A Love Letter To ‘The Ring’, The Film That Traumatised An Entire Generation

I was 12 years old when I watched the American remake of The Ring at a friend’s sleepover party.

The celebration started with cake, laughter and jelly snakes, and ended with a girl named Amy sitting in the corner with her head between her legs breathing heavily into a paper bag. Four people got picked up by the parents. The rest of us sat huddled in one corner of the room, the squat box of the television turned with the screen against the wall. We took turn sleeping in shifts, like we were on guard duty in the American Civil War.

I was better equipped than my friends for the film. I had been obsessed with horror cinema and literature since the age of about six, when I felt the inextricable pull of the Goosebumps books. I had already hoovered up my way through the ‘child-friendly’ horror I could get my hands on — I memorised every line from Gremlins, and found the hideous puppets of Labyrinth enchanting in a way that none of my friends could understand. I’d even started a cursory education on the harder stuff, staying up late and watching The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby back to back one thrilling evening.

But I still wasn’t prepared for The Ring.

From that very first scare — a neat subversion on the ‘lone babysitters telling scary stories’ gimmick — I was locked in a cold sweat.

It felt like waking up during surgery; this awful sense that I was both conscious and yet somehow not, locked by paralysis, riddled with the terrible sense that I was watching something fundamentally wrong. It changed me.

That horror is coded into the film, of course. Both versions of The Ring, the Japanese original and the remake that so curdled the insides of me and my friends, are about being changed by media. They’re deliriously postmodern films — the lingering sense of dread you get after a good scare is the lingering sense of dread that Naomi Watts’ Rachel feels. And the compulsion we all feel to share a particularly horrible experience — to pass it on to others, as a way of coping — is coded into the film’s climax.

Aside from that, the remake is just extremely fucking scary. Director Gore Verbinski nails the woozy lurch of a bad dream. Brian Cox electrocuting himself in the bath; a horse getting churned up by the motor of a boat; the sight of a stone tablet being dragged across a well, what feels like miles above you — these are images that have been scraped off the greying surface of the id.

The film is light on jump scares, and heavy on dread. It sits on your shoulders for days.

Then there’s Samara. Samara, the film’s antagonist, is a mess of Freudian trigger points: the fear of children; the fear of hair; the fear of death itself. She’s a far cry from the demented court jester that is Freddy Krueger, or the sociopathic teens of Scream. She has no character, per se; no trademark quips of dialogue, or complex backstory. She is a spirit of pure vengeance. You can’t reason with her. You have nothing that she wants. She’ll just kill you in a manner never shown onscreen, but nonetheless so horrible that it leaves her victims contorted into pink, fleshy whorls of pain.

Verbinski's THE RING has one of *the* best scares of the past 20 years in it: the moment where it suddenly cuts away to a dead girl in a closet. It gets me every time. https://t.co/caOfXUDoKw

— Scott Wampler™ (@ScottWamplerBMD) November 2, 2019

Samara didn’t become a hero the way that Krueger did. She wasn’t turned into merchandise, like her colleague Chucky. Nothing reduced her terror. She was so awful that even dodgy fascimiles of her still had the ability to horrify — my friend Alana once got punched in the face by her friend for hiding in a corner and hiding behind her sheet of wet hair. Invoking Samara when somebody else wasn’t ready could never be some cute joke. It was an act of violence.

Almost everybody in my generation has a story like this, a sense memory of the first time that they saw The Ring, and the way it fucked them up for months afterwards. My housemate was subjected to the film at a secret screening at the cinema, walking into the thing with no understanding of what he was about to see.

He vividly remembers sitting there, desperately praying for a joke, or some pratfall; trying as hard as he could to convince himself he was watching a horror spoof. Another friend remembers getting halfway through the film with her sister, and then taking the tape outside and burning it in the backyard.

For an entire generation, The Ring was perfectly placed to terrify, hitting home video at precisely the age where most of us start developing a morbid curiosity about just how scary horror movies could really be. That’s a kind of power that time cannot reduce. For some people, The Ring was the film that swore them off horror forever.

For the rest of us sickos, it is the activation point for an entire lifetime spent obsessing over horror movies, forever chasing the lurching, terrible thrill of that real true scare.

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Joseph Earp is a horror film tragic and staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @Joseph_O_Earp.