Sadako's Twin: The Ring - by Wren Roberts
The last time I talked about ghosts, we talked about Ringu’s Sadako. The one, the only, the icon. The ghost known by lay people. She’s so quintessential she even made a brief appearance in the beloved original David S. Pumpkins SNL sketch.
Except she’s not the one and only.
Because there’s also Samara, the ghost from the 2002 American remake The Ring. It’s pretty likely that most westerners are actually recognizing Samara when they see either of them. The two of them are almost identical in styling. I’ll have more to say about that later.
Ringu and The Ring are, on the surface, the same movie. One is Japanese and set in Japan. The other is American and set in America. But they are not the same movie. They share the same basic plot points and structure, but where Ringu stays tight with its story, The Ring tries to ramp up the tension and terror by giving Samara more of a backstory. And it also spends a lot of time killing some horses because a little animal cruelty is sure to unnerve most people. Spoiler: There’s a lot of horses drowning themselves in this movie. And as the sister of a tried and true Horse Girl, it’s unsettling.
But that’s not really about Samara.
I’d argue The Ring is a scarier movie than Ringu, in part because it’s got more going on in it. Yet Samara is a less scary version of Sadako. There’s just something about her presentation that isn’t quite it.
I’m getting nit-picky here, but I really don’t like Samara’s posture. Sadako stands mostly upright, which makes it harder to visually comprehend what is going on with her head and hair. How much her hair obscures her face doesn’t make sense, and therefore she reads as being a little more uncanny.
Meanwhile, Samara is slightly more hunched, which gives the impression that her hair is hanging naturally in front of her. Still creepy, but it visually matches with reality.
She also moves a lot faster. There’s less time to linger on the question if she’s really coming for you. She, undoubtedly, is.
Whereas Sadako shambles. She’s not in a hurry. She already knows that her victims will succumb to her, and her slow walk almost seduces them into watch her approach. Her slow crawl across the floor builds tension, suggests you might outrun her.
Samara comes quickly. She glitches forward in space as the video tape skips. She charges out of the TV and crawls across the floor at speed. She makes you try to run because, baby, she’s coming for you.
Is this personal preference? I’m sure some of it is. But I don’t think all of it is. Samara is the standard villain coming at you. She doesn’t need to be studied to be comprehended. She’s the boogey man. She’s the killer. She behaves like the Big Bad Monster after her final reveal, and nothing more needs to be considered.
She looks the way she does because Sadako looks that way. She moves the way she does because this is an American horror film, and our monsters overtake us through speed and strength and some kind magic serial killer dust.
Sadako looks the way she does because she’s rooted in Japanese folklore. She’s become a yūrei through the tragedy of her own story and her own need for revenge. If she hadn’t become a yūrei, she wouldn’t look that way. Her visual presentation has meaning and history, which was lost on Samara’s translation.
Ringu is folk horror. That story is steeped in folklore, isolation, and specificity of place. The Ring is bastardized folk horror, falling apart because those crucial pieces couldn’t be fully realized in a different location and culture.
That doesn’t make The Ring a bad film. It’s a modern classic. It just doesn’t fully meet the promises that the original made. It couldn’t.
Which is why it had to drown so many horses to make it make sense. It’s why Samara needed more of a story. There is no shorthand or history to understand why she’s there. Her ghostly presence needs to be explained.
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