Pepper Mill and I saw this over the weekend, and we were sorely disappointed. The “coming-out” scene, which was supposed to be horrifying (and apparently was to some folks on the Board) had us shouting “Oh, Come On!” and turning away in disgust.
Things just don’t hang together, the reasoning is frequently unreasonable (“This picture is shot right into the mirror – you can’t do that, it’s impossible.” Yeah, then how was The Ring made? People have been shooting right into mirrors ever since cinema started, often by building a duplicate room behind the mirror – see Reuben Mamoulian’s Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde, or the extended version of Terminator 2. A videotape expert would know this. Besides, it’s exactly the kind of cheap special effect that would show up in a “student film”). And spooky tjhings usually happen not in line with the internal logic of the story, but just so they’ll look creepy.
In the end I have to wonder why the creepy girl needs to have living people do things for her – she seems able to manipulate the real world perfectly well on her own (making phone calls, undoing screws and bolts, pushing the heavy lid of the well back in place (it had fallen onto the ground, remember!). What the hell was the point?
Just out of curiosity…why? It IS a frightening image. Was it just pulled off wrong in your opinion, was it too grotesque (“turning away in disgust”), or what? The thought of watching some creepy chick on my television suddenly step out of the t.v. and directly into my room is a pretty frightening image. What about it didn’t work for/bothere you?
Nope – we didn’t hear or read anything about it in advance. We turned away in disgust not because it seemed grotesque, but because it seemed unbelievably stupid.
In any movie, if you lose that precious suspension of disbelief, you’ve lost the audience. And its doubly true in a horror film. We just didn’t buy it at all.
Well, then they probably already lost you an hour or so earlier when the fly came out of the screen, too. I thought it was just eerie and creepy, and I wasn’t thinking about how it isn’t scientifically possible for an image to come out of the TV screen into the physical world. The physical world doesn’t apply–which admittedly is the chief “cheap” tactic applied to supernatural thrillers. But if you don’t like such tactics, you’re just watching the wrong kind of movie for your tastes.
As for. . .
. . .you obviously weren’t paying attention. She could only manipulate things that were in her close proximity (that’s why they put her out in the barn, to distance her from the mother she was driving insane). All of the things you mention that were manipulated were in the room above the well (except for the phones that would ring when someone watched the tape, and I would say that this was accomplished because there was a phone or phone lines in or near cabin 12 that she could manipulate). The better question to ask would be what would happen to the phone warning now that they’ve buried her somewhere where there probably isn’t a phone nearby? Unless her spirit is still attached to the well, that is.
I also laughed out loud at the horse suicide. This prompted horrified glances from those around me at how I could laugh at this, but I was slapping my knees. It was a hoot.
"You weren’t supposed to help her, says the boy. And it’s horrible that they helped her becase… well, because…
well, it didn’t really change anything that they helped her, did it?
She’s still off damning people after seven days, just as if they hadn’t done anything.
While I liked the movie a great deal, this part didn’t scare me in the least, and I was suprised to read how much it freaked most people out. Granted, it was a little jarring after I’d been scared to death by other parts of the movie, but taken on its own it wasn’t that bad, and I saw it coming a mile away.
I think it would have been scarrier had she stayed in the TV, myself. When I saw this scene I thought of how they showed the alien at the end of Signs - sometimes I just don’t need to see the monster up close.
The whole “You weren’t supposed to help her” line was just there for dramatic effect. When the little boy says that and his nose starts bleeding, it’s a big “Holy F*#K” moment, but it doesn’t mean anything. The standard belief in “ghost busting” if you will, is that if an angry spirit is around due to an unjust/unpunished/forgotten death, finding the body helps release the spirit and it can move on. Accordingly, Samara should have been appeased that the truth of her death was revealed and she should have stopped. That line was there to help set the mood for the upcoming scene, and I think it worked really well. But you’re right, setting her free didn’t do jack in terms of making her stronger or anything like that.
And I still am just baffled as to how you can’t find her climbing out of the television scary. As troub said, I have a feeling you weren’t really willing to give this movie a shot if you’re complaining about ghosts not being hindered by the laws of the physical world. They’re not. They shouldn’t be. It’s like getting pissed at the movie Ghost Busters because Slimmer passes threw walls without busting big holes in them. If you’re willing to suspend your belief and go along with the story of a tape that will curse you and kill you within seven days because it was created by an angry spirit, how can you suddenly find the fact that said spirit comes at you through the television “fake”?
