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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - October 18th

"THE RING" released in 2002

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Two high school students, Katie Embry (Amber Tamblyn) and Becca Kotler (Rachael Bella), have a sleepover and discuss the urban legend of a cursed videotape that will kill anyone seven days after watching it. Katie reveals that she and three friends watched said videotape, but Becca does not believe her. At 10 PM, Katie goes downstairs where she witnesses several supernatural occurrences, such as the TV turning on by itself, occur. Frightened, she calls out to Becca, who does not answer. Returning upstairs, Katie sees water flowing out from under her bedroom door. She enters and sees an image of a well on her TV screen as an unseen force rushes towards her and kills her. At Katie's funeral, her mother Ruth (Lindsay Frost) asks her journalist sister Rachel (Naomi Watts) to investigate the bizarre circumstances behind Katie's death after discovering her gruesomely distorted corpse in the closet.

Rachel discovers Katie’s three friends all died at 10 PM on the same night Katie died and that Becca has been institutionalized after witnessing her death. Looking through Katie's photos, Rachel finds out that they have all stayed at Cabin 12 in Shelter Mountain Inn a week before their deaths. When paying to stay a night at the cabin, she notices an unlabeled videotape among the selection at the inn's reception, which she secretly takes. In Cabin 12, she watches the videotape which contains surreal and disturbing images. As soon as the tape ends, the cabin’s telephone rings and Rachel hears a childish voice utter "7 days". Rachel enlists help from video analyst Noah Clay (Martin Henderson), her ex-boyfriend and her son, Aidan’s (David Dorfman) father, who is initially skeptical of the tape’s curse but watches it, asking Rachel to copy it for examination. Rachel also studies the video, discovering hidden imagery of a lighthouse, which she identifies it as the lighthouse of Moesko Island, connecting it to a woman on the video, a horse breeder named Anna Morgan. Anna’s ranch was caught in controversy when her prize-winning horses committed mass suicide by leaping into the sea. As Rachel and Noah continue researching the tape, the two begin to experience supernatural symptoms as a result of the tape's curse throughout the week, with Aidan eventually watching the tape himself.

Desperate, Rachel travels to Moesko Island, while Noah travels to Eola Psychiatric Hospital to gain information on Anna’s medical files. Rachel meets Anna’s widower Richard (Brian Cox), but he becomes angry when she starts asking him about Samara and the tape, and later visits the island's doctor  Dr. Grasnik (Jane Alexander), who explains that Anna experienced horrible visions and dreams after her adopted daughter, Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase), came to live with them. Rachel confronts Richard over his supposed abuse over Samara but he reveals to her that he had been a victim of Samara's mental torment and electrocutes himself in the bathtub to end it for good. Noah arrives, and the two search the ranch’s barn where Samara was kept, secluded from her mother. They find a burnt drawing of a tree on the wall, the same tree seen in the videotape, and on Shelter Mountain. With time running out, Rachel and Noah travel to Shelter Mountain, where the whole nightmare began, to stop the curse before it consumes them and their son!

[Becca and Katie talk about the cursed videotape]
Becca: You start to play it... and it's like somebody's nightmare. Then suddenly, this woman comes on. Smiling at you, right? Seeing you... through the screen. Then when it's over, your phone rings. Someone knows you watched it. And what they say is, "You will die in seven days". And exactly seven days later... 

 Top:   Rachel (Naomi Watts) watches the cursed videotape at Shelter Mountain;

