Introduction:
Film has always been more than entertainment; it reflects the cultural, historical, and aesthetic frameworks from which it emerges. During my undergraduate – Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney (2014–2018), I studied a wide range of disciplines beyond my foundation in Dentistry — from Art History, Race & Gender, and Cultural Studies to Film Studies, Japanese Media, Literature, and History. Collectively, these fields gave me an interdisciplinary lens through which to view cinema not merely as narrative, but as a cultural text shaped by deep-rooted traditions.
One of the most compelling opportunities came in JPNS2672: Japanese Media and Popular Culture, where I undertook a comparative analysis of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) and its Hollywood remake The Ring (2002). This project drew together all strands of my academic training: the formal language of art history, the critical perspectives of cultural studies (including gender and race from an Australian/Western point of view), and the thematic frameworks of Japanese and Western media and motion pictures. My presentation was awarded a High Distinction with a perfect 10/10, recognised not simply for its plot analysis, but for its exploration of how each film reinterprets horror through its own cultural vocabulary — Japan vs America, East vs West. The work also contributed to my receiving the Sakuko Matsui Prize for Excellence in Japanese Literature in 2016.
This blog post revisits that analysis in a more reflective, public-facing format. By placing Nakata’s Ringu alongside Verbinski’s The Ring, I aim to show how fear itself is not universal but culturally conditioned — shaped by aesthetics, mythology, and social anxieties. What frightens a Japanese audience may be unfamiliar, even abstract, to Western viewers, while Hollywood’s reinterpretation renders terror through spectacle and physicality. In this sense, the “same curse” manifests differently across borders, revealing as much about cultural identity as it does about horror cinema itself.
Background and Directors:
The Ring saga didn’t begin on screen, but on the page. In 1991, Japanese author Koji Suzuki (Fig. 2) published a horror novel called Ringu (リング – Fig. 1), which quickly became a bestseller and captured the imagination of a wide audience. What made the story so gripping was its modern twist on fear: instead of old castles or haunted mansions, the terror spread through something everyone had at home — a VHS tape. The idea that watching a video could curse you to die within seven days felt both bizarre and believable at the same time, especially in an era when video culture was booming in Japan. Readers were hooked, and the novel’s success created a wave of excitement that soon demanded a film adaptation. By 1998, director Hideo Nakata brought Ringu to the big screen, turning Suzuki’s unsettling vision into one of the most iconic horror films ever made in Japan. The movie didn’t just scare audiences — it became a cultural event, sparking conversations about technology, the supernatural, and how fear itself could be reimagined for a new generation.
When Koji Suzuki’s Ringu novel gained traction, the task of adapting it for film fell to Hideo Nakata (Fig. 3), a Japanese director known for his understated but deeply unsettling approach to horror. Nakata had previously worked in television and film, but it was Ringu (1998) that catapulted him to international recognition. His directorial style emphasised atmosphere over spectacle — long silences, shadows, and subtle camera work that built tension without revealing too much. This matched perfectly with Japanese horror traditions, where fear often comes from suggestion, ambiguity, and the unseen. Nakata’s Ringu became a domestic box office sensation and defined what would soon be labelled J-Horror: a uniquely Japanese form of supernatural cinema that blended folklore with modern anxieties.
Hollywood took notice. Just a few years later, Gore Verbinski (Fig. 4), an American director best known at the time for quirky comedies like Mouse Hunt (1997) and dark thrillers such as The Mexican (2001), was tapped to direct the remake, The Ring (2002). Verbinski’s cultural background and training in Western cinema brought a very different sensibility to the story. Where Nakata’s vision leaned on suggestion, Verbinski heightened the imagery: disturbing visuals, fast edits, and a polished, almost operatic sense of horror. This reflected the broader tradition of American horror, which often leans on spectacle, explicit violence, and the transformation of the monster into something visually distinct from humanity. His adaptation not only reframed Ringu for Western audiences but also amplified its reach, turning The Ring into a global box office hit and a blueprint for future Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror films.
Together, Nakata and Verbinski demonstrate how two directors, shaped by entirely different racial, cultural, and cinematic traditions, could take the same story and create films that feel familiar yet radically distinct. Ringu plays like a whispered legend that seeps into the audience’s subconscious, while The Ring confronts viewers with a direct spectacle of dread.
Plot Overview:
At the heart of both films lies the same chilling premise: a mysterious videotape that dooms anyone who watches it to die within seven days.
