The Ring Essay

The Ring (2002)
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Starring Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson


The film starts off by showing two girls watching TV when they start talking about a videotape that kills you seven days after watching it. One of the girls says that after you watch it the phone rings and the voice on the other end of the phone tells you that you will die in seven days. The whole film is basically trying to beat death, a good way to make the audience feel tension in the film is showing the tape at the near beginning which gives it a view as you watching the film to the end will save you from the seven day death.


The way people are represented in the Ring gives me the idea that they are all normal people living normal lives until they find the videotape and get thrown head first into the supernatural world, the videotape shows the viewer what i believe was going through Samara mind during the seven days she was down in the well. The reason the tape did not kill Naomi Watts was because she made a copy of the tape and passed it on. The way that the people represented are in my opinion how i would expect people to react if there was proof to the videotape, people would always try and save there own skin which is why this film is a great horror film because it plays with your mind thinking how you are able to survive the seven days.


The legal and ethical for the Ring is it was a remake from a Japanese film called Ringu, so there would be legal issues if the director of Ringu filed a copyright court order but seeing that the film was a american remake they had to get permission from the original film director before being able to start the filming. The ethical for the Ring was that the videotape was like a gateway to hell showing the hell Samara went though down the well seven days is how long she survived in the well giving the people who watch the tape a chance to fight death and find a way to live past the seven days. 


The Ring gives out a lot of death throughout the film which seeing that the film originates from Japan Samara Morgan reminds me of a shinigami aka the Japanese god of death. The dead girl in the well could also be referred to the story of Okiku, a Japanese folklore which has been adapted a few times each involves the main theme which is a slave girl who was tricked into believing to of lost a family heirloom of the family she works for and ends up being killed and thrown down a well, the spirit of the girl lives on until someone comes and helps her find the last heirloom which never existed. This folklore was the base for the original Ring film.