With This Ring, I Thee Horripilate

Here's a change: a Hollywood remake that improves upon the foreign original. We can usually trust our indigenous adaptors to alter international properties just enough to crush what made the original so interesting; when La Femme Nikita became Point of No Return, or Yojimbo became Last Man Standing, or even when Desperado became Desperado, it's been safe to presume the copy would fail to compare. When The Ring hit theaters this last winter, however, American audiences were treated to not only the first good horror film to come along in many years, but proof that a set of creepy but unpolished ideas can still be shaped into cinematic gold.

That the Japanese Ringu, which Dreamworks optioned for inevitably less than the millions the remake ultimately raked in, could ride on The Ring's coattails to find a healthy shelf life in American video stores is testament enough to the American version's success. Ringu so captivated Japanese audiences that a sequel and a prequel and a TV franchise were spawned; we can only pray the same doesn't happen here, as a sequel of a remake would simply be tempting fate.

It bears mentioning that in exploring the differences between the two films, significant plot points will be discussed, so if you haven't seen either version yet, reading on will appreciably diminish the thrills and twists that constitute The Ring's primary draw. Horror films nowadays base their fortunes on defying expectations and transcending the usual formulae that relegate most of their offspring to the straight-to-video purgatory, and Ring shocks when central characters have to be sacrificed to figure out exactly how to avoid seeing the eponymous fatal image that takes a week to arrive. So just like watching the baleful video, reading this essay has its consequences.

One wonders just how Japanese audiences responded when the American Ring made the rounds in their country; director Gore Verbinski's re-creation is both sleeker, more stylized, more gruesome, and less forthcoming with answers. Watching them in reverse order of production, the Japanese version comes across looking cheaper, less demanding, and their heroes' behavior strikes one as less plausible. Still, it seems unfair to entirely discount the film from which the ideas first came - no matter how clunky the execution, the story remains impressively hair-raising and novel, such that perhaps any remake in any country could hardly fail.

Both Ring and Ringu feature a young female journalist and single mother whose teenage niece dies unexpectedly and without apparent cause. Stumbling upon a link between that death and those of several other kids, she follows the trail to a cabin resort that lends videotapes to its guests. Among those tapes is an unlabeled cassette that, upon further investigation, contains some sort of surreal avant-garde short consisting of a series of brief but unsettling images. When the tape ends, the phone rings in the cabin where she is staying. And in the American version, the words the caller at the other end says match exactly the legend her niece's friends told her: "seven days," states the raspy female voice - all that now remains of the viewer's time on this earth.

Already significant differences start piling up, not least the Japanese version offering nothing but static over the phone when she picks up. (I suppose that's sinister enough - she's smart enough to guess what the call means.) Reiko, as she is known in the Japanese version, apparently needs plenty of help otherwise, though - a pixilated point-of-view shot when she checks into the resort seems to draw her to the video in question, and in her cabin we get our first glimpse of a ghostly figure, seen only in the reflection of the TV, pointing her to various clues. (The same figure, of indistinct gender, and with some sort of towel over its head, appears in the video as well, but that's all we know about it.) Also noteworthy is what remains of the film's first victim, the heroine's unlucky niece: in Ring we are treated to a disgusting shot of an instantly-decomposed girl cowering in the closet, but in Ringu the special-effects budget was clearly more limited, and all we get is a fresh corpse whose expression is fixed into a scream. "Their hearts simply stopped," somebody notes - clearly less unnerving than whatever happened to the victims in Seattle.

Neither film is spared the blurred-face phenomenon in photographs of the doomed, however, which clues both ladies that their countdown has begun. Only Ring's Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) has the added omen of a preternaturally intuitive son who seems all too aware that dark forces are gathering. Reiko's young Yoichi is also a highly independent latchkey kid, and also ends up watching the odious tape his mom brought from the cabin, but the American Noah particularly exudes a sense of doom from start to finish. Maybe Noah's so freaked because Ring's actual tape is significantly longer and more nightmarish; Ringu's evil "student film" shows the lady brushing her hair in the mirror, the mirror moving to the right of the frame then back, Japanese ideograms for the word "eruption" floating around the screen, the towel-headed figure gesturing on a cliff, then a picture of a well - not much more. Verbinski knew how to expand on that and add several more disturbing shots, many of which offer oblique clues to their source.

Ringu's most problematic elements center around the character of Ryuji, the audio-visual expert ex-husband. It seems hardly fair that he still bites it in the end, because in Ringu his phone doesn't even ring after viewing the tape. Even more confusing is the revelation that he's psychic. Much of their detective work is made easier thanks to the visions he experiences from time to time; this superpower is addressed so casually that we can only assume this sort of supernatural aptitude is a common superstition in Japanese culture, or at least Japanese film culture (an anime-expert friend says nearly everyone in those cartoons is psychic). For American viewers, however, that sort of assistance, and that of towel-head, make their discoveries far too easy. In Ring, Rachel has flashes of her own now and then, but we can accept them as symptomatic of D-Day's approach, as instances of the abominable Samara dropping little hints as to why she had to do this to them.

