Le Cercle : The Ring

If you watch the video and then the phone rings, you've got a week to wait, to find out what it will bring, or rather what it will take away, as it's quite a significant price you have to pay, just for pressing play, to see Samara spring.

Still a great piece of horror film making.

The Ring usually gets a bad rep for being "too slow" and some people even say that "nothing happens" in the movie. Unless you have ADD or something, you have to at least appreciate what Gore Verbinski achieved in 2002. What he did was he basically took the premise of Ringu, a good suspenseful Japanese horror flick and made it more suspenseful and filled with creepy visuals.

I am a huge horror fan, and this is one of the movies that unsettles me the most. The suspenseful pace, the incredible, beautiful but haunting visuals make this a unique experience. I love gory films, but this one relies a lot more on psychological horror and imagery to create scares. No jump scares, just good story telling.

The movie may not answer all the questions it creates, but the viewer, if he pays attention accordingly, will be able to figure them out for himself.

Unsettling to the bone, The Ring is one of my favorite horror films of all time. Truly underrated.

This film is the American take on the Japanese original and while it absorbs its source material intact, it twists around its formula a bit in order to make it fit its new surroundings. The story is the same: a journalist, after losing her niece to a mysterious circumstance, investigates and discovers a cursed videotape, which gives a viewer only seven days to live.

Like its predecessors, the film doesn't spend that much time on the supernatural elements, but focuses more on the mystery. However, The Ring features a lot more supernatural elements immediately and throughout the film than either previous version, perhaps to make more obvious and visceral the impending doom that faces our protagonist. Visually, The Ring has been injected with a shot of adrenaline, being less the brooding mystery of the original and more immediate and menacing. The color palette is colder than Ringu and the story is also more detached and focused on the ghostly mechanics than the human story, which leads the film to be more recognizably intimidating.

The story itself is a little more mysterious in that the backstory of our villain is rather thin and unexplained. Furthermore, the villain is clearly portrayed as senselessly malevolent; this weakens at least two significant scenes. The ending, I think, is more clever than the previous versions. I like that there is something to the relationship between the protagonist, Rachel, and her ally, Noah, but it still seems a little weak when compared to Ringu--where one line can effortlessly show the development in the relationship.

As far as a horror movie goes, The Ring is a blunt, but nonetheless creepy example. Losing some of the trappings of its predecessors helps simplify the story for faster flow and to create room for more visual creepiness, but also loses some of the complexity that helped the story have more depth. It's more of impressive frightfest than Ringu, but is a little weaker in story resonance. In the end, that makes The Ring just as effective overall: if you want more chills, catch this version. If you want more meat, catch Ringu. Decent entertainment. 7/10.

I've been watching horror movies for a long time, and I always consider myself to be some what desensitized. When I saw this film when it was released in 2002, I was terrified. Whereas other scary movies I had seen before it tended to be predictable, this one wasn't. Certain images were unexpected and shocking to me. The plot is well-placed and the setting dark and dreary. Such natural things in the world are given new meaning within the film's context.

Watching it again 18 years later, I know what to expect, but it still gives me shivers. This is a solid horror/suspense film and I appreciate it in light of the tendency towards gore which followed.

'The Ring' is one of the few horror films that still makes me jump after multiple viewings and is probably up there as one of my favourites of the genre. I've always admired the way this film seems to sustain a high level of tension from practically start to finish. I can't think of many films that have done a better job at creating an eerie atmosphere and a level of creepiness that never seems to erode away no matter how many times you watch it.

Part of the reason I like this film so much is it has a storyline you can actually buy into. Too many horrors focus too much on trying to scare the audience without giving enough thought to plot. For me an eerie horror like this with a convincing plot trumps anything that relies on gore and jump scares. Personally I would consider 'The Ring' is be one of the best horror films of the 2000s. Strong story, solid acting, successfully creepy and just as effective on second and third viewing.