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Japan’s Blair Witch Project

Ring rings some familiar, eerie bells

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the video store, Ringu (Ring) appears. The 1998 Japanese film based on the popular novel by Suzuki Koji is now available for rent at Le Video in San Francisco, and for purchase through Crimson Cult Video. A crazy-eyed, eerie hybrid of Videodrome and Twin Peaks, with a little Night of the Living Dead and X-Files thrown in for spooky measure, Ring is said to be Japan’s most successful horror film ever, spawning a scary number of tie-ins: a sequel, a prequel, a Korean remake and merchandising up the yin-yang.

The premise is simple, yet familiar, to anyone who’s ever hid creepy books, videotapes or CDs from view. Hideo Nakata’s horror flick opens with news reports announcing the deaths of a teenage boy and girl who had watched a weird videotape and died a week later, hearts stopped and eyes wide open, in a locked car.

How weird was the tape? About as weird as the hang-ups that happen to two girls gossiping about the deaths. Naturally, the deadly tape finds its way into their hands, and eventually into the clutches of a female TV reporter Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), who finds herself drawn into the case after her young son ends up watching the cursed video.

To solve the mystery, she naturally must glue herself to the boob tube and tune into the killer videotape, which turns out to have all the coherency of a dreamlike avant-garde short, or the pig-headed, cryptic sequence from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. There are images of water, a woman combing her hair, a volcano bubbling, a hooded man knee-deep in water, and then a field with a well. No biggie, until the phone starts ringing with a seeming crank call. Surprise, the curse has been triggered, and Reiko has only a week to live.

Reiko enlists her ex-husband, professor Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), to help her analyze the tape. The Mulder-and-Scully-esque couple discover that a psychic’s Medusa-like daughter had cursed the video before she was locked into a well for killing people by sight. The only reprieve from their death sentence? Open up the well, climb in and somehow put the girl’s soul to rest.

Cinematically, the film doesn’t make any great strides in special effects, but even at its silliest and most convoluted moments, the film is notable for its economy and sustained spooky mood. No deaths occur on camera, and no gore ever spills across the screen. Instead, the film focuses on the fear of technology, plays with the disease of teen consumerism, pokes fun at urban legends, and then reaches for the same primal scare Luis Bunuel picked up on in the early days of cinema: the horror and desire of the gaze.

That kind of terror translates across the board. And apparently, Fine Line Features agreed. The company picked up the rights to remake the film two years ago, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Ring-a-ding-ding, go the cash registers.