Ringu is a 1998 Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata and adapted from Koji Suzuki’s novel of the same name. It follows a TV reporter, who attempts to solve a string of strange murders, whose cause is believed to be a cursed video tape. The movie opens with two teenagers talking about a videotape that kills anyone who watches it within seven days. It is also revealed that one of the girls, Tomoko, has seen it and she dies very soon after the conversation. Her aunt Reiko, a TV reporter and the movie’s protagonist, hears rumors of several teenager deaths from Tomoko’s circle of friends and realizes that they were all on the island of Izu when they watched the tape. Reiko goes to Izu to the cabin that the teenagers had rented and finds
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In Ringu, the wronged ghost infects modern technology, thus demonstrating that “modernity is not immune to the ghosts of national culture” (Boey 98). Boey then isolates key motifs that made the film successful and recognizable to a broad audience: “A videocassette, a television set, an ancient well and a woman with long black hair covering her face are what it takes to scare audiences around the world… After the advent of widespread computer viruses via high-tech systems like mobile phones and the internet, Ringu was released at the right time to address humanity’s inability to control technological advancements” (98-99).
What made this movie internationally recognizable and particularly cross-culturally adaptable is the lack of control over technology and artificial intelligence, which has been a universally applicable issue in literature and film since the 1940s. Ringu, as well as the Ring, capitalize on these anxieties, amplifying them with the supernatural. Although both films have more similarities than discrepancies, there are certain paradigm shifts that were bound to occur when the narrative was translated from one culture to …show more content…
Sadako’s story is fragmented and incomplete, there is no need to reveal everything, as it perpetuates the terror. Similarly, her appearance is never fully shown. The iconic scene of a close-up of her distorted eye is enough to cause nightmares since it leaves it up to the viewers’ imagination to contemplate on what the rest of her looks like. Also, her character is somewhat innocent and childlike, the powers that she possesses are inherited from her mother and she uses them to kill a person only when that person verbally and physically threatens her mother. There is nothing inherently evil about Sadako, she is misunderstood and murdered by her father out of fear of his inability to contain those powers, and this is the source of her grudge. Sadako and her mother are tragic characters, representatives of the oppressed female and the embodiments of the monstrous feminine in Asian society. Their inborn psychic powers conform to Buddhist beliefs about the inherent dangers of
In Ringu, the wronged ghost infects modern technology, thus demonstrating that “modernity is not immune to the ghosts of national culture” (Boey 98). Boey then isolates key motifs that made the film successful and recognizable to a broad audience: “A videocassette, a television set, an ancient well and a woman with long black hair covering her face are what it takes to scare audiences around the world… After the advent of widespread computer viruses via high-tech systems like mobile phones and the internet, Ringu was released at the right time to address humanity’s inability to control technological advancements” (98-99).
What made this movie internationally recognizable and particularly cross-culturally adaptable is the lack of control over technology and artificial intelligence, which has been a universally applicable issue in literature and film since the 1940s. Ringu, as well as the Ring, capitalize on these anxieties, amplifying them with the supernatural. Although both films have more similarities than discrepancies, there are certain paradigm shifts that were bound to occur when the narrative was translated from one culture to …show more content…
Sadako’s story is fragmented and incomplete, there is no need to reveal everything, as it perpetuates the terror. Similarly, her appearance is never fully shown. The iconic scene of a close-up of her distorted eye is enough to cause nightmares since it leaves it up to the viewers’ imagination to contemplate on what the rest of her looks like. Also, her character is somewhat innocent and childlike, the powers that she possesses are inherited from her mother and she uses them to kill a person only when that person verbally and physically threatens her mother. There is nothing inherently evil about Sadako, she is misunderstood and murdered by her father out of fear of his inability to contain those powers, and this is the source of her grudge. Sadako and her mother are tragic characters, representatives of the oppressed female and the embodiments of the monstrous feminine in Asian society. Their inborn psychic powers conform to Buddhist beliefs about the inherent dangers of