Ring
Short description
A videotape is circulating among Japanese students, and word has it that anyone who watches it dies a week later. When a journalist's teenage niece becomes one of the tape's victims, the reporter begins looking into the rumor as a story. Her investigation leads her to the tape itself, and after viewing it she finds herself caught in the same countdown, racing with her former husband to work out what the recording means before the week runs out.
Hideo Nakata directed the 1998 Japanese production, working from a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi. It is the second of the eighteen films credited to Nakata in chronological order, following Don't Look Up (1996) and preceding Ring 2 (1999). Nanako Matsushima plays the journalist Reiko Asakawa, with Hiroyuki Sanada as Ryuji Takayama, Rikiya Ôtaka as Yoichi Asakawa, Miki Nakatani as Mai Takano, Yûko Takeuchi as Tomoko Oishi and Hitomi Sato as Masami Kurahashi, among a credited cast of thirty-six.
Made for around one million dollars, the film has drawn an IMDb rating of 7.2 from 85,000 votes and a TMDB rating of 7.1 from 1,740 votes. A critics' rating of 7.9 from forty-six reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Koji Suzuki, the author of the novel that formed the basis for this Japanese film, was inspired by his favorite horror movie, "Poltergeist".
- The prototype for one of the film's heroines, Shizuko Yamamura, was a real person named Shizuko Mifune, born in 1886 and rumored to have possessed psychic abilities. In 1910, she was declared a charlatan, and a year later she committed suicide by jumping into a volcano crater.
- The film is based on the novels "Ringu" (1991) and "Rasen" (1995) by Koji Suzuki.
- During the filming of the scene with Sadako emerging from the well, the actress Rie Inou backed away, and in the editing, the footage was reversed, making Sadako's movements appear very unusual.
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