Above:   Rachel later gives the tape to Noah (Martin Henderson) to examine

There were conflicting stories over how executive producer Roy Lee came to see the 1998 Japanese horror film Ringu, Hideo Nakata's adaptation of the 1991 novel Ring by Kôji Suzuki. Lee said two different friends gave him a copy of Ringu in January 2001, which he loved and immediately gave to DreamWorks executive Mark Sourian, who agreed to purchase the rights for $1 million. But Lee’s close friend Mike Macari who worked at Fine Line Features, claimed they had an American remake of Ringu in development before January 2001, when Macari said he showed Lee Ringu (Macari and Lee were both listed as executive producers for The Ring). In any event, Sourian immediately called producers and co-heads of DreamWorks Pictures Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald. "Mark said, 'I've just seen the scariest movie I have ever seen in my life. You have to see it right away,'" Parkes recalls. "Laurie and I cancelled everything and watched the movie on videotape, which, come to think of it, was appropriate for this film. We were both frightened and mesmerized by it, and immediately decided we were going to remake this movie. "  Parkes and MacDonald then hired director Gore Verbinski to helm the picture, Verbinski having already directed two films for Dreamworks, Mouse Hunt (1997) and The Mexican (2001). The initial drafts of the screenplay for the US remake of The Ring was written by Hiroshi Takahashi (the original Ringu screenwriter) and then by Ehren Kruger, with later revised drafts written by Scott Frank. Verbinski estimated that, for the American version, they "changed up to 50 percent of it. The basic premise is intact, the story is intact, the ghost story, the story of Samara, the child." Story-lines involving the characters having ESP, a volcano, “dream logic,” and references to “brine and goblins” were taken out.

The role of Rachel was first offered to Jennifer Connelly (who would later star in another Japanese horror remake Dark Water in 2005), before the script was then offered to Jennifer Love Hewitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Beckinsale, and finally to  Australian actress Naomi Watts - who the year before drew critical and audience acclaim for her work in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive - who accepted the role. New Zealand-born actor Martin Henderson was soon cast as Rachel's ex-friend Noah, with newcomer David Dorfman cast as there son, Aidan. Amber Tamblyn and Rachael Bella co-star as the two schoolgirls, Katie and Becca, who first introduce the urban legend of a cursed videotape. Famed Brian Cox was cast as Richard Morgan and, although receiving prominent billing in promotional material for The Ring, only appears almost an hour into the film, and has just 4-minutes of screen time. Chris Cooper was supposed to be featured in a small role as a child murderer, though his scenes were allegedly filmed and his name was included in early promotional materials (and on the film's official website) he's nowhere to be seen in the final theatrical cut. The pivotal role of Samantha Morgan (the American version of Sadako Yamamura) was portrayed by Daveigh Chase.

TRIVIA:   When filming the scene where Samara is walking toward the camera on the tape, the actress, Daveigh Chase, was actually walking backward towards the well.

 Top:   Rachel and Noah's son, Aidan (David Dorfman) watches the tape, passing on the curse;

Above:   Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase) shows early signs of her abilities at the Eola Psychiatric Hospital.

While much of the principal photography was accomplished in and around Los Angeles and on soundstages, portions of The Ring were filmed on location in the state of Washington. The Pacific Northwest winter provided a seemingly perpetual overcast and cold, gloomy weather that only added to the story's atmosphere of dread. The lack of sun also lent itself perfectly to the soft light and lack of shadows that Verbinski and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli were employing to complement the story's surrealistic moments. Moesko Island Lighthouse was actually Yaquina Head Lighthouse, at the mouth of the Yaquina River, a mile west of Agate Beach, Oregon. The website Rachel checks, MoeskoIslandLighthouse.com, used to actually exist as a one-page website, which gave general information on the fictional place.

The red Japanese maple (seen in the video) was artificial, built out of steel tubing and plaster, with painted silk for the leaves. (The crew dubbed it "Lucille" after "a certain red-haired actress"). While filming in Washington state, the tree was erected three times, only to have it knocked over by nearly 100-mile-an-hour wind gusts. In Los Angeles it was erected for a fourth time, only to be blown down again, this time by 60-mile-an-hour winds. Interestingly, the fruit of the Japanese maple tree is known as a "samara."

