How very effective are the journals and the actual video (the film inside the film) in The Ring. We see the first victim's journal with images of her teen idols and her dreams of one day being a being a bride, all pasted so neatly into her binder. Within time, as each day passes bringing her closer to her fate, they are beings transformed with dark veils scratched over their face and the sun blotted out with a heavy black pen that seems to scratch off the face. Or, as the seven days progress, we begin to see images of dying horses washed ashore by the tide, beneath each picture are the words "Why is this in my head?" written in chicken scratch beneath the images.

Even Naomi Watt's prescient son, who for the record is the only one who knows this Samora chick in the well is bad news, maintains a gallery of what he sees. Who among us can forget the maddening sound of his pencil scratching broad and deep circles on the desk as he draws the same dark ring over and over and over and over again and with such a dark fury. It's so intense, so deep, that you just might fall into the blackness of this dark, spinning well that he is so compelled to draw.

Perhaps we have developed a whole new category of art - that of horror movie films, or perhaps we are moving closer and backward again to films like Chien Andalou, the famous surrealist film that very much touches on the same themes as the clip in The Ring - themes of rot and decay, rebirth, nothing less than life - from it's first and primal state of maggot or egg, all the way through rot and decay.

John Nash's office as displayed in A Beautiful Mind (a flawed film in many ways, and one in which I think the real John Nash is somewhat degraded, and note that he did not work with the biographer on the book; this was unauthorized, but that's a whole other piece). The offices though, go a long way to illustrating the inner-world of the schizophrenic,.the walls used like a bulletin board, completely covered from floor to ceiling with news clippings circled and patterns found in magazines. It's easy to see how certain things jumped out at him.

When I worked at The Atlantic Monthly we had several people who would send us back our magazine, only they had, like Nash, circled certain words and headlines, phrases, and found what they believed to be code. I suppose you could review any magazine and newspaper and if you circle the right words, you could decipher a whole new meaning than what was intended. Like Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, you make it your job to reveal the secrets that you are so sure are hidden in the text. It's not so crazy: certain books and journals did contain code, and newspapers, personals, even literary fiction has been used by various governments and groups to convey secret messages that are two way blind.