The Ring/Nightmare Fuel

Seven days.

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• The original Japanese version of The Ring. My friend refused to go to sleep after watching it (a 30+ year old woman.) It is quite possibly the single most terrifying film ever. It's not the sort of film that jumps out and scares you. No, this is Fridge Logic terror. This is terror that comes creeping up on you only after you finished the film and have walked away. Then you start THINKING. To make matters worse (or better if that's your bent) this is quite possibly the only movie ever made that actually gets MORE terrifying simply by watching a 4th generation VHS copy of it.
• The American remake might be much scarier, if only for the two jump scenes with the corpse. If there were a category for Crowning Music of Scary, the horrible electronic shriek when Samara's victims are revealed would win.
• The "scared-to-death-face" can also freak one out.
• The original's simple twitchy movement by Sadako outshines the FX-twitch-video jumps of Samara. Ring 0: Birthday has a movement-moment that made me screech: when most of the victims are dead, the final women (Akiko and Etsuko) take shelter in the old clinic; they expect Sadako. They get a jerky faceless puppet of her that flips around a corner to confront them: freaked me out.
  • To elaborate further: Sadako is some distance behind them at the time they attempt to hide in the building. Akiko then runs back to barricade the entrance... holy shit, Sadako's suddenly appeared right in the doorway. A terrified Akiko then runs around the corner back to Etsuko and they both cower, too frightened to move. Nothing happens for several seconds... then Sadako suddenly appears around the corner, her limbs contorting in a horrifying manner, complete with bone-crunching sounds.
    • They're bone-crunching sounds because the theater troupe HAD broken every bone in her body when they killed her. This is Sadako rearranging herself and moving on sheer psychic power alone. Which is probably even worse.
  • Not to mention the bit just before where the Akiko and Etsuko are running through the forest and you can SEE Sadako just standing in the background, watching, waiting. One fall later, they get back up and she's gone. Sets your teeth on edge.
• For me, a truly disturbing moment in the original film arrived in the Deliberately Monochrome flashback to Sadako's mother giving a demonstration of her psychic abilities. The reporters present begin to shout "Fraud!", and all of a sudden, one of them just drops dead, wearing the same twisted face as Sadako's present-day victims. We cut to the present for a moment as the protagonists react to this information, and then, without warning, we cut back to the flashback. Sadako runs out from behind the corner--our first real glimpse of the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl--almost scuttling, like an insect. A subtle moment in the overall scheme of the movie, but truly effective.
• The original tape was supposedly created when someone taped a mysterious broadcast late at night from an unlisted TV station. I've been avoiding public-access TV ever since.
• Oh come on - how has the line from the son "You weren't supposed to help her!" not make the cut? That sent shivers straight down the spine.
• When Aidan's mother fixes up a sleeping-pills-peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich as she prepares to drown him.
• The part when the heroine is climbing out of the well while Samara is creeping UP the wall below her. It's the legs. The way they suddenly step in front in a logically spine breaking way freaks me out (that and the constant slow speed of the "walk").
• The page image. While it may not be as scary as the period where we can't see her face at all, The Reveal of Samara's face is pretty damn terrifying nonetheless. It's not so much the rotted, undead nature of the face, it's the amount of raw, seething hatred in her expression.
• For the remake, the video itself. Even when each of the surreal shots were given context, it doesn't change the fact that I have had literal and actual nightmares that looked exactly like this godforsaken tape. It was...unsettling.
• Sadako's eye. That is all.
• Ring 2. The "why won't this delete?" scene is widely considered the single most terrifying moment in the whole film (in addition with Sadako's well ascent during the climax). Okazaki really shouldn't have chickened out of watching and passing on the tape.
• The tape itself is just horrific. It's a collage of short, disturbing scenes that seem to be non-sequiturs, but make a terrible sort of sense once you know the backstory.
  • Which owe a lot to Luis Bunuel and Un Chien Andalou.
• The first novel has a few eerie moments aside from the main plot. When Asakawa arrives at South Hakone Pacific Land, he does so on a road that is unusually narrow for the entrance to a resort, which then suddenly widens as he gets closer. He stops at the main building to as k for directions, and there are plenty of people there, even though it's late at night on a week day. There's something about the small part of the novel that's just so darn creepy.
• The mysterious voice on Sadako's tape (theorised by some to be the voice of "the Towel Man"), which can only be heard clearly when the tape is played in slow-motion, is incredibly eerie and creepy. "If you keep on doing Shomon, Bokon will come." (Incorrectly translated in some versions as "Frolic in brine, goblins be thine" although the basic meaning is the same.) Doubles as an example of Hell Is That Noise.

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