I thought we’d open the blog this year with a series on The Ring franchise. Soon, Rings will be hitting the theaters and I feel like The Ring had a pretty big impact in 2002. Honestly, I think it was one of the first true horror adaptations where J-Horror met an American audience with a mostly unchanged story. Godzilla can feel free to get angry, but I don’t find anything scary or terrifying about the Godzilla of the 50’s when he first entered our theaters. If you want a true masterpiece in a mixture of Japanese and American film making watch both Kill Bills. Moving on, that’s not horror, but damn did they do a great job of marrying those two worlds.
Cabin Fever (Roth), Blade II (Del Toro), 28 Days Later (Boyle), Resident Evil (Anderson) and the list goes on and on. What do they all have in common? They answered a call to a stressed American populace and gave breath to some fun movies that had their own sets of rules and spawned or extended franchises. At this point Resident Evil is ready for a reboot and 28 Weeks Later was great, but I don’t see a 28 Months Later in our future. Cabin Fever had a bad remake (my opinion), and here we are with Rings.
The basic premise is pretty simple to get through how you get there is a complex detective game. A girl named Samara had the power of Thoughtography. She could burn images into your mind. The images she put into her adopted parents minds were so awful that she was tortured and left to die in a well over seven days. A videotape depicting several images of Samara’s life curses the viewer to die in seven days. You could escape this fate by passing the curse on. In Rachel’s case (The primary protagonist of the first two films) she creates a tape and shows her ex-boyfriend while investigating the tape. This makes her safe ...sorta. It's kind of unclear. Samara comes back and haunts Rachel in the second film but we’ll deal with that later.
Common baddies of 2002 films provided their heroes with a physical challenge of some sort. Crazy zombies in 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, bad ass vampires in Blade II and Queen of the Damned, unkillable but still...stoppable monster killers like Uber Jason from Jason X. Samara was different and thank the horror gods for that. You could not physically confront Samara and the film never offered that as an out to any of its protagonists until the second film.
The next series of posts will discuss the Ring, the Ring 2 and Rings but not all at once. I’ll outline the story so you’re caught up for the upcoming film and we’ll discuss some of the importance of the film to the Horror community. Until then, Stay Tuned!
Cabin Fever (Roth), Blade II (Del Toro), 28 Days Later (Boyle), Resident Evil (Anderson) and the list goes on and on. What do they all have in common? They answered a call to a stressed American populace and gave breath to some fun movies that had their own sets of rules and spawned or extended franchises. At this point Resident Evil is ready for a reboot and 28 Weeks Later was great, but I don’t see a 28 Months Later in our future. Cabin Fever had a bad remake (my opinion), and here we are with Rings.
The basic premise is pretty simple to get through how you get there is a complex detective game. A girl named Samara had the power of Thoughtography. She could burn images into your mind. The images she put into her adopted parents minds were so awful that she was tortured and left to die in a well over seven days. A videotape depicting several images of Samara’s life curses the viewer to die in seven days. You could escape this fate by passing the curse on. In Rachel’s case (The primary protagonist of the first two films) she creates a tape and shows her ex-boyfriend while investigating the tape. This makes her safe ...sorta. It's kind of unclear. Samara comes back and haunts Rachel in the second film but we’ll deal with that later.
Common baddies of 2002 films provided their heroes with a physical challenge of some sort. Crazy zombies in 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, bad ass vampires in Blade II and Queen of the Damned, unkillable but still...stoppable monster killers like Uber Jason from Jason X. Samara was different and thank the horror gods for that. You could not physically confront Samara and the film never offered that as an out to any of its protagonists until the second film.
The next series of posts will discuss the Ring, the Ring 2 and Rings but not all at once. I’ll outline the story so you’re caught up for the upcoming film and we’ll discuss some of the importance of the film to the Horror community. Until then, Stay Tuned!
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