The Ring - 2002's Accidental Analog Media Horror Masterpiece

This piece comes with spoilers

This movie was great, almost by accident

Note: I can’t yet publish my forthcoming continuation of “Observations and Predictions on AI-Generated Art,” mostly because I realized I’d need to read a couple books first just to make absolutely sure I know what I’m talking about. I’m going into romantic-era literary theory and Kantian aesthetics, and other hoity-toity stuff. It’ll take just a bit longer. Hold your horses. For this week, I’d like to share some nice, breezy remarks on The Ring, an American remake of a Japanese horror film that has proven to be a post-millennium horror classic.

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I. Intro

Looking at the credits for The Ring, you’d have no reason to assume it should work so well. The director is about average: Verbinski also directed the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but he’s no auteur. The scriptwriter Ehren Kruger hasn’t written anything else of any real merit except maybe Top Gun: Maverick. In the trailers, the film demonstrated the same style you’d find in every other horror movie from the same era. Besides Naomi Watts, the main actress, nothing in terms of either manpower or presentation really sticks out. Yet it not only succeeded incredibly well, but it also improved upon its source material, the Japanese film Ringu (1998).

Much of its success I think depends upon its timing. In 2002, America had just recently concluded a long debate about whether or not the entertainment that we consume has an effect on how we actually behave. Young people do not realize just how much of an event The Columbine High School Shooting was, but it was indeed a big deal. It prompted a wave of endless discussion that took up most of the televised news for about a year, especially since the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal was done and people needed something new to obsess over. For the year of 1999 and much of 2000, it was “the current thing.”

During this time, the dying remnants of the Christian Moral Majority staged what one might call its last great hoo-rah; its final protests of any real relevance. Among a few other things, their targets were violent computer games like the Doom series, and for some reason Marilyn Manson, a shock rocker whose music had absolutely no connection to the shooting (in fact, Eric Harris specifically name-dropped him in his journal as a musician whom he found awful). Eventually, things calmed down, and the public found other situations to distract themselves with. Schools across the country began hiring security guards and implemented school-shooting drills of dubious merit, the 2000 Bush/Gore election controversy occurred, and then the September 11th attacks took place. The hysteria over Marilyn Manson faded in people’s minds. Violent video games continued to be made, with the Surgeon General announcing in 2001 that they’re not likely an influence on shootings. The Moral Majority had decisively lost, and, at least on the pop culture front, the civil libertarians had won. On October 11^th, 2002, Bowling for Columbine was released, and it effectively took a victory lap, downplaying the importance of video games and portraying Marilyn Manson as a misunderstood and enlightened hero. The national consensus was in: the media content we engage with, no matter how unsavory, can harm neither us nor society in any substantial way.

And then, just one week later on October 18^th, a film came out about a video tape that causes you to die just by watching it. This film unexpectedly made a ton of money, about 5x its budget, and set off a wave of Japanese horror remakes. None of them really had the same power, however, and the “torture porn” subgenre would soon take over around the mid-00s. So what was going on in this movie, and why was it so special?

II. The Story

The film’s plot manages to be complex without being overly convoluted: a journalist called Rachel (Naomi Watts) learns of some mysterious deaths that all took place at exactly the same time a week after a camping trip in which the victims all had watched a mysterious tape in a rented cabin. According to urban legend, after watching the tape, you receive a phone call telling you that you have a week to live, and then a week later, you die. Being a journalist, she sees potential in this as a news story, so she goes to the cabin to see it. After seeing a two-minute video clip resembling an avant-garde art project, she receives the phone call from the cabin’s landline phone. For the next week, Rachel uses her detective skills, with the help of her ex-boyfriend Noah (Martin Henderson) who is also the father of her rather weird son (David Dorfman), to determine the film’s shooting location, the people involved with it, and the story behind it. Early on in the week, she shows Noah the tape, and a day later her son sees it against their wishes. Eventually, she and Noah go to where the tape was made, and they learn that it was summoned into being by the vengeful ghost of a girl who possessed psychic powers and was murdered and thrown into a well by her adopted mother. Deciding that she needs to exhume the girl’s corpse from the well in order to end the tape’s curse, Rachel does so, and then is relieved to find that she survives at the time when she’s meant to die. Feeling satisfied, she and Noah go back home. Her son, who has the uncanny ability to communicate with the ghost, tells her that she was foolish, because the girl was not innocent at all: she is a malevolent force of supernatural evil, and Rachel has only worsened the problem. Then Rachel learns that Noah has died. In the end, she concludes that the reason she didn’t die was simply because she made a copy of the videotape and showed it to someone else, namely Noah. The film ends with her copying the tape and telling her son that they’re going to show the tape to someone in order to save his life, while the son doesn’t seem particularly convinced of his mother’s wisdom.