In Ringu (1998), the story follows Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima – Fig. 5), a journalist investigating the sudden and unexplained death of her teenage niece. Her search leads her to an eerie videotape rumoured to carry a deadly curse. When Reiko watches the tape herself, she unwittingly seals her fate — a death sentence set to arrive in just a week. Desperate, she turns to her ex-husband Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada – Fig. 7), a university professor and former medical student with a strong intuitive sense for the supernatural. Against Reiko’s warnings, Ryuji also views the tape out of curiosity, and his fate is sealed: seven days later, he dies exactly as the curse foretells.
Their young son Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka – Fig. 9) inherits his father’s psychic sensitivity and, tragically, watches the cursed tape as well. Unlike his parents, however, his survival is left unresolved in the film, heightening the sense of dread and uncertainty that defines Nakata’s approach to horror.
In The Ring (2002), the story is retold through American characters. Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts – Fig. 6) takes on Reiko’s role as the investigative journalist, while Noah Clay (Martin Henderson – Fig. 8) replaces Ryuji as the sceptical partner who ultimately cannot escape the curse. Rachel’s son Aidan (David Dorfman – Fig. 10) mirrors Yoichi’s role, embodying a child marked by supernatural sensitivity. Yet in contrast to Nakata’s ambiguous ending, Verbinski’s adaptation makes Aidan’s survival more explicit — reflecting Hollywood’s tendency to resolve plotlines more clearly for its audience.
By keeping the central premise intact but reworking the characters and their fates, the two films illustrate how cultural differences shape not only the atmosphere of horror but also the way stories themselves are told and resolved.
Visual Analysis – Aesthetics, Style and Staging:
In the horror genre, remakes are necessarily reinterpretations, designed to allow new audiences to connect with fears that were originally set within a different cultural context. The differences between Ringu and The Ring emerge most clearly in their visual aesthetics and staging.
Both films make extensive use of contrasts between light and dark, shaping the atmosphere of each frame. This technique, known as chiaroscuro, originated in the Renaissance and is perhaps best exemplified in the paintings of Caravaggio (Figs. 15 and 16). In cinema, chiaroscuro can both create volume and paradoxically flatten space by immersing the background in darkness. This flatness — where depth collapses and figures appear suspended against a void — resonates strongly with Japanese cultural aesthetics.
As Ross (1978) observes in his discussion of Japanese art and architecture, the notion of the “flattened plane” runs through centuries of practice, from ink and wash painting by masters such as Sesshū Tōyō, to the conventions of traditional stage arts like Noh and Kabuki (Figs. 17 and 18). Sesshū’s broken, unfinished lines suggested form without fully articulating it, allowing ambiguity and space to carry meaning. Similarly, Kabuki staging often combines upward movements — such as the raising of a sword — with a downward force (a stamping of the feet) that produces sound and gravity. This interplay creates an aesthetic balance, anchoring spectacle through weight and resonance while reinforcing the flattened plane.
Applied to Ringu (Figs. 11–14), this approach results in screen compositions where tone, space, and silence intensify the psychological unease. Rather than relying on explicit horror, Nakata uses flatness, shadow, and suggestion to unsettle the audience.
In comparison, Verbinski’s The Ring departs from the planar, low-key economy of Ringu and leans hard into verticality and depth. The film repeatedly situates characters against towering structures and elevated vantage points — cavernous lofts and city grids (Figs. 19–20), the cliff and lighthouse on Moesko Island (Fig. 21), even aerial views that miniaturise Rachel’s car within the landscape (Fig. 22). The geometry of these frames (upright columns, stacked windows, plunging horizons) creates a strong up–down axis, a way of seeing that Wee (2011) links to Western cinematic traditions privileging spectacle, legibility, and the visible manifestation of threat. Where Nakata often holds to planar compositions that suspend figures against darkness, Verbinski uses wide establishing shots, high angles, and pronounced perspective to stage fear in three-dimensional space.
This divergence maps neatly onto broader cultural architectures. Gothic churches thrust upward with spires and ribbed vaults (Fig. 23), directing the eye — and meaning — heavenward; Shinto–Buddhist shrine complexes tend to emphasise layered horizontals, eaves, and thresholds that mediate space (Fig. 24), closer to the “flattened plane” sensibility Ross describes. The Ring mirrors the Gothic impulse: height signifies power, distance, judgement. Even Samara’s iconography is rendered along the vertical: the shaft of the well, the climb from below, and the notorious step out of the television — a literal rupture through the screen plane into the viewer’s space, transforming depth itself into a visceral shock effect (Wee, 2011).
