Ringu

Ringu (リング) is a 1998 Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata, adapted from Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel Ring, in which viewers of a cursed videotape die one week after watching it.^{1 • 2} Released in Japan on 31 January 1998, it became a major hit, was widely credited as a catalyst for the J-horror boom, and was remade in Hollywood as Gore Verbinski's The Ring in 2002.^{1 • 3 • 4}

Production and release

Ringu was produced by Omega Project and Kadokawa Shoten and distributed by Toho.^{1 • 5} Nakata had previously directed Yūrei (女優霊, "Ghost Actress"), and worked here from a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi; the score was composed by Kenji Kawai, with photography by Junichirō Hayashi.^{1 • 5 • 3} In 1998, the production company Asmic Ace Entertainment released two feature films based on Suzuki's first two novels simultaneously: Ringu, directed by Nakata, and The Spiral (Rasen), directed by Jōji Iida, in hopes that fans of the first would flock to the sequel.⁹

The film was hugely successful in Japan, spawning successful sequels, and one thesis account states that Ringu remains Japan's highest-grossing horror film of all time.^{10 • 11} At the 22nd Japan Academy Prize in 1999, Matsushima received the Excellent Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role award and the film won the Popularity Award in the film division.¹

The J-horror boom and the 2002 remake

Ringu is widely credited as a catalyst for the J-horror boom and as one of the most internationally influential Japanese popular films of the late 1990s.³ Its success drew Hollywood's attention to Japanese horror: DreamWorks bought the remake rights for $1 million, and Gore Verbinski's The Ring (2002), starring Naomi Watts, grossed nearly $130 million.⁶ The remake's critical and box-office success marked the return of Japanese horror cinema to the Western mainstream for the first time since the 1960s and sparked a cycle of Hollywood remakes of Japanese kaidan (ghost story) films, including The Grudge (2004), Dark Water (2005), Pulse (2006), and One Missed Call (2008).²

The remake follows the same basic premise: a TV journalist and single mother, Rachel Keller, investigates deaths centered on a cursed videotape and races to save herself and her son after he watches it.² Initial critical reaction in 2002 was largely dismissive; reviewers in The Guardian, The New York Times, the Village Voice, and the Chicago Sun-Times all panned it, though later assessments have been more favorable.¹² Comparative scholarship has treated the two films as a lens on cultural difference: Valerie Wee, a scholar of media studies, has analyzed the cursed-video imagery in each film as revealing distinct Japanese and Hollywood aesthetic traditions, and has argued that the American remake is more conservative in aligning women and maternity with evil, while the Japanese original leaves Sadako a more ambiguous figure.^{13 • 14}

Style and reception

Critics have consistently emphasized the film's restraint. A Daily Telegraph review quoted by Rotten Tomatoes observes that "almost nothing terrible is shown: the real horror lies in the viewer's anticipation," and the site's critics consensus describes the film as combining supernatural elements with anxieties about modern technology.⁵ The film holds a 98% Tomatometer score from 47 reviews and an 81% audience score on the site.⁵ Its aesthetic, long dark hair falling over a ghost's face, spectral figures pursuing victims to death, and dark legends woven into specific places, became a recognizable template that later Japanese horror films such as Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge adopted.⁷

The film's premise is also tied to its medium. Commentators note that the curse's logic depends on videotape as a copyable, passable object, which is why the story behaves like a contagion; the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema chapter on the film argues that Ringu both thematizes and exemplifies cultural contagion through this figure of the virus.⁸

References

1. リング：作品情報・キャスト・あらすじ, 映画.com
2. Maia Sharrock Churchill (2018). The Art of Adaptation and Depictions of the Incorporeal: A cross-cultural examination of the representations of death and the supernatural in Ringu and The Ring. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.
3. Ring, Cinema Anthology
4. Haunted tapes, killer copies, cinematic ghosts in Ringu and The Ring, Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens
5. Ringu, Rotten Tomatoes
6. Exporting J-horror: Will its Cultural Success Abroad be its Demise? Inscribe
7. Esta película de terror japonesa marcó un antes y un después en el género, MeriStation
8. Viral Contagion in the Ringu Intertext, The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, Oxford Academic
9. UCLA International Institute article on the Ring series
10. The DVD Journal, Quick Review: Ringu
11. NC State thesis on the Ring franchise
12. Michael Hann (2009). The Ring: one remake that outshines its original. The Guardian.
13. Valerie Wee (2011). Visual Aesthetics and Ways of Seeing: Comparing Ringu and The Ring. Cinema Journal 50(2).
14. Valerie Wee (2011). Patriarchy and the Horror of the Monstrous Feminine: A comparative study of Ringu and The Ring. Feminist Media Studies 11(2).

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Psychological horror films › Psychological horror films, 1990s and 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

© 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Developers: read Edgepedia by API or MCP. Embed a reference card.