III. The Power of Images

Now, the original Japanese film Ringu was itself based on a well-known novel from 1991, and with each instantiation of the story, improvements were made. In the original novel, the cursed tape is twenty minutes long, and there is no phone call; it simply displays text at the end telling the viewer he’ll die. In the Japanese film, the video is a two-minute mixture of strange images and mysterious text, and they add a phone call. In the American film, the video is two minutes of just images and uneasy ambient background noise, nothing else, and then you get the phone call.

The removal of visual text altogether gives the American film a certain brilliance lacking in the other versions of the story. In the original Ring novel series, we learn from its sequel Spiral that the curse is actually a virus similar to smallpox, and it can transmit to anyone who not only sees the tape but also reads things related to it, like literary descriptions, or the journal of the man who was investigating it. Whatever the readers felt about how the story develops, one thing is indisputable: in making these adjustments, there is no longer a horror element, nor could there be.

Since we first created the ability to mechanically reproduce an image, industrial civilization has experienced a cheapening of the image’s inherent power. Successive technological developments, especially the computer, have only worsened the problem. In order to restore an image’s power, something like a transcendental significance must be attributed to it. One must establish rituals pertaining to its contemplation. Allegories must be conceived for its various component parts. One must find a conceptually motivated reason to gaze upon it at great length or look at it repeatedly. In other words, the only way an image can be powerful in a technologically advanced culture is when the power of language (in the form of narrative, ideology, allegory, or whatever) is recruited to strengthen it by playing a subordinating role to it. So the notion that a series of images in a video – shorn of all narrative, context, or any extrinsic information at all – could actually mark you for death seems all the more terrifying precisely because of its inconceivability. The American Ring thus acts as a haunting reminder of man’s primitive state of being, in which images mean everything and the written word means nothing because it hasn’t even been invented yet. Even the phone call a victim gets after watching the tape is remarkably minimal: “one week” she hears, and that’s it. A sentence fragment.

IV. Analog Media

The other uniquely haunting aspect of The Ring, one that has aged like fine wine, is the dated nature of the media used to convey this phantasmal curse. When the original novel had been written, DVD hadn’t even been invented yet, so the VHS tape was the latest and greatest technology. When the Japanese film was released, VHS was still dominant and DVD had only been introduced two years prior. When the American film was made, however, VHS was just on the verge of being displaced. Consider this timeline. The Playstation 2 came out in the year 2000, which meant the writing was on the wall, so to speak. The Ring came out two years later in 2002. Then, just one year later, DVD rentals finally surpassed those of VHS nationwide. Finally, in 2006, VHS tapes stopped being commercially produced except as gimmick items. By the time The Ring was released, VHS was a dying medium on life support, and the general population could already hear the faint clarion call in the background announcing its end. So that would make it a silly choice for this movie, right? Not even slightly. The passage of time had made it an even better means through which a wraith could transmit its essence than it had been before.

For one thing, VHS tapes, antenna televisions, and landline telephones are all analog devices. Analog signals convert information into continuously changing waves of various frequencies and amplitudes. The fluid waveform structure is always maintained from the sender to the destination. When you have signal interference, the waves still remain, but they “get confused” and pick up on whatever is causing the interference, usually ambient radiation (from other electronics, but also rain, the sun, and even the atmosphere itself), and it gives off random frequencies and amplitudes. We call this random information “noise,” and visually it manifests as TV static. The Ring uses noise and static to great effect. The film simply wouldn’t work with digital media, since digital media obscures the manner in which information is transmitted.

