[PHONE RINGING]
[CREEPY MUSIC]
Ah!
[TENSE MUSIC]
[STATIC]
This moment, right here, propelled The Ring from
a run-of-the-mill remake into something that defined a horror
subgenre for nearly an entire decade.
This was the moment that The Ring killed the teen slasher
genre as the reigning king of the horror films,
plain and simple.
It elevated audience expectations
of what was truly terrifying.
Not since the Blair Witch Project was released
had a movie generated this much mystique and lore
around a low-budget horror film, something
that the current generation of would-be horror creators
could learn from.
American audiences had been lulled
into a falsely clean and ostensibly scareless
version of horror for the previous decade.
But regardless of what many people want to admit,
The Ring took real horror mainstream again.
Directed by Gore Verbinski, written by Ehren Kruger,
and starring Naomi Watts, The Ring
was one of the first highly-prominent American
remakes of a Japanese horror film
to be released in North America.
Based upon Hideo Nakata's 1998 Japanese horror film
Ringu, and the novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki,
the film follows a woman who has to grapple
with the fallout of a cursed videotape.
Anyone who watches it will mysteriously die.
Infamously,
In seven days.
The film is a somber, surprisingly cerebral film,
with a highly-visual, saturated blue palette
and a keen direction from Verbinki.
The film's visual fingerprints were
unlike the other mid-budget attempts at generating scares
that studios were mounting.
Released in 2002, The Ring was a brash departure from the horror
stylings of the day.
The 1980s saw the rise of the slasher genre
take over the cineplex.
Freddy, Jason, Michael, and others
ruled the mainstream and low-budget spaces.
This commercial ubiquity spawned a near industrial approach
to horror films.
Find a holiday, a location, add a serial killer,
and print money.
Sure, everyone remembers the big three slashers,
but what about The Burning Black Christmas, Sorority Party
Massacre or Silent Night, Deadly Night?
And they were just the tip of the iceberg
of what was being produced.
And thus, when the 1990s rolled around,
studios started adopting the low-budget and indie approach,
but sanitizing it a little for the mainstream audience.
Wes Craven's initial Scream film took this mantle
and ran with it.
It established a postmodern way to refresh and update
the tropes of the slasher genre.
However, that one franchise was not
able to support a whole industry.
The 90s version of horror was cleaner,
had less gore, more jump scares, and pseudo-bankable young
stars.
Many of these films were literally
rated PG-13 in an attempt to pull in younger audiences.
These teen slashers adopted the tropes and stylistic
proclivities that had made their predecessors so successful.
The Faculty, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend,
Disturbing Behavior, and Final Destination,
took the box office by storm.
And with every successful entry, they
became less slasher and more thriller,
inching their way towards ditching the horror
roots altogether.
These films, much like the slashers that came before,
struggled to maintain franchise integrity.
Often the initial entry of the series
was well-received and commercially successful.
But the many sequels quickly took a nosedive
in terms of quality.
These films are usually marked by having a cast filled
with attractive teenage protagonists who
grapple with some sort of homicidal maniac,
or other entity, that is usually a metaphor for adulthood.
The monsters rapidly evolving in The Faculty,
the looming omnipresence of an un-fated demise in Final
Destination.
All of these films use their narratives
to prey on the existential dread of young people.
This movement of teen slashers was
so prevalent throughout the 1990s
that nearly every young star of the decade
came in contact with it at some point.
Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Freddie Prinze Jr.,
Elijah Wood, and Devon Sawa, just to name a few.
However, The Ring changed all of that.
These days.
The idea of remaking a foreign film
seems fairly standard for the industry at large.
In 2000, when development began on the film,
this was not the case.
Director Gore Verbinski, who at the time
was known for films such as The Mexican, MouseHunt,
and many iconic music videos, had
a vision for how to reinvent what Americans
thought was frightening.
The Ring is actually highly visual.
Verbinski's iconic camera movements, inventive editing
choices, and sleek cool blue color correction
make The Ring stand out from everything else that
was being produced.
Many film fans may not be aware that the iconic jerky movements
and static-filled tape footage was
accomplished by combining filming the actress walking
in reverse.
and then playing it backwards, to simulate
an otherworldly forward movement,
and under cranking the cameras so the frames of footage
were removed during post-production.
Choices like these were completely unheard of in 2002.
They cemented the visual style of the movie in the minds
of moviegoers everywhere.
They were so iconic that they were parodied
in films like Scary Movie 3.
Cindy, the TV's leaking!
The other aspect that really helped to distinguish The Ring
is that it was actually supernatural.
A lot of '80s slashers and teen slashers
are simply just a man with a sharp object
chasing people around, and this can be scary,
but the movie-going public had seen this for close to 20 years
at this point.
The film's clear and simple premise
as well as the paranormal entity at the center of it, clearly
delineated it from everything else in the marketplace.
The Ring was released theatrically October 18, 2002,
and received widely-positive critical responses.
Ultimately, the film grossed over $249 million
worldwide off a production budget of only $48 million.
It spawned two sequels, The Ring Two,
and Rings, which were released in 2005 and 2017, respectively.
However, it is not the franchise of The Ring that
truly leaves a legacy in the world of horror,
but more The Ring's broader impact
on the world of early 2000s American horror films.
It firmly established the tradition
of remaking foreign films as a commercially viable enterprise
for production companies to venture into.
And it also spawned the direct trend
of an increased number of horror films based on Asian horror
projects.
The most commonly recited examples of this
are The Grudge, Dark Order, and One Missed Call.
These films, along with the newly-popularized subgenre
of torture porn, summarily dismissed
the almost decade-long run of teen slashers.
They marked a return to horror films that were actually
intended to be scary, as opposed to creepy
with a lot of pretty teenagers.
The Ring and its creative brethren,
successfully pushed us away from the highly glossy
and overly-commercial genre, and into a more darker,
psychologically-probing direction.
The Ring gave us genuine scares and multiple defining moments
that have stuck with audiences for years after its release.
[TV TUMBLING]
[SCREAMING]
Rachel!
Ultimately the takeaway is this: The Ring
succeeded because it was unlike anything
that was happening at the time.
It was a palate cleanser, plain and simple.
A break from the norm.
A new type of narrative experience.
And with every passing year, it feels
like we're in desperate need of a system refresh like this.
A contemporary version of this feels
like something we're sorely in search
of in a marketplace that's demanding
no more remakes, no more films pre-existing intellectual
property, and no more wall-to-wall CGI fests,
where do we go from here?
Horror needs to rediscover its roots.
We need original films, created by scrappy upstarts.
New stories told by storytellers with a deep connection
and conviction for their material.
We need a new crop of indie filmmakers
to take over and steer things in a new direction,
to remake horror in their image.
To diverge from the current status quo.
Just like The Ring did.
So that's all for Nerdstalgic.
Do you have a soft spot for some early 2000s J or K horror
remakes?
Do you think we should try to remake some of these films
again?
Let us know in the comments down below what you think.
And as always, please like and subscribe
for more Nerdstalgic videos.
See you later.
[MUSIC PLAYING]