Ringu is a terrifying J-Horror classic and it achieved this by subverting an unwritten rule…
This article comes from Den of Geek UK.
In the early 2000s, a new movement in horror hit Western audiences.
It came from Japan, was known as J-Horror and it was scary as all hell.
InRingu, a cursed VHS tape will kill the viewer seven days after theyve watched it.
Its scary and uncanny anyway, but theres more to it than that.
This can be a bit of a problem for things that actually are real.
Watch it on the news and its easy to pretend its not real.
The glass screen keeps us one step removed.
But obviously, those films arent real.
And this isnt just me knowing thatA Serbian Filmisnt real.
He was not ok.
But the dog getting hit by the car was way worse.
In the film, its good, in the play its bloody terrifying.
Ringu makes the audience unknowingly complicit.
We see thevideo within the filmin its entirety before we really know or understand all the rules.
And in the original version at least, we have no idea what were looking at.
A woman brushes her hair.
Japanese characters shift and twitch like ants.
A man with a sheet on his head points at the ground.
Even watching it again now, out of context, its unsettling in an almost primal way.
Its wrong but you dont know quite why and now youve seen it, so you are cursed too.
Or its not, until the moment Sadako pushes her way through the television screen.
You thought you were safe behind the glass screen: well now youre not.
AndThe Blair WitchProjectmanaged it again by trying to convince us that the whole thing was real.
The glass screen was broken, the curse felt real and I was terrified.
More than 20 years after its release andRingustill holds up as one of the scariest movies of all time.
So scary, in fact, it literally frightened me into becoming a film journalist.