With a digital signal, information is converted into a finite series of discrete pulse units that manifest as 0s and 1s, or a binary sequence. Thus, the fluidity of the analog waveform is simplified into straight lines with right-angle edges, and only by making more and more pulse units within a given expanse of time can a digital signal adequately represent the original information. But because a digital signal is so easy to replicate, signal interference rarely happens, and thus there’s no more static; no more noise. Once the information is finally audible or visible, it returns to a fluid wave (since all waves in nature are fluid), but nonetheless, throughout the process it’s captured in an “unnatural” state. All of this is to say, an analog signal shows us more nakedly the transmission of information from the sender to the destination. It’s akin to a marionette show in which one can see the wires animating the puppets. The static on a television screen conveys the ambient noise that is always present in nature, no matter the circumstances.

In The Ring, the cursed two-minute video tape is continuously interrupted with little splotches of signal interference. It is book-ended by static, and when the time comes for someone to die, a television somewhere will show static at first, and then show images that are apparently so horrible that they physically kill the victim, warping his or her face and body into an unnatural shape. One might think that for an audience dimly aware that VHS tapes are about to go away, it might be a little reassuring that we’re dealing with “dead media” here. But not so. The static shows us something about the noise inherent in nature as well as the radiation inherent in the atmosphere, and thus we can make a thematic connection between the vengeful ghost and nature herself. The film’s total effect is to force us into a headspace in which we accept the premise that all forms of electronic information are linked; connected by some cosmic presence, and thus we can more readily accept the idea that the video and a phone call are part of the same process. In this mode of thinking, they each have the same location of origin: an electronic ghostly otherworld whose contours are everywhere and center, nowhere.

Now, this situation would not make digital media any less dangerous; quite the opposite. Even upon its release, digital information had reached the point at which it could look and sound quite good, and it conveyed the intended signal with more reliability. But the crudeness of the analog signal effectively was and is its own message. When teenagers went to go see The Ring in 2002, they didn’t have cell phones quite yet, but they did almost all browse the internet. The analog signal’s message basically was, “Now that I’m going away, you’re in fact more vulnerable than ever.”

V. The Ubiquity of Electronics

The Ring has lots of horror movie logic, i.e. lapses in logic from the characters that do not lend well to retrospective analysis but which contribute to the sense of foreboding at the moment in which the audience watches the movie (which in the horror genre is the only time that really counts).¹ If The Ring were to “make sense,” the people who watched the tape would simply go off to a remote location with no electricity in which they couldn’t die on account of ghosts or demons killing them through a screen. Maybe they could go live with the Amish. But the point of the film is to highlight the ubiquity of electronic devices and the sense that they’re inescapable. The opening sequence demonstrates the issue perfectly.

The opening lines of dialogue come from a girl who’s about to die (she’s the first victim whom Rachel investigates, and also Rachel’s niece). She watches TV with her friend and says, “You know, I heard there are so many magnetic waves traveling through the television because of TV and telephones that we’re losing, like, ten times as many brain cells as we’re supposed to. Like, all of the molecules in our heads are all unstable. All the companies know about it, but they’re not doing anything about it.” And yet, there she is, watching TV with her friend, which means she’s not doing much about it, either. She knows the stuff is bad for her, but it’s not like she’s intending to actually do anything about it — all the worse because she also knows she just watched a tape predicting her death exactly one week ago. When the time comes for her to die just a couple minutes after this discussion, a TV downstairs starts showing static. She becomes frightened and unplugs it, and the static goes away. But then, she just goes upstairs, and another TV in her room kills her.

VI. Body Horror and Psychosomatic Effects

In addition to demonstrating the ubiquity of electronics, the opening sequence’s first few lines also set the tone for the rest of the film by establishing the notion that purely visual information can have a physical effect. The original novel presents “the ring” as a kind of virus, and the Japanese film dispenses with this idea, instead opting for elements of body horror. But the American version pushes the body horror elements further than the Japanese film, lending an ironic quality to the opening’s mention of “magnetic waves,” giving it the quality of dramatic understatement. The victims’ faces are contorted in the Japanese film, but they are way more contorted and messed up in the American version, with more bloodshed to match the contortions. In the American film, the victims start to get nosebleeds around day two or three. Rachel also has a gruesome dream in which she coughs up a long wire connected to an ECG electrode, sees the ghost, gets grabbed by her, and then wakes up with fingerprint bruises on her arm. The fingerprint bruises are in the Japanese film, but not the electrode part. The American additions further extend the relationship between electronically conveyed information and the human body, thus making the film a spiritual nephew to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).

