This year as Halloween approaches I have decided to bing on horror films, Most if not all of these will be older films from my personal collection though there may one or two from a streaming service.

Horror films have been a part of my life as long as I can remember. When I was a wee boy my older brothers would go to the drive-in on the weekend and promise our parents that they would select something suitable for my impressionable mind and we often ended up watching horror films. The only fiction books I owned as a child were ghost stories so horror and ghosts in particular have always been a part of my experiences.

In 2002 the film The Ring was released, an American remake of a 1998 Japanese film Ringu. I saw The Ring on videotape – how very ironic – loved it and when I moved over to DVD obtained a copy in that medium. Some years later through Amazon I purchased a DVD set of the original films, Ringu and its sequels.

Ringu is based on a Japanese novel of the same title but the film and its sequels diverge significantly from the source material.

The plot of Ringu is fairly straight forward; a cursed videotape summons a ghost who kills people seven days after they watch the tape. A female news reporter discovers the story, views the tape and scrambles to unravel the mystery before the ghost arrives and claims her.

This movie has all the classic elements of a ghost story, the mystery, the unjust death, the focus of atmospherics over ‘kills’ to propel the horror. It is one of my favorite horror films. If you have seen The Ring you’ll know most of the beats that occur in Ringu but there are story elements that were not translated to the American version and these make watching Ringu a different experience than watching the Ring. The DVD has no dubbed English language so if you watch it you will do it via sub-titles. (Not a hindrance for me. I generally prefer sub-titling over dubbing.)

The sequels and prequels are uneven and perhaps are best approached as films in their own right and not directly tied to Ringu. That said, I would heartily recommend Ringu to anyone who like creepy horror fiction over splatter kills.