Watts and Henderson's dueling accents led to some good-natured ribbing on the set. "Between takes, we'd joke around with each other's accents and play into the whole New Zealand-Australia rivalry," Henderson smiles. After shooting some of the scenes, and not having the benefit of seeing what they'd look like once any special effects were added, Henderson and Watts worried that the final result would not be scary enough. "There were moments when Naomi and I would look at each other and say, 'This is embarrassing, people are going to laugh,'" Henderson told the BBC in 2003." You just hope that somebody makes it scary or you're going to look like an idiot!" “It’s no fun making a horror film," admitted Verbinski later, "You get into some darker areas of the brain and after a while everything becomes a bit depressing.”

ALTERNATE ENDING:   Midway through the movie Rachel rents some movies and gets laughs from one of the employees over her picks. This led to an alternate ending, in which Rachel put the cursed tape in the sleeve for one of her rented movies and returned it to the store, where it ended up under "employee picks."

 Top:   Samara's vengeful spirit manifests itself and (Above) kills Noah!

DreamWorks took an unusual but effective tack on the release plan for this film. When the lengthy post-production and test screening process was complete (it took more time than usual largely because of edits to make the film less graphically violent and move it away from a potential R rating towards the PG-13 it received), the company decided to launch it in fewer theaters than expected. The logic was simple: if the film did well during the October 18-20, 2002 weekend, it could be expanded to great anticipation just ahead of Halloween (The Ring actually ended up improving its box office in its second weekend and became one of the biggest surprise hits of the year). In order to advertise The Ring, many promotional Web sites were formed featuring the characters and places in the film. The video from the cursed videotape was played in late night programming over the summer of 2002 without any reference to the movie. When The Ring finally opened, the film grossed an impressive $15 million in it's opening weekend, and another $18 million on its second weekend in theaters. The Ring also surpassed Ringu's box office within it's first two weeks of release in Japan, with a gross of $8 million (compared to Ringu's overall $6.6 million). Overall, The Ring grossed a total US and worldwide gross of nearly $250 million.

The Ring was also met with generally positive reviews from film critics. IGN's Jeremy Conrad praised the movie for its atmospheric set up and cinematography, and said that "there are 'disturbing images'… but the film doesn't really rely on gore to deliver the scares… The Ring relies on atmosphere and story to deliver the jumps, not someone being cleaved in half by a glass door" (referencing a scene from Thirteen Ghosts). On Ebert & Roeper, Richard Roeper gave the film "Thumbs Up" and said it was very gripping and scary despite some minor unanswered questions. Roger Ebert gave the film "Thumbs Down" and felt it was boring and "borderline ridiculous"; he also disliked the extended, detailed ending. Despite the praise given to Verbinski's direction, critics railed the characters as being weak. The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum said that the film was "an utter waste of Watts… perhaps because the script didn't bother to give her a character", whereas other critics such as William Arnold from Seattle Post-Intelligencer said the opposite: "she projects intelligence, determination and resourcefulness that carry the movie nicely."

 Above:   Director Gore Verbinski with Watts on location

The success of The Ring at the box-office paved the way for several more American remakes of Japanese horror films including The Grudge (2004), Dark Water (2005), Pulse (2006), and One Missed Call (2008). The Ring also spawned a sequel, The Ring Two in 2005, with Watts and Dorfman reprising their roles of Rachel and Aidan Keller, joined by fellow Australian actor Simon Baker and veteran actress Sissy Spacek as Samara's biological mother Evelyn. The sequel is noted for being directed by original Ringu filmmaker Hideo Nakata, but was a financial disappointment at the box office. The eerie short film Rings, directed by Jonathan Liebesman and co-written by The Ring and The Ring Two screenwriter Ehrn Kruger, was released earlier that year as a promotional tie-in to the movie. In 2014, former Dreamworks distributor partner Paramount Pictures announced the initially titled The Ring 3D with F. Javier Gutiérrez directing. The third installment of US franchise of The Ring, now known as Rings, stars Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Aimee Teegarden, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Bonnie Morgan as Samara Morgan. Rings is expected to be released on February 3, 2017. 

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   71%

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