Ringu (1998)

The setup

A television journalist hears a teenager's story about a videotape that supposedly kills anyone who watches it, and the rumor stops being funny when her own niece is among the dead. She starts to investigate with a deadline she cannot argue with. The film unfolds as a mystery, one piece of evidence at a time, and it prefers dread that creeps over shocks that jump.

Context

Ringu is based on Ring, a novel by Koji Suzuki first published in 1991. The book was the first in a trilogy that continued with Spiral (1995) and Loop (1998), and a related short story collection, Birthday, appeared in 1999. The novel's protagonist is a male reporter, Kazuyuki Asakawa. Sales were respectable at first, and they kept growing; the book was published in English by Vertical in 2003. The Japanese publisher Kadokawa Shoten decided to adapt it for the screen after its moderate success.

The film's route to the screen also ran through television. Screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi and director Hideo Nakata reportedly wrote their script after watching a 1995 Fuji Television film based on the book, directed by Chisui Takigawa. They made the lead a woman, Reiko Asakawa, and turned the child at risk from a daughter into a son. Suzuki is said to have liked Nakata's earlier film Don't Look Up (1996), and he asked for Nakata to direct. The cast was led by Nanako Matsushima and Hiroyuki Sanada.

Why it matters

Ringu did more than scare audiences. It established a style that the world began to call J-horror, built on quiet, slowly mounting fear, a vengeful female ghost, and ordinary technology as the carrier of a haunting. In the late 1990s, mainstream Western horror leaned on slasher sequels and self-aware irony. Nakata's film offered a stillness that felt new to many viewers abroad, and its success drew attention to a wider run of East Asian ghost stories.

It also made the vengeful spirit a figure for modern anxiety. The ghost in the film comes from a long Japanese tradition, but her weapon is a copied videotape and a telephone call, items from a normal living room. The film's subject is as much about how a rumor spreads as about what the rumor is, which is why it still reads as current in a time of viral content and forwarded messages.

What to look for

• A structure close to an investigation, in which the audience learns the rules of the curse at the same time as the heroine.
• A short, strange sequence of footage on the tape itself, shot on 35 mm film and then given a rough, degraded look by computer.
• A near absence of on-screen gore. Nakata chose to avoid showing the victims' deaths directly.
• Layered sound design in which four telephone sounds were mixed together, and roughly 50 tracks each were used for backgrounds and effects.
• A pale, long-haired female ghost whose look descends from Japanese stage and print traditions.
• A vision of motherhood and responsibility that shapes the heroine's choices as much as the supernatural threat.

From page to film

Suzuki's novel is more of a scientific detective story than a ghost story. Its reporter follows clues through a set of connected deaths and tries to understand a mechanism, which gives the text some of the logic of a medical mystery. The film keeps the curse and the deadline but changes much else. Reiko is a single mother and a journalist, her relationship with her former husband Ryuji is central, and her son is placed at risk. Those changes shift attention from the puzzle toward family and responsibility.

The sequels followed in the book's own order, and then in the film world's own order. A film called Spiral, based on the second novel, was shot back to back with Ringu, and it shares much of the cast but not Nakata or Takahashi; it was poorly received. Nakata and Takahashi made Ring 2 (1999) as a separate follow-up that ignores Spiral, and Ring 0: Birthday (2000) went back in time as a prequel. There was also a television series in 1999 and a South Korean version, The Ring Virus, the same year.

Making a quiet film

Nakata has cited The Haunting (1963) as a major influence and said he watched it at least five times. That film also relies on suggestion: a hallway, a door, a sound with no clear source. Ringu has the same preference for implication. The production reportedly took nine months and one week, from three or four months of script and pre-production, to five weeks of shooting, to four months of post-production. The budget is usually given as about $1.5 million, small even by Japanese standards.

The restraint was a creative choice and not just a cost-saving one. Because the film seldom shows the moment of death, the audience fills the gap, and what people imagine is rarely as controlled as what a director could show. Cinematographer Junichiro Hayashi shot the story in everyday settings, and Kenji Kawai composed the music, so the rare supernatural moment arrives inside an otherwise plain, believable world.

The vengeful spirit tradition

Sadako, the film's ghost, belongs to a category the Japanese call onryo, a spirit made dangerous by a wrong done to it in life. Belief in such spirits goes back to at least the eighth century, when a cult grew up around Prince Nagaya, who died in 729. Rulers later built shrines to appease the so-called three great onryo, including the scholar Sugawara no Michizane, who became the deity Tenjin. Our entry on the onryo covers this belief in more detail.

On stage, the look became a convention. Kabuki gave ghosts a white burial kimono, long loose black hair and white face makeup with blue shadows. The best-known stage example is Oiwa from Yotsuya Kaidan, a revenge story whose ghost acts through the mind of her husband more than through physical violence. Nakata and his team took that inherited look and put it in a modern apartment and a television set, a pairing that gave the old figure new reach.

