Scarred by Cinema : The Ring

by Eutychus

There is an old rule in politics and social interactions that the devil you know is preferable to the devil you don't know. In literature and cinema, the opposite is true. The monster you don't see is always scarier that the ones you can see and understand. The human mind can generate much more horrifying monsters and scenarios than the film maker can show. And once the film maker does show them, one realizes that it was never really as scary as you expected it to be. The television miniseries of Stephen King's book It was generally well done and scary...until they showed the monster as a big hairy spider at the end and it just seemed to become silly.

With the unexplained, mysterious, the self-created, explanations seem to be more satisfying as well. Roger Ebert alluded to this in his review of 2010 : The Year We Make Contact. His major complaint with the movie was that it attempted to give explanations to all of the mysteries woven in it's predecessor, 2001 : A Space Odyssey. In one sense, the mysteries in that film were the entire point of the film; that there are things so mysterious and otherworldly they may defy explanation. 2010 was a lame attempt to explain them away and force them into a specific context.

All of this serves to provide a background as to why The Ring may be a victim of its own success.

The Ring centers around a videotape which mysteriously appears at a campground in a log cabin. The videotape only contains about a minute's worth of odd images, but as soon as you watch it, the phone rings. There is a voice on the other end that says, "Seven days." And in seven days, you're dead. The plot revolves around a newspaper reporter trying to unravel the secrets of the videotape after having watched it herself and gotten the phone call. The movie was fairly well-plotted with some nice moments of suspense and a truly chilling outcome when you discover what "the ring" actually refers to. It was modestly successful in theaters and even more so when it was released on video.

Successful enough that you just know there is going to be a sequel.

In that sequel lies it's possible ruin. There are so many questions raised in the film, even as it slowly reveals the history of the videotape. Why did the horses commit suicide? Where did Samara actually come from? Why does she never sleep? How did she create the videotape? And how she know when you've watched it? And how does it actually kill?

One suspects that the inevitable sequel will attempt to answer all these questions, and just as inevitably, it will do it badly. Hollywood simply cannot let a mystery be a mystery and let a truly scary film stand on it's own without trying to explain the mechanics behind it.

Unfortunately as well, when they do try to recreate the original mystery, they tend to screw it up as well. The Blair Witch Project is a good example. It was just moderately creepy up until the last ten minutes, when it finally got around to becoming genuinely scary. Blair Witch 2 : Book of Shadows didn't try to explain away everything from the previous film, but it also didn't build on it and just turned out to be a confusing, poorly scripted waste of time which seemed to relate to the first film in title only.

I have heard that there have already been sequels to the original Japanese film, Ringu, in which deaths are explained by an actual, physical virus in the videotape itself. That is hardly a satisfactory explanation, but I don't expect any better to come out of Hollywood. If they are smart, they will leave well enough alone and let our already over-active imaginations fill in the blanks with our own subconscious fears.