So, just out of curiosity, what kind of things DO scare you? Because personally, even if it wasn’t some super creepy little psycho ghost child, if ANY image wandered out of my television set and into my living room, I’d shit my pants.
I’d agree with that–I would have found it more effective if Creepy Girl had just wandered up in jerky leaps to close-up on her face just in back of the screen, let the hair partially uncover not in a sudden leap to her dead fisheye but to simply a slow smile, and had Mr. Deadmeat’s screams simply choke off to silence offscreen.
Horror films need to stop showing things right in front of the camera, dagnabbit.
But all in all, I thought it did a fine job of maintaining a great atmosphere, far better than most horror films do (though less so than others).
Actually, the fly was well done, and didn’t bother me at all with its supernaturalism – heck, it’s a horror movie. I like supernatural and horror movies, and the whole point is usually that it defeats uyour expectations of the way the universe works. But the fly was just a fly that was suddenly on the wrong side of the screen, alive. You didn’t see it morphing its way through, or glowing wirth strobing and raster-scanning like the image of the girl.
My point is that the girl-coming-out-of-the-screen simply did not work for Pepper and I. Instead of being a terrifying moment, we found it profoundly silly. That’s not something that you rationalize about, either – something either works, or it doesn’t. It’s no use telling me that I should be scared by it. If I’m not, I’m not.
It probably doesn’t help that the image of something coming through a TV screen is by no means a new one in my life, and when I’ve seen it before, it’s generally been played for laughs.
Another point is that explicit special effects for something serious and/or scary typically hasn’t worked in cinema. The fly, recall, made the transition without f/x or a strange appearance. When Dracula changed into a bat, it was suggested, not shown – at least until Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a comedy – where it was shown in all its animated glory. Ladyhawke similarly avoided showing you the transformations, simply suggesting them. Showing something coming out of your TV screen with a halo of color around the interface works in The Last Action Hero, but not in something that’s supposed to scare the bejeezus out of me,.
Maybe it’s just me, but I was really waiting for something like the boy’s line about not helping her. It seemed pretty clear that the movie wasn’t ending after the little girl had been helped, so the “twist” ending came off really telegraphed. I liked the movie, but I thought it a bit of a mess plotwise. The Sixth Sense was done much better.
Now this, I agree with. I’m one of those people who saw the Japanese version first, and when I saw this scene in the American remake, I was rather dissapointed. Aside from the cut away car chase scene in the middle, I hated the way they tried to make Samara look like a televised image with her “signal” cutting out every now and again. Her little teleportation bit was good for a startle, but all of that really disuaded the impact of it. In the Japanese version, there’s none of that. No flashy outline, no “signal jumping,” no teleporting…just some creepy girl crawling out of the screen, stumbling forward with incredibly awkward, jerky body movement, and then a close up of a single bloodshot eye. MUCH more powerful. her coming through the television was seamless, as though she just walked through a window instead of a screen, and when she was there, she was there, not just “projected”. She was solid. The American version really botched this, in my opinion. It’s still a powerful shot, and I think works a hell of a lot better than if she would have stayed in the television, but I can see where you’d be offset. I don’t mean to tell you “You’re wrong, it is scary you poopyhead,” because you’re right, it is all subjective. It’s just that when I saw it happen originally, it creeped me out, and everyone I’ve seen it with was equally freaked, so the fact there’s someone out there saying “Yeah…not so much” just kinda gets me.
But then again, there are those people who don’t find The Exorcist scary, so who knows?
I’ve been on the other side of this, too. Apparently when Jason and the Argonauts came out, a lot of audiences responded to the “fight-with-the-skeletons” scene by laughing. I think it’s a jaw-dropping piece of superb dimensional animation (so do a lot of other folks – see Spy Kids 2, for instance), but some people just had this weird reaction that I’m hard pressed to understand.
I agree with this, the Japanese version handled this scene much better. In addition to what Elvis pointed out, the Japanese guy’s apartment is a hell of a lot smaller than the American guy’s loft, so you get added claustrophobia involved. The loft had so much space that when I saw it I was thinking “well, why not run away?” whereas you couldn’t say that in the Japanese version, even if he was closer to the door.
