Trick or Trailers: The Ring (2002)

My first reaction when I saw this trailer was one of relief. It gave me a glimmer of hope that the remake of Hideo Nakata's J-Horror classic Ringu (1999) might not be a disaster.

When an American remake was announced, it seemed like such a doomed-to-fail idea. How could Ringu successfully make the jump to the US? And why should it be forced to for the sake of subtitle-phobic US audiences? Further, the fact that the remake would be helmed by the director of the slap-sticky Mouse Hunt (1997) wasn't any cause for encouragement.



So the US Ring had a few big knocks against it from the start. It definitely was a film that would have to be damn good to ever be embraced by the horror community but this trailer went a long way towards alleviating at least some of that early skepticism. It was like the horror equivalent of the first Tim Burton Batman trailer that sold irate comic fans on the idea that, ok, this might not suck.

When The Ring was released on October 18th, 2002, the general consensus was that director Gore Verbinski and writers Ehren Kruger, Scott Frank, and Koji Suzuki (the author of the Ring novels) had pulled it off. This was one of those rare but happy instances of Hollywood doing right by horror. Sure, some fans still continued to grouse about whatever but by most reasonable standards, The Ring was an admirable remake. VCRs and video tape may have become all but obsolete in the eleven years since The Ring was released (which reminds me that my first viewing of Nakata's film, like that of many US fans, was on a VHS dub) but The Ring still plays great.

US audiences certainly embraced Verbinski's film in a big way, leading to a subsequent wave of J-Horror remakes, including The Grudge, Dark Water, Pulse, One Missed Call, The Eye, and The Uninvited. Few were any good, leaving one Ring to rule them all.

Remembering The Class Of '02

The older I get, the more I find myself saying crap like "man, where did the time go?" but I have to say it feels odd to consider that 2002 is already a long ten years ago.

It wasn't a particular milestone year for the genre but as the year following the events of 9/11, it did represent a crossroads of sorts. Post 9/11, some pundits speculated that the audience for fear fare might dry up in the wake of such a catastrophic tragedy but, if anything, the fall out of 9/11 and the two wars the US became embroiled in because of it led to a renewed popularity for the genre.

That new wave didn't really florish until 2003/2004 but 2002 laid the groundwork for big things to come and over at Shock Till You Drop, we've taken a look back at a handful of films that helped define that transitional year. This is not intended to be a "best of" list but simply an acknowledgement of several films that proved notable in one way or another - whether they kicked off trends, put an end cap on an era, or tapped into the cultural mood at the time. In sizing up the Class of '02, Spencer Perry writes about Signs, Tyler Doupe takes on Resident Evil, Paul Doro considers the teen thriller Swimfan, while I take a look back at The Ring and Halloween: Resurrection.

Regarding Halloween: Resurrection, even though that movie will never be much good (no matter how much time passes!), I'll always regard it with some affection. Filmed prior to 9/11 (originally it was meant to come out in September of '01 but reshoots and schedule shuffles moved its release to almost a year later), Resurrection has the virtue of being one of the last horror movies to be filmed pre-9/11 and as such feels like a bittersweet keepsake of a time when a "killer shark in baggy-ass overalls" could be more easily touted as the epitome of Evil.

3-D Ring Circus

This is not a happy time for movie fans who regard 3-D as an obnoxious gimmick. What began as a trickle last year with the remake of My Bloody Valentine and the sequel The Final Destination has become a deluge of three-dimensional terror. Coming this year is Piranha 3-D, Resident Evil: Afterlife, and Saw 3-D. And going into production soon will be Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, the next Final Destination sequel, Shark Night 3-D (!), Spring Break Zombie Cruise 3-D (!!), the monster movie Burst, and the just-announced third installment of the Ring saga. Like it or not, 3-D is quickly becoming the new standard. It's just a shame that the new movie The Human Centipede couldn't have put 3-D to its advantage as well, don't you think?

Having been a kid during the short-lived 3-D revival of the early '80s, and as someone who still thinks Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) embodies the 3-D experience, to see the format come back with this kind of popularity feels a little surreal. 3-D used to be a punchline and now almost any movie that has made serious money lately has done so by virtue of 3-D. Anyone who believes the trend will pass and that this technology is going to fade back into obscurity is dead wrong. The interest may naturally level off over the next few years but the demand for 3-D is not going to disappear. There's a whole generation of kids growing up now for whom 3-D is what they expect to see when they go to the theater. My five year old son doesn't look at 3-D as a gimmick, it's simply how he's always known movies to be.

As someone who felt like their dreams died a little when 3-D's comeback proved to be a flop in 1983, my inner twelve-year-old can't help but welcome the prospect of many more 3-D horror movies to come. At the same time, I do worry about the format completely overtaking the genre. 3-D horror is geared towards providing pure popcorn entertainment and while I'm all for enjoying movies on that level, it'd be a crime if that started to become the only kind of horror movie that studios were willing to release in theaters. There's a type of mood and atmosphere and a type of suspense that 3-D just doesn't lend itself to (at least not yet - maybe future filmmakers will change that) and I'd hate to see the 2-D releases of the future have to settle for direct-to-DVD distribution (or else be converted to 3-D, as with next year's The Cabin In The Woods and Priest).

Of course, very few 2-D horror films of late have really distinquished themselves so going for the full-on 3-D circus isn't necessarily such a loss. But yet much of what makes horror great is that it allows the audience to project itself into the film. To have 3-D doing that work for us is bound to lead to an audience too lazy to be scared.