Rings is upon us, 12 years after The Ring Two. The third film in The Ring franchise offers a new twist on the spooky girl Samara, whose spirit comes forth from a well to kill people a week after they have viewed her spectral videotape. This time a young woman seeks to save her boyfriend from the curse and finds there is a terrifying hidden movie within the movie. It also marks director Gore Verbinski’s return to the series since 2002’s The Ring.
To celebrate all of this shivery goodness, let's revisit the most intense moments from the Ring franchise along with its original Japanese counterpart, Ringu. For those of you who have seen few if any of these films, spoilers abound below.
1. THE RING (2002)
Many American remakes of Asian horror in the last decade were pale imitations of the originals, but Verbinski’s The Ring broke new ground. After her teenage niece dies of heart failure, a journalist named Rachel (Naomi Watts) discovers that she watched a cursed videotape that killed her and her friends exactly a week later. The brief but indelible scare below comes when Rachel's sister recalls finding her daughter's body in the closet.
2. THE RING (2002)
After Rachel, her ex-boyfriend Noah and their young, psychically sensitive son Aidan are exposed to the videotape, the estranged couple sets on a quest to track down its origin and put a stop to the curse. But despite finding Samara's body and revealing her horrible death to the world, she is still a threat, as this climactic scene reveals. It is one of the most famous horror-movie sequences of all time.
3. THE RING TWO (2005)
Leaving their life in Seattle behind them, Rachel and Aidan start anew in a small Oregon town, but local teen deaths prove that Samara's curse has followed them. Rachel comes to the shocking realization that they are not safe. In this creepy sequence, as she takes Aidan home from school a group of deer, either sensing or lured in by the evil spirit of Samara, attack their car.
4. THE RING TWO (2005)
At the climax of the sequel (which was helmed by original Ringu director Hideo Nakata), Rachel realizes that Samara will keep coming for Aidan unless she takes her on directly. Rachel allows the evil spirit to pull her through the TV into her realm, which sets off an eerie race up the side of the well.
5. RINGU
In the 1998 Japanese original, journalist Reiko Asakawa teams up with her psychically sensitive ex-husband Ryuji Takayama to solve the mystery of Sadako's curse. In this early scene before their mission starts, she watches video of one of her niece's friends recorded when her corpse is discovered, with her face contorted into a look of sheer terror.
6. RINGU
To be fair, the ending of the original Japanese version is just as horrific as the American one.
7. RASEN
The underwhelming first Japanese sequel Rasen, released at the same time as Ringu, did not perform well, leading producers to make the more "official" follow-up, Ringu 2, which replaced the timeline and events. It’s not without its tense, freaky moments though. Here, a dead Ryuji awakens during his autopsy, shocking the pathologist who’s just opened him up. (Fast-forward to around the seven-minute mark.)
8. RINGU 2
In the more accepted sequel to Ringu, Mai starts her own investigation into Ryuji's death. Her quest leads her to a mental hospital where a friend of one of Sadako's victims is locked up and is afraid to look at any televisions. But she just happens to do so when Mai visits and her mind projects a snippet of the cursed videotape onto the screen, inciting paroxysms of fear in the other patients.
9. RINGU 2
Mai visits the original home of Sadako and witnesses a creepy replay of part of the videotape in one room. Then she realizes that the ghost of Sadako's mother can see her.
10. RINGU 0
In this 2000 Japanese prequel, we learn about Sadako's life before she was thrown down the well. She was actually a shy, misunderstood drama student (albeit with psychic powers) whose peers did not know about the fatal incident at her mother's ESP demonstration (seen in Ringu). But by the end her theater troupe, egged on by the embittered, widowed wife of one of Sadako's victims, turns on her, only to discover that there are actually two Sadakos, one good and one bad. Their merger at the end explains where that spooky spider walk could come from.
11. SADAKO 3D
In this opportunistic 3D revival from 2012, an angry artist seeks revenge on his critics by committing public suicide online so he can resurrect the spirit of Sadako to reach out to living souls through the Internet. Her goal is to possess a human body and come back to life. It's a silly concept (which somehow merited a sequel), and the boldest shock in the movie does not feature the long-haired creepster herself, rather a surprise that a detective gets when visiting the apartment of the deceased artist.
Rings comes to theaters February 3.