Verbinski also couples this spatial strategy with tonal and colour design that preserves coherence (the blue–green, water-suffused palette) while enhancing depth via atmospheric perspective — mist, rain, and backlit haze that push backgrounds away and isolate figures in the foreground. By contrast, Nakata’s cooler blacks and shadowed midtones often collapse depth, keeping attention on surfaces, thresholds, and suggestion rather than on volumetric space.
Finally, sound underscores the cultural split. As Bordwell, Thompson & Ashton note, changes in loudness can be as structurally expressive as visual contrasts, punctuating narrative rhythm and shaping audience emotion. The Ring frequently punctuates the quiet with sudden, high-amplitude cues — the phone ring, the ferry sequence, thunderous stingers — aligning with its spectacular use of vertical scale. Ringu tends to the opposite: sustained hush, diegetic ambience, and minimal cues that thicken the flatness of the frame and let dread accumulate in the silences between images (Bordwell et al., 1997).
In short, The Ring translates the same curse into a Western grammar of height, depth, and sonic punctuation, whereas Ringu locates terror on (and just beneath) the surface — a difference in ways of seeing and hearing as much as in storytelling.
Sadako vs Samara:
Japanese awareness of the spiritual world and their perceptions of horror are markedly different from those in American culture. Sadako (Fig. 25) has become one of the most iconic horror figures of the contemporary era, precisely because she embodies characteristics already deeply embedded in Japanese cultural memory. To a Japanese audience, the mere sight of a woman with long black hair and a white robe immediately signals the presence of a ghost. This association is not arbitrary — it is built upon centuries of folklore, transmitted generation after generation (Figs. 26–28).
One of the most famous legends, Okiku from Bancho Sarayashiki (Fig. 26), tells of a loyal servant unjustly killed and cast into a well, returning as a wrathful spirit to haunt the living. Similarly, the tale of Oiwa from Yotsuya Kaidan (Fig. 27) recounts betrayal, murder, and ghostly revenge, with Oiwa often depicted with long hair and a distorted face, her image etched deeply into the Japanese imagination. Fig. 28 shows a traditional Japanese Ghost – a long-haired woman with no legs – there isn’t much to freak out about from the Western perspective, but it is a scary figure based on Japanese cultural standards.
These figures — faithful, pure, but transformed by violence into agents of vengeance — provided a clear cultural template for Sadako’s creation. Even her name encodes this symbolism. The character “Sada” (貞) conveys purity and loyalty, traits which, when corrupted by violence, transform into haunting vengeance. Paired with “Ko” (子), meaning child, the name Sadako (貞子) can be read as “pure/innocent child.” More specifically, the compound 貞女 (teijyo) translates as “pure virgin,” with 女 (onna/jyo) signifying “woman.” Thus, Sadako’s very name marks her status of innocence prior to her transformation into a monster. For Japanese audiences, this etymological layering does more than identify the character — it evokes the tragedy of what might have been done to her, and how such violence against innocence fuels her wrath. In this way, the name itself acts as a cultural and narrative trigger, adding emotional and symbolic depth to her role as a vengeful spirit (Fig. 29).
By contrast, Verbinski’s The Ring reconfigures Sadako into Samara (Figs. 30–31). Interestingly, this is one of the few moments where the Japanese and American versions resemble one another visually, capturing a similar screen composition and figure design. Yet the underlying meaning diverges. The name Samara — derived loosely from Sadako Yamamura by reversing and recombining syllables (Fig. 32) — loses the cultural depth embedded in the Japanese original. Where Sadako’s name is rooted in notions of purity, loyalty, and innocence lost, Samara functions more as an arbitrary label, stripped of etymological resonance.
Visually, too, Samara is constructed in a different register. While Sadako remains recognisably human — her terror stemming from silence, ambiguity, and suggestion — Samara undergoes a full monsterisation (Figs. 35–36). Her skin is pallid grey, her eyes filled with hate and grudge, her features masculinised and gender-neutral, aligning her more closely with Hollywood’s canon of physically monstrous figures. In this respect, she echoes the iconic horror archetypes of Frankenstein and Dracula (Figs. 33–34), figures that terrify precisely because they represent an overt, visible departure from the human form. In Hollywood tradition, fear is produced through mutation, spectacle, and transformation, rather than through the invisible or implied.
It is worth noting, too, that in Ringu’s production, the actress playing Sadako reportedly had to remove her eyelashes to achieve a more unsettling, dehumanised appearance (see Fig. 25). This detail underscores how Japanese horror manipulates subtle, human features — rather than wholesale transformation — to disquiet its audience. The uncanny lies not in the exaggerated but in the almost imperceptible erasure of what makes us human.
