Nearly 12 years after The Ring Two – and 15 years after The Ring and 19 years after Ringu, the original Japanese horror movie that inspired it – Rings opens in theaters this Friday. The producers, Walter F Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, have stuck around for all three American versions, but there are no holdovers from the cast and crew – no Naomi Watts, no Gore Verbinski (director of The Ring) or Hideo Nakata (director of Ringu and The Ring Two), no Ehren Kruger (screenwriter of both the first and second Americanizations). In terms of continuity, it feels like a game of telephone where the line has been severed completely and we’re not even hearing gibberish on the other end. We need to be reminded why, exactly, The Ring was so scary in the first place.
There are some reasons why The Ring is scary that are common to J-horror – the dark, flaxen-haired specter; its disturbing hitch-stepped movements; the black, shadowy residue it leaves behind – but the specific hook is a piece of technology that the teenage audience for Rings has probably never used: the videotape. The hook is that if you watch a certain unmarked VHS tape, you will die seven days after viewing it. There’s a lot of mythology surrounding the abstract contents of the tape – specifically about Samara (“Sadako” in the Japanese version), the vengeful ghost who crawls out of TVs and wells – but The Ring plays off a fear of a particular technology, one that the streaming video of Rings cannot quite approximate.
Ringu and The Ring expanded on a history of videotapes as a distinct physical menace, playing off the fear that movies you consume at home had the power to devour you, too. In David Cronenberg’s 1983 cult favorite Videodrome, the underground videotapes coveted by James Woods’s Max Renn, a UHF programmer in search of the lascivious and “edgy”, morph into a grotesque, pulsating, fleshy blob, to be inserted into a slot in the stomach. In later films like David Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway or Michael Haneke’s 2005 Caché (Hidden), a series of unmarked videocassettes, each more intrusive and disturbing than the last, are delivered to the doorstep of a residence, terrorizing the people inside. In every case, the object itself carries a threat even before we look at the images themselves, which inevitably creep with static and faulty tracking.
But as physical media has disappeared, and the digital realm of streaming and smartphones has taken over, the movies have struggled to figure out how to make technology a threat again. The telephone was once a reliable scare tactic: the abrupt shock-scare of a ring, the raspy taunts of a serial killer, the cutting of a landline, the cord as a strangling implement, and even the phone itself as a blunt force object in films like The Stepfather. Starting with the dawn of cellphones, however, the new technology has become more a hassle than an opportunity. Film-makers are always having to account for why a phone can’t be used to call for help rather than how it might possess some talismanic quality that could scare an audience. In fact, there’s a hilarious five-minute video called “No Signal” that’s exactly what it sounds like: a compendium of 21st century horror-movie characters complaining about their phones being out of range. And though few good arguments could be made for the merits of the original When a Stranger Calls, the potent threat of the call coming from inside the house was significantly minimized by a remake where the babysitter has a cell with a dodgy signal.
The ubiquity of handheld cameras, digital surveillance and smartphones inspired a wave of found-footage-style horror films a solid decade after 1999’s The Blair Witch Project set the standard, and there have been moments of real ingenuity. The Paranormal Activity movies have long since devolved in repetition and confused mythology, but for a time, they reinvented the haunted house movie for the age of DIY videography. All the classic techniques of old-fashioned ghost stories – the use of offscreen space, light and shadow, the various bumps in the night – surfaced in a new, inexpensive form that utilized cameras that had become, by that time, common household tools. There’s no more clever effect in recent horror history than a sequence in Paranormal Activity 3 where a camera is jerry-rigged to an oscillating fan and the action goes on- and off-screen to nerve-shredding effect.
But there are dead ends, too, in thinking new technology is going to take a film to another level. Last year’s massively disappointing sequel to The Blair Witch Project scuttled the simplicity of a two-camera, three-person crew in favor of an array of digital bells and whistles, including Bluetooth earpiece cameras, cellphones, camcorders, and a remote-controlled camera drone to get overhead shots of the dreaded Black Hills forest outside Burkittsville, Maryland. The camera arsenal gives Blair Witch a busyness and slickness that betrays the spirit of the original, but it’s the drone that’s particularly egregious. In theory, the drone would provide some perspective on a forest that snares victims in an almost magical, directionless labyrinth. But the device is abandoned before it can do anything – it gets caught in a tree like a cheap kite.
New technology does scare us now, just as it always has, but few films have articulated why. Video conferencing apps like Skype have provided a fresh twist on the mirror-scare cliché, but the true terror of modern technology is the isolation and stress of constant connection, which isn’t as easy to put in cinematic terms. The underrated, semi-experimental 2014 sleeper Unfriended has gone further than any in trying to bring those fears to life. There’s not a moment in this real-time thriller that doesn’t take place off a laptop screen, as high-school friends video-conference with each other and contend with a glitchy, unknown user known as “Billie227”. As this ghost in the machine wreaks havoc, the characters are forbidden from logging off without suffering fatal consequences.
Unfriended isn’t a model to be replicated – it’s hard to even think of it as a piece of film direction, in fact – but at least it gave some thought to what, exactly, scares us about our attachment to devices and the virtual relationships they forge, which are paradoxically intimate and distant. (If it were a David Cronenberg film, the humans and laptops would no doubt merge into a bloody singularity of flesh and pus, rather than the static image of teenagers who can’t break away from their computers.) For all its flaws, the horrors of Unfriended are real and its originality testifies to how inadequate the genre has been in addressing them. Modern technology has always scared us, because it can so radically upend the way we live. But it’s a problem few film-makers have possessed the imagination to solve.
View all comments >