Ultimately, however, it’s the brain that is the cursed video’s most vulnerable target, not the rest of the body. Rachel at one point finds herself able to physically pick a fly off of the screen from the original video when she inspects it for a second time, and it isn’t clear whether this is really happening or just her imagination. In fact, it often becomes difficult to tell whether or not a character is hallucinating because of the tape’s effects on the psyche. The first victim apparently was possessed to use a ballpoint pen to scratch out the faces of every photo she had in her room some time before she died, replacing them with lines resembling the ghost’s long hair. At one point, Rachel finds herself doing the same thing subconsciously.

The fact that the cursed tape affects its victim’s minds for a week before they die compromises the agency of the characters. Some critics found the detective story aspect of the film irritating, as Rachel slowly pieces together the ghost’s entire backstory and explains it to her ex-boyfriend in a plodding and heavy-handed fashion. But what makes the film so rewarding is just how absurdly wrong she turns out to be. She decides, with no solid evidence, that the ghost girl was a precocious but innocent victim of child abuse (who just happened to have psychic powers), and exhuming her body will somehow “set her free.” The reasoning she uses to arrive at this conclusion is made clear by the film, since the storytelling invites the viewer to share her perspective, but one ultimately wonders if her thinking was compromised by the same forces that prompted her to go on the expedition in the first place.

At the end of the film, she theorizes that in order to save her son, she must make a copy of the tape. But what kind of flimsy evidence is she basing this on? If she’s still alive, why not just assume that the ghost spared her because she “set her free” and thus made her more powerful? The viewer has no reason to agree with her thinking, especially since she was so wrong before. Could she be completely warped by the ghost’s influence at this point? And if not, why not? An earlier retrospective article sees the film’s conclusion as an eerily prescient comment on the way horrible things often “go viral,” and I agree. It’s a shame, then, that the American sequel accepted Rachel’s theory as canon, while the original Japanese sequel Spiral doesn’t present it as even close to correct.

VII. The Big Problem

The biggest problem with The Ring is its high likelihood that the filmmakers didn’t really understand why what they were doing was effective. The best example of this is found in Rachel’s weird son, who has the telepathic ability to communicate with the ghost before anyone has even died yet. This dimension is not present in either the novel or the Japanese film, yet the American film never bothers to explain just why this random kid can communicate with the dead; he simply can, and even Rachel isn’t all that curious about it. Had he developed the ability to communicate with her only after seeing the tape, it would have made far more sense. But for this reason and a few other minor ones, I consider The Ring something of an accidental masterpiece. It isn’t that the filmmakers had a firm, resolute grip on the source material they were using and really wanted to say something with it. It’s more that they wanted to put out a PG-13 movie so teens could see a horror, they had a vague idea of what kinds of things are scary, and those things all happened to come together in a film that somehow says something about electronic media – more now than it did then, though even in 2002 it said plenty. But because the filmmakers didn’t quite know what worked about the film, the sequel, The Ring Two (2005) was very bad. No longer a film about an evil video tape, it instead turns into some strange allegory for… motherhood, or something. It did decent box office, at least.

The eeriness of analog video static continues to be a frightening phenomenon, perhaps moreso the further we get away from it. In 2015, for instance, there was a creepypasta that went viral called “Candle Cove” about a group of adults on a nostalgia message board reminiscing about a children’s puppet show that had many sinister elements, before eventually realizing that they all had just been watching TV static as children and imagining the entire thing. You can consider this very short story a descendant of The Ring. But I think the more important takeaway is that dead electronic media make an incredibly fertile ground for experimentation in horror. When we encounter electronic media, we become porous; the light and the message go right through us, as Marshall McLuhan observed. And the analog signal defamiliarizes the process through which this happens.

1. Horror movie logic is often a target of grad-school-educated critics who demand psychological realism in all forms of storytelling, often forgetting entirely about the total cumulative effect that all components of a horror movie are meant to have on the viewer. In fact, the increasing absence of such logic in favor of “elevated” themes has done great harm to the genre as a whole. Someone ought to tell these deeply confused souls that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does not exist on the same plane as Madam Bovary, nor could it ever.