Taken together, these differences reveal how Sadako and Samara, though narratively linked, function as cultural mirrors: one emerging from centuries-old folklore and aesthetic restraint, the other translated into the Western idiom of spectacle, transformation, and physical monstrosity.
As Balmain (2006) suggests, the defining characteristic of Japanese horror lies in how it blurs the boundary between the living (konoyo) and the dead (anoyo). Spirits such as Sadako are not monstrous intrusions from outside humanity but vengeful presences that remain tethered to it, haunting the everyday through suggestion, silence, and unresolved grievances. By contrast, Western horror — as reflected in Samara — tends to embody fear in visible, physical monstrosities that rupture the human form. This fundamental divergence explains why Ringu and The Ring, though narratively parallel, generate fear through entirely different cultural vocabularies.
Cursed Video Tape:
In Ringu, the cursed videotape operates as a montage of fragmented, symbolic images (Fig. 37), referencing Kaidan, the long tradition of Japanese folktales and ghost stories. Long black hair, a white kimono, kanji text, water, and of course the well — each image resonates within Japanese cultural memory. Yet, crucially, the most terrifying actions are not directly shown but rather suggested, leaving horror to emerge precisely from absence and implication. As Bordwell, Thompson & Ashton (1997) note, cinema often works as much through omission and suggestion as through visual excess; Ringu embodies this principle, making fear a product of what remains unseen.
The opening sequence itself begins with the cold ocean waves (Fig. 38), an image that carries deep cultural resonance for Japan as an island nation. Japanese ghosts are often believed to originate from water — whether seas, floods, or wells — and the ocean here becomes a metaphor for a looming, uncontrollable threat. In traditional tales, the sound of waves or natural tremors would often presage disaster, such as a volcanic eruption or approaching storm. In this sense, the tape functions as an encoded cultural text, drawing its imagery from centuries of folkloric warnings.
As Balmain (2006) argues, Japanese horror is defined by its ability to blur the boundary between konoyo (the world of the living) and anoyo (the world of the dead). The cursed tape epitomises this: its images are not explanations but intrusions of the dead into the space of the living viewer, delivered through ambiguity, silence, and symbolic suggestion.
In contrast, the images in The Ring’s cursed videotape are no longer symbolic fragments but rather direct representations of Samara’s lived experiences, tightly linked to the film’s narrative (Figs. 39–40). Instead of evoking folklore, the images dramatise her perspective: writhing figures, screaming mouths, distorted medical imagery, and barren landscapes all visualise her pain and isolation.
A striking example is the recurring fly motif (Fig. 41). At first it appears within the tape itself, but later, as Rachel examines the recording, she is able to pull the fly out of the screen into her own world (Fig. 42). This literalises the concept of the screen as a threshold between konoyo (the living world) and anoyo (the dead), preparing the pathway for Samara’s emergence. Crucially, Rachel’s nose begins to bleed as the fly emerges — a subtle but ominous sign that anything passing through this boundary carries destructive force. What crosses from the tape into reality is not neutral; it is tainted, an intrusion that foreshadows danger.
These images work as visual cues for Western audiences unfamiliar with Japanese folklore. By explicitly showing Samara’s memories and torment, the tape becomes a way to engage the audience empathetically with her fear — fear made visible and concrete. As Wee (2011) notes, this shift reflects a Western cinematic tendency to anchor horror in legible spectacle, where the unseen becomes shown, and ambiguity is replaced by clarity.
Thus, the cursed tape in The Ring is not an enigmatic cultural text but a horrifying document of trauma that visually instructs the audience on what to fear.
Visual Aesthetics and Expressionism:
Visual aesthetics are heightened in The Ring, but perhaps the most notable differences lie in the representation of the victims. In Ringu, their deaths are marked by the facial expressions (Figs. 43–44), but the bodies (even the faces) remain recognisably human and largely unharmed. Horror resides in what is unseen: the moment of death, Sadako’s curse, is never directly visualised.
In contrast, The Ring pushes the spectacle further. Victims’ corpses are grotesquely dehumanised — their faces disfigured, mouths frozen in inhuman screams (Figs. 45–46). Here, horror is not suggested but explicitly shown, consistent with Hollywood’s preference for physical transformation and shock value. At the same time, Verbinski adapts a subtler aesthetic device to “suggest” ominousness: the persistent embedding of square shapes within the mise-en-scène (Figs. 19, 20, 31, 36, 42, 47). The square — the shape of the television screen itself — becomes a visual motif that echoes Samara’s eventual emergence from the TV. By repeating this geometry in windows, rooms, and frames, the film creates a sense that characters are constantly being watched, their lives boxed in by surveillance. This pervasive squareness strengthens the symbolic connection between konoyo (the living world) and anoyo (the dead), foreshadowing Samara’s intrusion into reality through the screen.
