Day for Night Magazine

The Ring: The Remake Loop

BY BRENNA EHRLICH

Close your eyes. Listen. There’s buzzing behind your laptop screen, the hissing of your television as it cools down, your cell phone ringing. Witness the wonder of technology: the ability to reach anyone, anytime, anywhere. The wonder, and to quote Heart of Darkness, the horror! Communication is the ultimate scare tactic in modern cinematic Japanese horror stories, and it’s how these chilling and thrilling flicks find their way to America. Most famous of the J-horror craze is Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, adapted to the U.S. silver screen by director Gore Verbinski, and Ringu 2, Americanized by Nakata himself. The haunted video has had a long journey through the technological grapevine of popular culture, and, like a garbled message left on an answering machine, much has been lost in the translation. Still, a cultural parlay, (even if a translator is a must), has been established between America and Japan, suggesting a future commingling of cinematic culture.

In Japan, the spirit world exists just under the surface of everyday life, teeming with vengeful ghosts waiting to wreck their inevitably bloody revenge. So, it’s no surprise that Ringu’s evil ghost girl, Sadako, was not created in some filmmaker’s twitchy brain; she was a real person. Or, more accurately, she was many people. Ringu reveals that Sadako’s mother, Yamamura Shizuko, was a psychic accused of fraud who took a one-way trip into an active volcano. Shizuko was based on Mifune Chizuko, a purported turn of the century mystic under the care of Psychology Professor Fukurai Tomokichi. Tomokichi, the model for Ikuma Heidachiro in Ringu, also studied a girl named Nagao Ikuko. This young woman possessed nensha, the ability to produce an image on film through the sheer force of her mind, a power that both Sadako and Samara, her American counterpart in The Ring, possess. Ikuko was also called a fake, and subsequently died due to a fever brought on by her raging emotions. Finally, there was Sadako’s namesake, Takahashi Sadako, a double threat possessing the ability of foresight along with nensha. These women were real spirits, real souls who were wronged. In true Japanese tradition, they were not lost in the abyss of history. Suzuki Koji took their stories and transformed them into a popular series of novels in 1991. Then, Nakata gave the women a stronger voice, one that would ultimately span nations — he created a cursed video tape, a chronicle of their lives and deaths, a tape that would be copied again and again both onscreen and off.

Ringu enjoyed legendary success in its opening weekend in January 1998. Hideo Nakata told Offscreen, an online magazine, that “during the release of Ringu I went to five or six theatres and saw kids calling each other on their cell phones right after the screening, telling them ‘Boy, this is really scary you should go watch it.’” Even then, the ghost of Sadako was making her waterlogged way through the crackling communication pathways. Through Ringu, the Japanese turned their folklore into a valuable trading commodity. In the increasingly globalized film network, the film quickly ended up in the hands of the Hollywood higher-ups.
When DreamWorks executive Mark Sourian got hold of the terrifying tape, Ringu was primed to capture and captivate American audiences in its devilish death grip. Verbinski took the helm as director, and Ehren Kruger penned a new screenplay that would jibe better with U.S. filmgoers. The film opened on October 18, 2002, grossing just over $15 million on opening weekend. The tale of terror became a sleeper hit, and as of February 2003, has grossed more than $128 million. From there on out, the story of Mifune and her fellow wronged women changed. Their tragedy became a trend, a fad, another aspect of American pop culture rife to be parodied (Remember Scary Movie III?). In taking its new vows of citizenry, the film’s plot became more personal, more individualized, more American.

Although the plotlines in Ringu and The Ring are essentially the same (girl watches tape, girl dies, girl’s aunt teams up with her ex-husband to find out why) The Ring carries a distinct flavor of American individualism that Ringu lacks. Japan’s indigenous religion, Shinto, claims that multiple Gods inhabit natural phenomena. In the U.S., however, God mostly runs a one man (or woman) show. But Americans see things differently. They like a good, knockdown, drag-out brawl between the good guy and the bad guy, complete with infectiously quotable one-liners and delightfully caustic guitar riffs. From James Dean to Kiefer Sutherland, loner heroes have always capitivated the American imagination. The same is true for solitary villains. ason Vorhees, Freddy Kruger, and Hannibal Lector are just a few lone gunmen found in the horror hall of fame. Like heir virtuous foils, these boogeymen operate alone. owhere else in The Ring is this focus on individualism as strong as in the structure and content of the cursed video itself. When making the original haunted tape, Nakata told Offscreen that he “didn’t want to give the viewer any reference points, so there is no reference whatsoever to where the scene is taking place or where it was shot or where the light and dark is coming from.” The surprisingly brief video begins with a shot of the moon, followed by Sadako’s mother combing her hair in a mirror, Sadako in the mirror, Japanese characters spelling “Eruption,” people crawling in agony, a man with a sack over his head pointing at the sea, a Japanese character reflected in an eye spelling “Sada,” and concludes with a shot of the outside of the well. True to Nakata’s words, the video does not present one point of view, but a spectrum of ghostly and haunting visions of evil. Sadako is not the sole source of this horror, but merely a part of the greater terror that created this lethal film.

