This movie played a significant role in my life 20 years ago. I was a huge cinephile, and watched movies all the time. I don’t remember the exact sequence that led to me watching it for the first time, but this was the movie to watch if you were a fan of horror movies in the early 2000s. there was a florescence in Japanese horror that was kicked off by this movie, which, in turn, influenced movies being made around the world. And I enjoyed a lot of those movies. Ringu, undoubtedly, was probably the reigning king of the genre, spawning numerous copycats and ushering in a new era for the horror genre – which had been dominated by stale slasher-style flicks and would lean into more moody, atmospheric horror films like Let the Right One In, The Babadook, and It Follows.
Well, as important as the movie was to the era, the book is equally as important. Published in 1991, I think the book presaged what was about to happen in Japan. Namely, the “Lost Decade” brought about by the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble (it’s more complex than that, but I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on economics and Japanese governmental policy). It’s hard to find, now, thanks to the proliferation of AI-generated articles, but I remember reading something a few years ago about how Japan’s stagnation in the 90s was at least partially a result of a heavy investment in home entertainment at the expense of personal computers and other forms of technological advancement. Basically, Japan spent their resources on analog instead of digital.
Again, I’m no expert. And I’m going off a half-remembered article from several years ago. But in current digital competitiveness, Japan ranks 31st in the world. Even shopping in Japan is apparently heavily resistant to modernization, as many stores are still cash-only. Contrary to what I think a lot of people would assume, Japan – renown as they may be fore technological development – are also fairly slow to adopt many of the technological developments of modern life. This resistance – or maybe even fear – is fairly well encapsulated in this story.
The character of Sadako is a modern version of folkloric stories of vengeful spirits in Japan known as onryo. Often depicted as women wanting to inflict their vengeance on the world, the onryo in this book uses a VHS tape as the vector for her rage, and the spread of her vengeance is a contagion that is explored in subsequent novels. It’s fitting that in a highly advanced nation that is also somewhat reluctant to adopt technological developments, a modern ghost story might use technology as a metaphor for social alienation, sexual repression, and the transmission of generational trauma.
Anyway, I quite liked the book. It wasn’t as terrifying as the movie, but served as an engaging mystery that I already knew the resolution of.