A Perfect Circle Or a Downward Spiral?

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Western audiences who had previously rather overlooked Japanese horror (especially outside weeaboo circles) suddenly became very excited by it. Though it’s likely that the massive commercial success of Resident Evil and the critical acclaim drawn by Silent Hill was a factor in this, both of those games set their story in the United States and played up influences from Western horror.

Though they were horror games hailing from Japan, they didn’t spawn the “J-horror” tag in the way that The Ring did. (Look, I know the Koji Suzuki novel the film was based on was called Ring, not The Ring… but they wrote it that way on the original posters. If the filmmakers didn’t want me to call the movie that, they shouldn’t have translated it that way.) Though it eventually spawned an American remake, the remake largely relied on the existing audience enthusiasm for the original Japanese movie to get greenlit in the first place.

The combination of Japanese horror aesthetics (in particular the appearance of Sadako), which Western audience were not particularly used to, plus a tasty urban legend concept to draw you in (the infamous “videotape where you die a week after you watch it” angle), plus the buzz from it becoming a monster hit in Hong Kong (where it outdrew The Matrix) all added up to it becoming a bit of a sleeper hit in Western markets, and now to mark 20 years of Sadako-flavoured cinematic nastiness Arrow have put out a boxed set containing Blu-Rays of The Ring, The Ring 2, and Ring 0: Birthday – plus The Spiral, the original The Ring sequel which… well, I’ll get to that.

Does Sadako’s curse still hold up in an era when VHS is a hipster retro-medium, or has it – like actual VHS tapes – ended up degrading after repeated viewings?