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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 4, No. 11 |
 THE RING |
 The DVD edition of 'The Ring' |
Modern horror classic
'The Ring' now on DVD
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
The welcome new trend in gore-free horror films that really scare the bejesus out of you without drenching you in blood is definitely not a fluke. Witness "The Ring," the best horror film of 2002, which came out on DVD this month.
Normally you'll pay $25-26 for the DVD from DreamWorks Home Entertainment, but I got it for around $20 at Suncoast Video. That's a real bargain because "The Ring" delivers genuine chills without cheap thrills. The DVD also includes a special short film by director Gore Verbinski, which augments the feature, and a trailer for "Ringu," the Japanese film that inspired "The Ring."
As a lifelong horror movie buff, I'm ecstatic that the gore-free trend is not dying out, but continues to pick up steam. "The Ring" did excellent business at theaters, attracting a large general audience. It's definitely in the tradition of "The Sixth Sense," the huge box office champ that launched the gore-free trend, and other new classics in that style, like "The Others" and "Signs."
I'm especially cranked up about "The Ring" because it was filmed in the moody, atmospheric landscape that's now my backyard: The San Juan Islands and the state of Washington's spooky coastline (at least when the sun's not shining!).
On paper, "The Ring" sounds ludicrous. It's about a creepy videotape that looks like a relic from the student underground movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Watch this brief tape and something strange starts going on in your head. When you've finished, your phone rings and a girl's voice grimly informs you you'll die seven days later. What's more, you do--in ghastly style, your face frozen with terror.
When this happens to a teenage girl, whose boy friend apparently committed suicide on the same night, seven days after watching the tape with her, it intrigues a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the real-life Hearst newspaper that's the liveliest of Seattle's two metro dailies. She starts to investigate and winds up finding the tape that she's certain must be the source of the latest "urban legend."
But as soon as the reporter (Naomi Watts) watches the tape, the phone rings and a girl's voice tells her she'll be dead in seven days. As stupid as that sounds, the enigmatic tape and the stunning phone call, which couldn't have been rigged in advance, makes her decide she'd better get to the bottom of this very quickly--in less than seven days, as a matter of fact.
It's best to know as little as you can about the plot before seeing "The Ring," so that's about as far as I'll take you into it. Trust me on this point: Like most of Hitchcock's great thrillers, you won't need to worry about the credibility of the premise. Just relax and let yourself identify with this very earnest and attractive young single mom as she gradually realizes she's working on a baffling story that is turning into a matter of life and death for her, her young son and the boy's father.
Verbinski's film, like "The Others," is an almost poetic work of art as well as a thriller. Bojan Bozelli's rich cinematography captures the stark beauty of overcast skies, dense woods and the rugged coasts of the San Juans and Hans Zimmer's chilling musical score sets a mood you can't shake for hours after the movie has ended.
There's also one stunning scene that's unlike anything you've ever seen on screen: The reporter talks to a frightened horse that's locked up in a livestock trailer on board an inter-island ferry. The nervous horse panics so badly that it breaks out of the trailer and runs loose among cars and passengers as the ferry churns its way across the choppy seas of Puget Sound. The closest thing I've seen to this sequence is a similar one in the original "Black Stallion" movie, but this sequence is even more of a stunner because you're already on edge from everything else you've seen--and this is the last straw. It's a complex sequence and a marvel to behold.
At heart, "The Ring"
is a ghost story with oak leaf clusters. There are no vampires,
werewolves, zombies or outer space creatures. There's just a
very malignant spirit with a vengeful mind, but it will give
you all the heart flutters and nervous tremors you'll ever need.
Verbinski has given us a classic horror movie for the ages.
©2003 by Ron Miller. The Ron Miller caricature is ©
2001 by Jim Hummel. The DVD cover reproduction is ©2002
by DreamWorks Pictures.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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