Other than those random mental feeds, Rachel relies on her journalistic abilities to get to the bottom of things. So does Reiko, but at least Rachel conducts her research under the pretext of following a juicy lead for her employer, and she tells her boss as much; Reiko's professional life is addressed only at the beginning, then seemingly forgotten. (Still, who can blame her? She's got more important things on her mind.) Both characters' investigations lead them to an island off the coast - in one film containing a horse ranch, in the other a fishery. Here's another instance where Ring succeeds by altering the material; it would be hard to be creeped out by suicidal fish. Upon the arrival at the island, Ringu's backstory is clarified a bit too thoroughly: Sadako, the source of this idiosyncratic curse, was the daughter of a local female seer (who predicted the "eruption" of the island's volcano several decades earlier) and a professor who specialized in psychic phenomena. Though the seer's powers were formidable, Sada grew up with the power to kill with her mind, an ability that probably prompted both her mother's suicide (throwing herself into the volcano) and her father's dumping the youngster down a well.

That's a solid enough explanation, but Ring does it one better by refusing to reveal even that much. In Ring, the little Samara was adopted, her biological parentage was unknown, her new mother had no paranormal abilities, and even though her adoptive parents had clearly wanted a child for a long time, once Samara arrives she is subjected to endless physical isolation and abuse. Ring shows that sometimes, less is more: why would her parents be so cruel? Did Samara have malefic powers, and if so, how did she get them? Who were her birth parents? And what happened at the asylum they sent her to later?

In Ringu the dad is never even punished for sending Sada to her watery grave, whereas in Ring Alex Cox's adoptive father is clearly tormented from afar and does himself in right in front of Rachel. Ringu's father figure instead ferries our two heroes back to the mainland, whereupon Reiko and Ryuji travel back to the cabin under which lies the well, where they hope to exhume the corpse and end the curse. Here Ringu's plot shows an excess of material, in this case to the story's detriment: inexplicably, the duo brings along two buckets and starts dredging water out of the well. With the male below and the female up top single-handedly pulling the filled buckets up with a rope, no less. Why not just do like Rachel Keller, and feel your way around the water, since it's still no more than chest-deep? Instead the Japanese leads waste endless hours as Reiko's final hours tick away. Tiring of the labor, she demands they trade places, she hops down into the pit, and voila! Her fingers catch Sada's hair almost immediately. Like Ryuji couldn't have found her? (Or maybe he wasn't meant to.)

To Ringu's credit, the smaller budget, which allowed only for a skeleton with long black tresses awaiting them in the water, is still effective in this scene. Though oddly tender with the remains, Reiko inadvertently tears the hair from the skull with but a touch - and a gelatinous liquid seeps from Sadako's eye sockets, eerily weeping. Of course Japanese audiences must have presumed she was mourning her prolonged claustrophobic suffering, but they learn soon enough the figurative crying is because the curse cannot end, despite their efforts; her ordeal must be communicated to everyone under penalty of death. Ringu's subdued soundtrack is also competent here, as it never tries to cheaply amplify the grisly events with obvious aural flourishes. What little funds were applied to technical matters are used well, at least.

It's instead when Ringu refuses to get overly technical that scenes lack sufficient oomph. As Sada later emerges from Ryuji's television set, her hands do indeed lack fingernails (as she tore them off trying frantically to escape her cistern tomb), but her dress is sparkling white, her skin devoid of grime, her hair healthy and shiny, if in need of a trim. She's not pixilated like her counterpart Samara when she does away with Aidan, an appropriately horrific manifestation of her medium. Nor do we get to see anything of Sadako's face other than one bulging eyeball peering from between her bangs - the eye is a dreadful sight, I'll grant, but nothing like Samara's explicitly malicious visage with its rotten teeth and obvious dermatological distress. With Sadako you only know your time is up; with Samara you know you're fucked.

This is the radical departure of the Ring films from other instances of the horror genre: the heroes think they know how to save the day, and they're wrong. There is a way out, but it's found only through very costly trial-and-error. (And in one film, with valuable help from the towel-head.) "Then it goes on forever?" asks the now-safe Yoichi - indeed it must, but sadly the Japanese victims don't get quite so macabre a ride to the great dirt nap. There's no fly you can pick off the screen, no gagging up cords from the asylum (indeed, there's no asylum at all), no ominous tree on a hill, and no horses doing lemming impersonations. And your corpse certainly doesn't end up quite so ghoulish. Not to say either fate is desirable, but if ya gotta go, you might as well do it in style.