(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)
The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 9
5. The Ring, dir. Gore Verbinski
For once, I don't have to recount my first time watching a movie. I already did so a few months back, on this very blog. The movie was The Ring, and I was scared as hell.
The most recently made film on my list, it's very much a product of the genre's history. The Shining, Hellraiser, Jacob's Ladder, The Blair Witch Project, Shivers, Videodrome, Candyman, Psycho, Rear Window, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Scream, Poltergeist, and The Sixth Sense are all referenced (as are creepy moments in Fight Club, Blow Up and The Conversation, for that matter). Astoundingly, though, the film manages not to be at all derivative or lazy. It's simply too relentless for that.
This is a film that deploys the Monumental Horror Image with almost unbearable regularity; to paraphrase a famous review of Stephen King's It, The Ring is to the Monumental Horror Image what the Sears Roebuck catalog is to things to buy. A chair, a ladder, a television set, a tree, a well, a mirror, a girl, the ring itself--they all stand there in the center of the screen, mute indictments of normality, sanity, reality itself. They should not be, and yet there they are, over and over and over again, each time imbued with more menace than the last.
This is also a film that embraces the horror of the small detail, the little things that just don't seem right: defaced pictures, distorted photographs, a fly on the TV screen, unexpected phone calls, static on the television. (It seems safe to say that this film will have caused more people to have nervous breakdowns when the cable goes out than any movie since Poltergeist.) Just as the monumental horror images shatter our composure, these "minimal" horror images undermine it. No scene is "safe," because the filmmakers establish that horror can be found anywhere, in anything. (Especially, thanks to one of the all-time great shock moments in film history, in closets.)
Article comments
1 - jadester
it's a cliche, but having watched both recently, i can honestly say i think the original is superior to the re-make
2 - Nazza
Hi I think Gore Is an exellent director. If anyone knows this great director or even his email address . I would like to get in contact with him to talk about film. And I would like to get him to view some of my work and moderate it.
NO SPAM PLEASE.
Email me at mevetrix99@msn.com
3 - timmato
I used to be in boy scouts with Gore in La Jolla. He gave everyone wedgies. It's hard to believe he's a famous dirctor now. But great for him!!!!