Did you know that “The Ring”, a 2002 blockbuster hit, was based on a book? It paved the way for the J-horror craze of the early 2000s and it terrified me when I saw it in theaters. Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you. The Ring is scary. While the book doesn’t deliver terror in the same way the movie does, there is a building tension throughout. As our understanding of the curse deepens, the real ramifications of the ring resonate more completely.
Warning… Spoilers ahead.
Teens Discover Ridiculous Curses
Welcome to Tokyo. The book starts much the same as the movie. Four teenagers die mysteriously. Movie viewers will surely remember the sting as the closet door opens on the first victim, her face contorted in horror. (Why was she in that closet, though? Isn’t that where the demons ARE? Not where we hide from them?) Medical reports call their deaths sudden cardiac arrest. One drops from his motorcycle, desperately pulling at his helmet, unable to remove it. His face is revealed to be a mask of fear and shock. Another is the niece of our main character, reporter Asakawa. (Not played by Naomi Watts) Asakawa can’t let this coincidence go. Note, if you find yourself in a horror movie, just let the coincidences slide. There’s nothing to be gained by ‘just looking into it’. Burn some sage, sprinkle some holy water, and move on with your life.
The four teens were last together in their natural habitat, a cabin in the woods. Okay, it’s a cabin at a resort but, honestly, same thing. Asakawa figures that the only thing to do is spend the night in the same cabin. Sure, four people died for seemingly no discernable reason after spending a night there, but this is where the investigative journalist gets his hazard pay. While there, he finds a notebook that warns, ‘You’d better not see it unless you’ve got the guts. You’ll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.)’ I did not add the evil laughter part. The soon-to-be horrifically murdered teens did.
Gen Z Will Never Know The Horror of VHS
With little to no self-preservation skills, Asakawa watches the tape anyway. Both he and Rachel (US Movie Asakawa) had plenty of warning that this tape is a bad idea. It’s an unmarked videotape. Anything could be on it. Even without the portent of doom, I think I’d be less than enthusiastic about what might be on someone’s random home video. Some things cannot be unseen. This random cabin tape is a bunch of short and seemingly random clips. Here the book and movie diverge. The tape is stylistically the same, but the images are a little different, and at the end of the book version, there are instructions for how to beat the curse which have been mostly taped over with commercials. In both, the phone rings. ‘You have seen it now, you know what that means. Do like it said. Or else…’ (aka Seven days).
Asakawa enlists the help of his friend/certified creep Ryuji to help in his investigation after experiencing the life-changing horror of a deadline. Emphasis on dead. (I hate myself) Ryuji asks him to make a copy so he can study it and he watches the cursed tape with an enviable level of cool. He is so unbothered by the potential death curse that it is vaguely suspicious. In both versions, our hero copies the tape and hands it off to someone completely unaware of what they have done. We shudder at the implications.
Everyone’s a Critic
In both The Ring movie and book, the main character and their newly acquired friend/victim use the film as their main source of potential leads in their investigation. Which is good, because it’s all they have. They start by looking through the images frame by frame to determine where they came from and using the landscape to find where they were filmed. Naturally, this leads to a spooky location and psychic children. It always does. Our book friends find Sadako (Samara), a psychic who can imprint images onto film. As all psychics can in this universe. She is just extra good at it. Instead of watching a bunch of creepy films in some old guy’s house, uninvited might I add, Asakawa and Ryuji find all this out from reading archives. (In the movie, this is easily one of the biggest jump scares. But Rachel, don’t go into other people’s houses and just plop down in front of their TV and start watching videos. This one is on her.)
Armed with the knowledge that poor Sadako (Samara) was just a young woman (child), plagued by the horror of her visions, our crew set out to find out what happened to her. Sure what they need to break the curse, in the book they call it a charm, is to find out what happened to her and put her soul to rest. They deduce that she is probably dead. A fair thought, considering she appears to be haunting people. However, if it is an option to do that while alive, I’m interested.
Who Done It?