Also, I thought Sadako was innately more scary than Samara, because 1) she didn’t get as much screen time (which probably isn’t saying much, horror works best with unknown danger), 2) she never talked or did anything you could call communicating other than grabbing Our Heroine in the psychic-flashback sequence, and 3) she seemed older and bigger, meaning if she was pissed and powerful, that power she had would have been more “mature” and more fully-realised than the ~12 year old samara. And as for the jerky walk in the scene above, Sadako did it a bajillion times better.
On the whole I thought the American version was pretty close to the original in quality. But the Japanese version had a much greater air of dread permeating the film while the American version came off as too sanitized in the “filler” scenes. I’ll admit that this may be due to the fact that I had seen the Japanese version first so I knew what was coming up, but I also thought that the use of sound in Ringu caused some kind of imbalance in me as I watched. Starting out it seemed like the sound was rather poor, but as this continued throughout the film, it became apparent that it wasn’t necessarily poor sound, it was that the sound was somehow “off,” like they wanted it that way. Am I the only one who noticed that? Or do I need new speakers?
Personally, I think the “You weren’t supposed to help her” line detracts from the shock/surprise of the ending.
In the Japanese version, you’re led to believe that the ‘rescue’ of Sadako has lifted the curse, the kid’s going to live, and everyone’s going to have a happy ending. I was starting to roll my eyes at this point, since it seemed like a cheesy, disappointing way to wrap up what had been a pretty good film. The ending sequence came as a complete surprise in comparison to what had happened before.
What made the ending work, I think, was that the fear throughout the parents’ investigation was centered around Sadako herself, not the tape, the ring or anything else. She wasn’t an unwitting conduit for freaky shit, she was the big, bad mama herself, and she wanted people dead. When you saw that second hand come out of the well and realized the video wasn’t going to stop as it had before, there was no question of what she wanted: someone was in deep shit. At that point, almost anything she did was going to make an impression.
The problem is that the ending relied very heavily on suprise. Once you’d seen the movie (or heard about the ending), the surprise was gone, and the ending lost most of its impact.
Incidentally, one of the variety shows here just had on Rie Inou (Sadako) in her costume. They also tracked down the actor (male) who was used for the part of Sadako’s eye.
Just a little something I noticed that I don’t think hgas been brought up (American version only…I haven’t seen the Japanese version):
The flaming tree on the ridge appeared, from my brief glimpse at it, to be a Japanese maple. I didn’t pause the film or anything to take a look at it, but that was my impression.
Playful, yes?
Well, what is the botanical term for the winged fruit a maple produces?
I hate to be picky, but in the very beginning when she comes to pick her weird kid up at school and the teacher tries to talk to her…
She was acting as if nothing had happened yet 3 days earlier her 16 year old niece was found IN A CLOSET with her face distorted and very dead. Yet she acts as if nothing was wrong and it was just another day at work.
She would not even have been at work and her kid wouldn’t be at school. She would have been with her sister helping her.
Then she starts talking to that horse on the ferry as if nothing weird had happened and when it starts freaking out she doesnt just get away from it.
Then when she shows her boyfriend the tape and the phone rings, why didnt she say “now there will be a voice on the phone” to convince him of what happened to her? She doesnt answer it or say why she isnt answering it.
To me that is just playing us for idiots. Make it realistic and have them act like real people would really act.
And the bit that he wouldn’t even be a father to his kid. what the hell was that?
But I liked the photography and music, and I liked the scene of her coming out of that screen.
But writers, producers, directors, please don’t insult our intelligence with some reality, some huge plot holes where the characters aren’t real.
I am a total wussy when it comes to scary movies. I mean, I have had nightmares about trailers, for God’s sake (the movie previews, not the mobile homes).
So I probably won’t be seeing this movie, ever. Or at least not until the baby always sleeps through the night, because I do a lot of wandering around my house at night. I can just imagine flasjing to some horribly creepy moment and freaking out. Yes, I am afraid of the dark in my own house.
I have always loved scary books and movies, which is funny because then I am freaked out for years in some cases. Just the other night, I was putting the baby back down at about 3:00 am and had a thought about that scene in The Changeling where the old-fashioned wheelchair spins around and chases that guy! Aaaauuuggghhh! I scared the shit out of myself! And surreal things can scare me too.
I have DVDs of Frailty and The Exorcist that I haven’t even wrestled out of the packaging.