Release and reception

Toho released Ringu in Japan on January 31, 1998. It became the highest-grossing horror film in the country up to that time, with a total of about 1.7 billion yen, or roughly $13 million, according to Wikipedia. It did well elsewhere in Asia: in Hong Kong in 1999 it earned about HK$31.2 million, and it was for years the highest-grossing Japanese-language film there. Its estimated worldwide gross is around $19.5 million, a very large return on its small budget.

Critics around the world were warm. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 98 percent approval from 43 reviews. Mark Kermode of Sight and Sound praised its timeless terror, and Variety admired its patient pace. Not everyone agreed: Empire's Adam Smith found it complicated and short on action. The Guardian ranked it 12th among the best horror films in 2010, and the film won the Best Feature prize in the Asian section at the 1999 Fantasia Film Festival.

Reading the film

Scholars have read Ringu through several lenses. Colette Balmain treats Sadako as a yurei archetype, a wronged spirit whose return signals that the repressed past can never be fully contained, and she sees the video's replication as a virus-like spread. Ruth Goldberg reads the film as an expression of ambivalence about motherhood, especially Reiko's tension between independence and her role as a mother. Jay McRoy sees the film's final movement as more hopeful than other critics do, which is a sign of how open the film is.

Technology is central. A videotape is something you can copy, hand to a friend and watch in private, and the curse uses all three features. Anyone who grew up with a VCR or a chain letter will recognize the logic. That helps explain why the film inspired so many followers that worked with phones, websites and cameras. It is also worth noting that Ringu arrived in Japan at about the same time as The Blair Witch Project in the United States; both films made old fears feel recorded and found, and both shifted horror toward the ordinary look of the camera.

The J-horror wave

The success of Ringu opened a door. Ju-On (2000), Uzumaki (2000), Pulse (2001) and Dark Water (2002) followed, as did the American remakes. The Ring (2002) opened in the United States and reached number one at the box office, and in Japan it earned slightly more than the original had, about 1.75 billion yen. Nakata himself directed The Ring Two (2005). The Grudge (2004) came from Takashi Shimizu, who also made the Japanese originals.

The wave was part of a larger interest in East Asian horror that also brought attention to titles such as A Tale of Two Sisters and The Eye. J-horror had older roots. Kwaidan (1964), Masaki Kobayashi's anthology of ghost stories, and Onibaba (1964), Kaneto Shindo's film set in a civil war, showed that Japanese cinema had long treated supernatural fear with painterly care. Common themes in the later films included haunted houses, broken families, monstrous mothers and long-haired female ghosts, all of which appear in Ringu.

Where it sits in the library

Ringu is useful next to the two other supernatural films in the collection. The Exorcist treats the supernatural as something to be fought by faith and ritual, with a loud body-based horror. Ringu offers a threat that cannot be bargained with and that follows rules like those of a contagion. For a comparison with another ghost story told through documents and evidence, watch The Blair Witch Project.

To explore the wider category, see the supernatural subgenre page and the guide to found-footage horror, where the idea of dangerous recorded images has a long afterlife. For a different Japanese-adjacent example of how sound can carry dread, look at our article on horror and sound, and for an older meeting of folk belief and cinema, see the folk horror entry.

How to watch it

Watch the Japanese original with subtitles, if possible, rather than a dubbed copy; the spoken pauses and the offices' room tone are part of the effect. Arrow Video released a 4K restoration on Blu-ray in the United Kingdom in March 2019. The film runs 95 minutes.

If you have seen the American remake, the original is not a lesser version of the same thing. It is slower and less ornate, and much of what bothers you in it is left to your imagination. Pay attention to small details: how the heroine takes notes, what the camera lingers on in a hospital room, how often a phone is on screen. Those choices are the film's way of reminding you that the threat lives in the machinery of daily life.

Verified details

• Ringu is based on Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel Ring, the first book of a trilogy.
• It opened in Japan on January 31, 1998, and runs about 95 minutes.
• The budget is usually given as about $1.5 million, and the estimated worldwide gross is about $19.5 million.
• Hideo Nakata cited The Haunting (1963) as a major influence and said he watched it at least five times.
• The film was shot back to back with Spiral, whose cast overlaps with it but which Nakata and Takahashi did not make.
• Hiroshi Takahashi wrote the screenplay, and Kenji Kawai composed the music.
• It won the Best Feature prize in the Asian section at the 1999 Fantasia Film Festival.
• The Hollywood remake The Ring (2002) was directed by Gore Verbinski.
• Ring 2 followed in 1999 and the prequel Ring 0: Birthday in 2000.
• The Vertical edition of the novel in English came out in 2003.

Connections

• Creature profile: The Onryō.
• Subgenre: Supernatural Horror.

Sources and further reading

• Ring (1998 film), Wikipedia
• Ring (Suzuki novel), Wikipedia
• Onryo, Wikipedia
• J-horror, Wikipedia