A second, equally revealing difference emerges in the treatment of sexuality. Ringu avoids eroticism altogether, keeping Reiko’s character firmly outside the realm of the sexualised female body. This absence is significant: within the Japanese tradition, horror emerges from spiritual unease and social memory rather than from desire. By contrast, Verbinski’s remake injects Eros into the narrative through Naomi Watts (Fig. 47). Shots of her in underwear, shower scenes, and moments of physical vulnerability are framed not simply as character detail but as part of a visual aesthetic that commodifies her image. Watts’ eroticisation also aligns with the Western horror archetype of the ‘final girl’ (Clover, 1992), a trope often embedded in gendered expectations of vulnerability, sexuality, and survival — elements absent from Nakata’s original. This resonates with my own studies in gender and race, where the intersection of vulnerability, sexuality, and spectacle is a recurring theme in Western cinema.
Why is this important? In cinematic theory, Eros represents desire, tension, and attraction — energies that parallel the mechanics of horror itself, which thrives on tension and release. By embedding erotic undertones, Hollywood aligns horror with a broader system of entertainment where pleasure and fear are intertwined. Naomi Watts becomes both a narrative protagonist and a visual commodity: her body is offered to the audience as spectacle, enhancing the film’s marketability and aesthetic appeal.
This emphasis reflects Hollywood’s orientation toward the commodification of images. As Tsai (2008) argues, the remake repackages Japanese horror for Western consumption by translating symbolic elements into accessible, sensational forms. Watts’ eroticisation functions as part of this repackaging: desire (Eros) amplifies horror by increasing the audience’s investment, while also transforming the film into a more bankable product.
By contrast, Ringu’s refusal to eroticise its female lead underscores the cultural difference. For Japanese audiences, fear is not heightened through sexuality but through the spiritual and cultural weight of folklore. Where The Ring layers horror with erotic tension, Ringu preserves its atmosphere of dread by keeping its heroine unsexualised, locating terror in suggestion rather than spectacle.
Conclusion:
Both Ringu and The Ring are shaped by the historical, sociocultural, and aesthetic traditions of their respective cultures. In the Japanese original, ghosts evoke fear precisely because they represent an escape from the material body: they linger in ambiguity, blurring the boundaries between konoyo (the living) and anoyo (the dead), intruding silently upon everyday life (Balmain, 2006). Terror arises from suggestion, silence, and cultural memory. By contrast, in Hollywood’s remake, fear emerges only when ghosts materialise as physical bodies, visibly dehumanised and grotesque, proving their ability to inflict harm. Here, horror is bound to spectacle, transformation, and commodification, aligning with broader Western traditions of narrative clarity and marketable imagery (Wee, 2011; Tsai, 2008).
Ultimately, the same curse manifests differently across borders: Ringu unsettles through its cultural aesthetics of flatness, silence, and folkloric suggestion, while The Ring reinterprets these symbols through depth, spectacle, and eroticised visibility. In doing so, each film reveals not only how horror is constructed but also how fear itself is culturally conditioned, reflecting the values, anxieties, and visual vocabularies of Japan and the United States.
For me, analysing these films has underscored how cinema serves as both a cultural text and a mirror of collective imagination. What began as an academic project has become an enduring fascination with how stories shift across borders, reminding me that even fear itself is never universal, but always shaped by who — and where — we are.
References:
- Balmain, C. (2006). Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.
- Bordwell, D., Thompson, K., & Ashton, J. (1997). Film Art: An Introduction (7th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Nakata, H. (Director). (1998). Ringu [DVD]. Japan: Toho.
- Ross, M. F. (1978). Beyond Metabolism: The New Japanese Architecture. New York: Architectural Record Books, McGraw-Hill Book Company.
- Tsai, P. B. (2008). Horror Translation: From Nakata Hideo’s Ringu to Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. ProQuest.
- Verbinski, G. (Director). (2002). The Ring [DVD]. United States & Japan: DreamWorks Pictures (Sony Pictures).
- Wee, V. (2011). Visual aesthetics and ways of seeing: Comparing Ringu and The Ring. Cinema Journal, 50(2), 41–60.
