rachel (Watts) that he has been rehabilitated and ready to reenter society. But Rachel sees through this facade and helps put him back in jail. At the end of the film, Rachel drops off a copy of the videotape for him at the mental hospital where he is staying. The only remainder of this subplot is a picture of Cooper in a newspaper article, which Noah picks up his coffee mug from.
  • Adam Brody makes an appearance as one of the teens talking about the cursed tape at Katie's funeral.
  • There are brief flashes of the "ring" motif throughout the film. There is at least one instance of a barely detectable single frame of the ring being spliced into the film between scenes, such as at 57:35, just after the horse jumps off the ferry. The ring also appears briefly during the opening DreamWorks logo.
  • The bizarre music on the cursed videotape is the same noise as Anna closing the lid on the well.
  • Ringu wasn't released in theaters when The Ring was in theaters, but appeared on DVD around the DVD release of The Ring.
  • The "Don't Watch This" feature on the DVD has outtakes from the film that are edited into a short film. It also appears on the VHS version after the film's end credits. We discover from the scenes that the camp ground owner near the well also saw the tape. Noah discovers his body in a canoe on the lake near the camp when he and Rachel returned there on day 7. The camp owner presumably watched the film shortly before Rachel. The deleted scenes also show Rachel renting two movies, Pokémon: The First Movie and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which she presumably did to return her and her son's copy of the tape.
  • According to director Gore Verbinski, he would occasionally get into heated arguments over the production with producer Walter F. Parkes.
  • The term "ring," in the American version of the film could refer to the ring of sunlight barely shining beneath the edges of the well's lid that Samara saw. Some say it also refers to the endless cycle of Samara's deadly video, as well as the "ring" from the telephone.
  • On the DVD box cover featuring the photograph of the well scene, and also the well scene in the cursed video as shown in the movie, the sum of the composition of the frame is Samara staring out at the viewer. The well itself are her nostrils, the haze in the mid-ground is her face, while the trees in the background contain her eyes and form the hair that partially obstructs her face.
  • There is an early Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name that has no relation to this movie.
  • In early 2004 a teenager bombarded the UK based insurance firm Domestic & General Group with 5 million emails, causing their server to collapse. Contained within the emails was a quotation from this film. [1]
  • As an exclusive DVD feature; if you move the cursor one up from the "Play Movie" option, the uncut version of the tape is played. Interesting to note is that you cannot fast-forward, stop, pause or backtrack the video. The only way not to watch the track is to switch off the television. After this track plays, the DVD returns to a faux main menu which is identical to the real main menu, except a ringing phone is heard. If the viewer has a home theatre system, the ring is sounded through the rear speakers, increasing the illusion that their phone is actually ringing.
  • When the movie was released on VHS in North America, the video was packaged in a transparent plastic sleeve rather than a standard cardboard one. This gives the video the appearance of a rental tape one would find at a local store. The DVD came in a standard black keep case.
  • At one point in the film, in the scene where Rachel is researching Anna Morgan and Moesko Island, she finds information on a website which is located at: http://www.moeskoislandlighthouse.com. This one-page website actually existed until it was discontinued in 2004. The website has since been copied and placed at: http://www.sweb.cz/moesko/
  • Emo/Horror Punk band Aiden took their name from the child in the movie, and sampled a quote from the movie in their song "I Set My Friends On Fire".

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

The Ring Cycle
Novels: Ring | Spiral | Loop | Birthday
Japanese Films: Ring 0 | Ring | Ring 2 | Rasen
American Films: The Ring | Rings | The Ring Two | The Ring 3
Korean Films: The Ring Virus
Curses: Samara Morgan | Sadako Yamamura | Eun-Suh Park | The Video | Towel-Headed Man
Misc: Anna Morgan | Moesko Island Lighthouse | Hideo Nakata | She Is Here | Koji Suzuki | Terror's Realm

de:Ring (Film) es:La señal fr:Le Cercle (film, 2002) gl:The Ring it:The Ring he:הצלצול hu:A kör nl:The Ring ja:ザ・リング pl:The Ring pt:The Ring (filme de 2002) fi:Ring sv:The Ring

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