The video in The Ring is a whole other story, literally. Unlike Nakata’s tape, Verbinski’s version is clearly filmed from Samara’s point of view. The tape begins with a shot of the ring, or the well closing, a much more individualized viewpoint than the moon. Then, it runs through images from the young girl’s life: blood in the water from when the horses on her ranch went mad, a chair in a blank room from her stay in the psychiatric hospital, her adopted mother combing her hair, and her adopted father looking down from a window in her house. Next, the tape shows scenes from her death: the cliff near where she was interred in the well, the tree that she saw right before being attacked by her mother, various images of horror (maggots and twitching disembodied fingers), and the inside of the plastic sack that her mother pulled over her head before shutting her in the well. The fact that all of these shots show a distinct point of view- Samara’s- suggests that she is the sole creator of the malevolent tape. Samara is the one villain in The Ring, the Devil that the good guy has to fight.

The movie became a massive moneymaker, and spawned a sequel much to DreamWork’s delight. On its opening weekend in March of 2005, The Ring 2 grossed just over $35 million- more than double the opening weekend of the first film. When Verbinski declined to direct round two, Nakata signed on to remake of his own hit Ringu 2. Although Nakata was remaking his own film, the story had to undergo a massive overhaul before filming began. The central figure in Ringu 2 is a marginal character in both Ringu and The Ring, Mai Takano (Miki Nakatani). She was the girlfriend and student of deceased professor Rjuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), who was the ex-husband of the main character, Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima). Mai possesses psychic powers similar to Sadako’s, and makes it her mission to save Reiko’s son, Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka) from the dead girl’s clutches. The central figure of Ringu, Yoichi’s mother Reiko, is killed halfway through, a choice that didn’t sit well with American producers in remaking the film. Reiko’s American counterpart, Rachel, was played by Naomi Watts in The Ring, and her star power was considered a big part of the success of the first film. So, obviously a mid-movie snuff-out meant a lot less screen time for Watts. Thus, the script was rewritten so that Rachel and her son became the main focus of the film, resulting in a story far different than the original. The suffering of Mifune and the rest, with the aid of technology, has spurred a J-horror craze, and like all crazes, everyone’s after their piece of the pie. After the success of The Ring, it has become the new “thing” to remake Japanese horror films. Ju-on came to America as The Grudge in 2004, Dark Water seeped into theatres in August 2005, Lions Gate films bought the rights to The Eye 2, Martin Scorsese plans to direct Hong Kong thriller The Departed, and Pulse, originally Kairo, beats its way onto screens in 2006. While bringing these 35mm thrillers to American projectors opens up new avenues of horror to U.S. audiences, the question becomes: is Hollywood just becoming lazy? Or is this trend of remaking just another turn on the reel of film history?

Although the J-horror stories brought to the screen are ancient, the manner in which they’re portrayed is not novel. Japanese filmmakers have been as influenced by American horror as big time Hollywood cinephiles have been by Jhorror. The first horror films that Nakata saw were Hollywood shriek-fests, like The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). Still, Ringu is not a dutiful retreading of some American splatter film; it belongs in the category of classic horror, but it’s a new spin on the genre. Ju-on director, Takashi Shimizu, told Science Fiction Weekly that he thinks that “the trend [of remaking Japanese films] is really good, but if it keeps going on I’m not sure that it will be a good thing because people will depend on more of the movies and not create new ideas. Maybe business-wise it’s going to be good for a while, but creativity-wise it isn’t necessarily good.” Shimizu is right, to a certain extent. Remaking another nation’s films seems at first look like a waste of time and money. Perhaps if American directors were simply churning out shot by shot remakes of foreign films this would be the case, but new work is being created. With the aid of technology, Japanese folklore can be transformed into a story that gets to the heart of the American people, and then freezes it in terror. Although films like Ringu and The Ring are not identical, there is something universal about fear that demolishes the language barrier. If this cultural cinematic dialogue continues, it might not be long before remakes become obsolete. Then, finally, America and Japan could communicate in the same language: a good old fashioned scream.