2002 was quite an oddball 12 months in the genre, giving us Queen of the Damned, Feardotcom, Red Dragon, Blade II, The Mothman Prophecies, Dog Soldiers, Ghost Ship, Eight Legged Freaks and Brotherhood of the Wolf as well as the films we cover inside.
Some touched on post-9/11 fears – intentionally or not, depending on when they went into production – others signaled the end, or the beginning, of new sub-genres that would ultimately take off. Read on for Shock’s five-part retrospective…
The Ring
By Jeff Allard
There is a timeless quality to the fashions in The Ring (at least they havent dated that much yet), but the technology is another story. And Im not just talking about the extinct VHS format. When Naomi Watts character picks up a roll of film that her deceased niece had dropped off to be developed, for instance, it sticks out. When was the last time anybody dropped off a roll of film? And at one point, Watts is looking up a story about the death of her nieces boyfriend and she flips through a newspaper to find it rather than look it up on her Ipad. In the nieces bedroom, a rack of CDs can be spotted in the background a common sight in 2002 but do many teenagers today own CDs anymore? Its almost as antiquated as seeing a vinyl collection (speaking of antiquated, the idea that anyone who watches Samaras cursed video has to make, and pass on, a VHS dub to save themselves looks especially ancient in a world where videos can instantly go viral with a single click). Its details like these that make The Ring look like the period piece that it is.
The world around these characters might be dated but the narrative still works like a charm. Anytime you have a story that involves a countdown, its an automatic hook for the audience and as seven days slip by, bringing Samaras prophecy of death closer to fulfillment, you cant help but be riveted to seeing how it plays out even when you already know the outcome. There was a lot of doubt in the genre community at the time as to whether a remake of Ringu could work but Verbinski (with the help of screenwriters Ehren Kruger and Scott Frank) made it work. The story and the characters were adapted to an American setting while preserving the ingenious structure of the original.
Released the year after the events of 9/11, The Ring became a sleeper hit in the fall of 2002. The Rings melancholy, mournful atmosphere might well have tapped into our national mood at the time but whether it spoke to specific post-9/11 anxieties or not, its success helped reinforce the fact that horror still had an important part to play in popular entertainment. In the wake of 9/11, it was questioned in some quarters as to whether the public might suddenly prefer their entertainment to be strictly upbeat but the ghostly yarn The Others, which opened before 9/11, found sustained success in the weeks following the tragedy and in 2001. The Ring was a certified sensation, making a mark on American pop culture as profound as Ringu had in its native country, leading to a J-Horror boom on US soil.