I should mention that by this point, Asakawa’s wife and 2-year-old have watched the tape. I didn’t mention them before because they aren’t super relevant to the story but much like in the film, the child’s deadline is the real catalyst for the main character to ensure they figure out how to beat the curse. In both, this whole kid-sees-the-spooky-tape-thing is strange. Why are you just watching a random tape? Mom sits with her toddler to watch something. Could be anything. She has no idea what it is. It makes sense for the plot, but not for actual humans.
Now we go in an entirely different direction from the movie. Don’t worry, we will converge again. Asakawa and Ryuji decide to look more into the history of the resort where the tape appeared. Seems relevant. Turns out…it used to be a sanatorium! Dun dun dun. And wouldn’t you know that Sadako’s father spent his last days there dying from tuberculosis. They visit the only surviving staff member, Dr. Jotaro, from the sanatorium days and wait. Does this guy look familiar? OH MY GOD! His face is one of the clips from the tape.
Everything spills out when they confront him. He folds pretty easily, considering what they tell him doesn’t really make sense. He could have held out. Jotaro admits he was also a patient at the facility for a short time. He was the last smallpox case in Japan. During that time, he saw Sadako and she was just so pretty and he was just so addled from fever that he SA’d her. Yup. Horrible man. But then the book takes a super strange and unnecessary turn. Sadako was intersex. She had a condition called testicular feminization syndrome. And this enraged our lovely Jotaro. So he killed her and threw her down the conveniently nearby well. Or possibly, Sadako psychically forced him to kill her? We are unsure, although Asakawa and Ryuji seem sure that’s how it happened. Into the well she goes. Ah, the ring! The ring of light. No. Stop. That is only a movie thing. That is not what the ring means in the book. We will come back to it.
The Well Where It Happened
Okay, we are back on track with the movie now. We have different killers, Mom vs. random doctor dude, different reasons, stop psychically attacking me and my horses vs. I am displeased with your physical form, but both lead to a body in a well. Samara hangs out in the well for 7 days before dying, hence her deadline, Sadako is dead before being thrown in the well and is also probably the actual last person infected with smallpox in Japan and just thinks a week is a good timeline. Great.
But where are the wells? Aside from videos or images in the book or movie, no wells have shown up. That’s because, apparently, when someone needs to plant a building somewhere and a well is in the way, they just build over it. Is that real? Like, they don’t even fill it in or anything? Thankfully for our protagonists, all they need to do is a little light construction work and descend into the depths of a dark, decades-untouched, body-filled well to finish their task. Good thing because the deadline is moments away.
Sadako (Samara) is put to rest, the deadline passes, the day is saved. Except, there are a few too many pages left in this book. Of course, that isn’t what she wanted! In the movie, it is Rachel’s ex-lover who finds himself drawing the short stick, but in the book, Ryuji dies due to Sadoko’s curse. Up to this point, he has been portrayed as a pretty terrible and unlikable guy. Only after his death do we find out he wasn’t who we thought he was. It was all bravado. I thought that was a strange choice. Why make us hate him and then after we didn’t care too much that he died tell us he was a nice guy? Am I retroactively supposed to feel bad? Or like I misjudged him?
But Where is the Ring?
By now we have figured out what Sadako and Samara want. To spread the curse. Copy the tape. Show it to someone else. Survive another day. Both Rachel and Asakawa save their families by cursing others. In the movie, we don’t know where it spreads but in the book, Asakawa has his wife and daughter show the tape to his inlaws.
The movie is filled with ring imagery. Everywhere you look, there are rings intended to represent the circle of light Samara saw in her last days. That isn’t what the book means by ring at all. The book treats the curse as a virus. Its only goal is to multiply and spread. Like the ripples from a stone dropped in water. Those are the rings. The ever-widening band of the infected as each person does more and more to ensure their safety. I like it. It’s thought-provoking and tragic. Smallpox died with Sadoko, but the curse was born.
So what do you think? This was a pretty true-to-the-book movie adaptation, especially early on. The movie was much scarier, but I read a translated version (sorry I don’t read Japanese) so some things were likely lost in translation. The book was still very good and the curse as a virus concept was much more interesting than how it played out in the movie.
The Ring Book. The Ring Movie.
Check out this other book-to-movie adaptation.
Discover more from Stressy Lemon
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
