My answer is, a resounding YES! Holy crap, has anybody seen this movie yet? I heard that it was scary, but I didn’t know that I was going to be afraid of my television and VCR and telephone for the rest of my life.
I figure that this movie crossed the line. The way that most people detach themselves from scary movies is to say, “Oh, geez, it’s not like they’re going to come through the television and get me.” Oh no my friend, this girl does come through the fucking television, and then she gets you!
It’s a great movie, the only true scary movie I’ve ever seen. But I never want to see it again, even though I will encourage my friends to see it. I don’t want to be the only one scared shitless.
(Pssst. There are four other threads about The Ring already.)
I wouldn’t say it’s scary per se, but I’d say it’s nice and creepy. Like The Haunting (the real one, not the crappy remake) or The Innocents. Some people in the other threads thought it was overhyped, but I only saw the trailer on TV about three times so all I knew about it was “anyone who watches the video dies”.
I liked it. Lots of nice Washington scenery. (Oh, to live in Washington!) Good, creepy ghost story.
No way. It wasn’t very scary at all. A good movie, yes, and a nice ghost/mystery story, but it had very little going for it to make it scary. I didn’t find it at all scary until the end, but perhaps a steady diet of horror novels since the age of 11 has desensitized me to “scariness” the way people claim that video/tv violence does to little kids. There was a list of the 25 scariest movies of all time given out in a publication for new releases, and I couldn’t fathom people finding a lot of the ones I’d seen, like Rosemary’s Baby to be scary at all, never mind in the top ten of that list. Now Phantoms, with Rose McGown and Ben Afleck, that’s a scary movie, even upon repeat viewings.
<hijack> JohnnyLA What do you hate about the Haunting remake, anyway? I’ve seen the orginal many times, although my copy is titled ** The Haunting Of Hill House** despite what imdb claims the title to be, and I love it. I also like the remake though, despite the fact they eliminated my favorite piece of dialogue, since it actually does have some scary scenes to it, unlike the orginal which is just kind of creepy. The same thing goes for ** House on Haunted Hill**, the remake is much scarier than the orginal version.
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CGI. It seems that filmmakers think that if they use enough CGI, then they don’t actually have to tell a story. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House was made as The Haunting in 1963. No CGI back then. The story was told through lighting, camera angles, good acting, and good directing. In the 1999 version the director has decided that it’s better to be noisy and to show ghosts than to let the audience use their imagination. (I heard something about a kid who saw television for the first time at the 1939 World’s Fair. When asked how television compared to radio, he said, “The pictures aren’t as good.”) The original, 1963, version is a wonderful psychological thriller. The 1999 version lays everything out in the open and destroys the sense of creepiness.
I thought The Ring was a decent movie but it didn’t even seem like it was trying to be all that scary imo, maybe just a bit suspenseful. The only movie that has ever really scared me was tape 1 of Stephen King’s It. Tape 2 sucked.