Now here’s
a funny thing – funny peculiar, that is. In which modern
entertainment medium would you, gentle and discerning reader, expect
to encounter the most imaginative and faithful treatment of the ghost
stories of M.R. James? Did someone at the back mumble ‘the BBC
around Christmas time’? O ye of narrow cultural horizons! By far
the best attempt at a Jamesian spook story I have come across in
recent years is a teen-orientated Japanese horror movie based on a
saga originally published as an adult comic (or graphic
novel, as hairy middle-aged blokes in death
metal T-shirts insist on calling such things). The film is Ring,
and it is available on video for rent or to buy, along with its
sequel.
Anyone
who doesn’t like films with subtitles should stop reading now.
Anyone still with us needs to know a few things. Firstly, not all
Japanese films feature frequent soulless copulation or crazy kung-fu
violence. Ring has
neither. Lest I should lose my audience entirely, what we do get is a
well-paced supernatural thriller that works, in large part, thanks to
understated direction, good central performances, and a plot that
takes both its basic premise and some of its best shocks from the
Provost of Eton’s tales.
The ring
of the title is figurative – a group of schoolchildren circulate a
mysterious video that one of them supposedly recorded by chance,
while on holiday in a remote maritime province. Anyone who sees the
video (which features a series of surreally-disjointed but not
actually horrific scenes) supposedly dies exactly seven days later.
An urban legend, of course; but kids do die, and the viewer is left
in no doubt that Something is going on. A young journalist
investigates, and a chain of events is set in motion that leads to
revelations, terrors and a neat ending that leaves room for Ring
2.
Ring
contains explicit nods to several stories by M.R. James: a
claustrophic descent into a well recalls ‘The Treasure of Abbott
Thomas’; the arrival of the deadly ‘thing’, Sadako, suggests
‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’; and the actual process whereby people
are successively doomed is a straight lift from ‘Casting the
Runes’, perhaps by way of the British film Curse
of the Demon. James is not the only
influence. There are nods to Lovecraft, science fiction B-movies, and
Japanese folklore. You’d think this would make for a terrible mess,
but instead Ring is a remarkably coherent and effective film. It is
also very engaging, especially as the implications of the video curse
become clear to the reporter, who has a small son.
Ring
2 is not quite as good as the first film –
perhaps inevitably. However, this is not because of the simple
problem of ‘sequelitis’, the curse of so many Hollywood shocker
franchises. While there is a sense that good ideas from the first
film are being rehashed, the real problem is that the story virtually
marks time. In Ring we
are told that the terrifying Sadako’s father was not human, and
Ring 2 repeats the
claim without adding any extra data. Something Lovecraftian here,
methinks, but what? The set pieces, while well-executed, are less
shocking, with one exception – a cracking scene in a video editing
suite, which returns to Jamesian horror on the individual level.
Overall, though, we get a Nigel Kneale set up – scientists
tampering with dark forces, as in The Stone
Tape and Quatermass
and the Pit. Indeed, both Kneale’s classics
are more than hinted at, particularly in a well-executed but rather
predictable finale. Ring 2
is eminently watchable as science fiction, but I hope that the next
instalment (if there is one) returns to the darker terrors of the
original.*
*It didn't.
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