Ring (film)
Ring | |
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File:Ring.jpeg | |
Directed by | Hideo Nakata |
Written by | Hiroshi Takahashi |
Produced by | Taka Ichise |
Starring | Nanako Matsushima Hiroyuki Sanada Rikiya Otaka Yoichi Numata |
Cinematography | Junichirō Hayashi |
Edited by | Nobuyuki Takahashi |
Distributed by | Toho Company Ltd. |
Release dates | January 31, 1998 (Japan) |
Running time | 96 min. |
Language | Japanese |
Budget | $1.2 million |
Ring (リング, Ringu) is a 1998 Japanese horror mystery film from director Hideo Nakata, adapted from the novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki, which draws from the Japanese folk tale Banchō Sarayashiki. The film stars Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Rikiya Otaka as members of a divorced family, each cursed by a videotape. The film was later remade in Korea as The Ring Virus (1999), and in the United States as The Ring (2002).
The film is the highest grossing horror film in Japan at 15.9 billion yen ($137.7 million) and is also considered the most frightening horror movie in Japan according to the investigation of Oricon.[1]
Plot
The film begins with two teenagers, Masami (Hitomi Sato) and Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi) talking about a videotape recorded by a boy in Izu which is fabled to bear a curse that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Tomoko then reveals that a week ago, she and three of her friends watched a weird tape and received a call after watching it. Unnervingly similar to the fabled videotape, Masami realizes that Tomoko was fated to die. After some unsettling moments, Tomoko mysteriously dies with Masami having the horror of watching.
Some days later and Asakawa Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), a reporter investigating the popularity of the video curse among teenagers, discovers that her niece, Tomoko herself and her three other friends, mysteriously died on the same time, same night with their faces twisted in a rictus fear. She also discovers that Masami, the girl with Tomoko when she died, went crazy and was now in a mental hospital. After stumbling upon Tomoko's photos from the past week, Reiko finds out that the four teenagers have stayed in a rental cabin in Izu and eventually, she also finds a photo of them with the teens faces blurred.
Later, Reiko sets for Izu and finds an unlabelled tape in the reception room of the rental cottage where the teenagers used to stay. Watching the tape inside Cabin B4, Reiko sees (a series of unrelated images). A soon as the tape was over, Reiko receives a phone call, a realization of the tell-tale videotape curse. Then on, she now assumes that she has a week to live.
On her first day, Reiko enlists the help of her ex-husband, Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), who then watches the tape. A day later and Reiko creates a copy for Ryuji for them to study. What they found was a hidden message embedded within the tape saying that "if you 'shoumon' on seawater, the 'boukon' will come for you." The message was actually in a form of dialect in Oshima Island. The two sail for Oshima after Asakawa's son watches the videotape and discovers the history of the great psychic Yamamura Shizuko.
With only a day left, Reiko and Ryuji discovered that Shizuko's lost daughter, Sadako, must have made the videotape. Determined, the two sets back to Izu with the assumption that Sadako was now dead and it was her vengeful spirit that kills. The duo then uncovers a well under Cabin B4 and tries to empty it after realizing that, through a vision, Sadako's father killed her and threw her into the well. They try to empty the well and find the Sadako's body in attempt to appease her spirit. It was then, Reiko found Sadako and nothing happens to her and the curse is believed to be broken.
All seems fine until the next day when Sadako crawls out of Ryuji's TV set and kills him. Desperate to find a cure to save her son, Reiko realized what she did that Ryuji didn't, thus saving her: she copied the tape and showed it to him. With a VCR and Ryuji's copy of the tape, Reiko rides to her son in attempt to save him.
Production
After the initial success of the Ring novel, written by Koji Suzuki, Kadokawa Shoten decided to make a motion picture adaptation of the Ring. The whole production work took nine months and five weeks[2] The movie's screenwriter, Hiroshi Takahashi, and director, Hideo Nakata, collaborated to work on the script after reading the novel and the TV adaptation of Ring[3]. With the budget of 1.2 million USD, the shooting began which took five weeks to complete.[4]
Sequels and adaptations
There were two sequels shot in Japan: Rasen (also from 1998, aka Spiral) and Ring 2 (from 1999, and which was not based on Suzuki's works), as well as a prequel, Ring 0: Birthday (2000). There was also a Korean remake (called Ring in Korea and The Ring Virus abroad) that was the first ever joint film making venture between Korea and Japan.[citation needed] A video game, known as The Ring: Terror's Realm in the U.S., was also released in 2000 for the Dreamcast.
The international success of the Japanese films launched a revival of horror filmmaking in Japan that resulted in such pictures as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse (known as Circuit (回路, Kairo) in Japan), Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge (呪怨, Juon) (2000), Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から, Honogurai mizu no soko kara, literally The Depths of Dark Water), also based on a short story by Suzuki), and Higuchinsky's Uzumaki (2000, aka Vortex, based on the Junji Ito horror manga of the same name).[citation needed]
Most of the Ring stories also appeared as manga novels.
Cast
- Nanako Matsushima - Reiko Asakawa
- Miki Nakatani - Mai Takano
- Hiroyuki Sanada - Ryuji Takayama
- Yūko Takeuchi - Tomoko Oishi
- Hitomi Sato - Masami Kurahashi
- Yoichi Numata - Takashi Yamamura
- Yutaka Matsushige - Yoshino
- Katsumi Muramatsu - Kōichi Asakawa
- Rikiya Otaka - Yōichi Asakawa
- Masako - Shizuko Yamamura
See also
References
- ^ 最も怖いジャパニーズホラー映画ランキングTOP10! ニュース-ORICON STYLE
- ^ http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/nakata.html Pre-production, including writing the script was about 3-4 months, postproduction about 4 months, and shooting itself about 5 weeks.
- ^ http://www.theringworld.com/anolis.php Well, of course, the first thing I did was read the book, following which I and [scriptwriter] Takahashi Hiroshi spent about six months thinking about the screenplay. I also watched the TV version.
- ^ http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/nakata.html shooting itself about 5 weeks.
External links
- The Ring at BitTorrent.com - via its relationship with Kadokawa Pictures, BitTorrent Inc. is the online site that has licensed The Ring for streaming and download.
- the ringworld - a fansite covering all aspects of the Ring series and movies.
- the Ring AREA - Contains of the cursed videos of the Ring cycle and their scene-by-scene analyses, as well as lots of other useful information.
- Ringu at IMDb
- Snowblood Apple's Ring Cycle article - an overview of all Ring films.
- Snuff Video - Japanese heart-stopping terror with the Ring series.