I’ve never seen The Ring. You might wonder why I call
myself a horror buff even though I haven’t watched maybe the most iconic
Western horror film in the last decade—oh, scratch that, The Ring turns 12 this year. Regardless, yes, it’s iconic and no, I
haven’t seen it, primarily because I was still a big wuss back in ’02, with the
only things resembling horror under my belt then being Alien and Ghostbusters, the
latter telling you how big a wimp I was.
Another
contributing factor was the overwhelming opinion within the community that any
American remake of a Japanese horror film is bound to pale in comparison to the
original. I don’t believe this is a statement about horror remakes in general: John
Carpenter’s The Thing, David
Cronenberg’s The Fly and most
recently Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead are
all great and all of them remakes, re-adaptations or re-imaginings of some
kind. But when someone from the West does try to reinvent a film or television
show from a very different culture, I think there is an inherent risk of
changing or even being completely oblivious to the context in which it was
created. Cracked’s Robert Brockway pointed this out rather succinctly in a pair
of articles about the perpetually-in-development American remake of Akira.
What’s funny is
that I can’t tell you if the same issues apply to the American take on The Ring, again in large part because I
still haven’t watched the whole thing. That being said, I have watched a single
scene—undoubtedly its most famous moment—and while I can’t comment on the
entirety of Gore Verbinski’s stab at remaking Hideo Nakata’s unsettling Ringu, I can say he screwed up one big
part.
