Cinema is about experience. Films are designed to be seen on towering cinema screens, surrounded by living, physical sound. The images are meant to saturate your vision, fill your vision until you are part of the image, and the image is everything. It's fair to assume then that I don't own many Film DVD's, I'd rather watch episodes of TV shows on DVD as that is the medium they were designed for, Seinfeld, The Wire, NYPD Blue, Buffy-all great small screen entertainment.....but rules are made to be broken and "Ringu" is designed for the small screen.
Now for some scene setting....I used to live in an isolated school house in the middle of nowhere, and one cold frost stricken february weekend our central heating packed in, so hiring a handful of DVD's we took fully dressed to bed as our breath kicked out little patterns in the air. In this dark, cold night I first experienced "Ringu". As my face reddened with a creeping chill the tale of a cursed video tape unfolded, now without getting all "meta" on you what first struck me is by watching it on DVD/Video you almost feel complicit/cursed with our heroes, as they watch the grey grainy images you do too. The film is like a jigsaw, it gives you bits of information but you're unsure about how they fit together-an outcast woman in an isolated community, suggestions of the supernatural but nothing is an explanation, just shadowy shapes in the mist. Nothing is concrete, nothing is explained. American films can't do this, there has to be an explanation. Ringu does explain, but only as far as saying "Goblins", there's an acceptance that the supernatural is an explanation in itself. Now I saw Cloverfield recently and for a while it did attempt to maintain a tension, a kind of "instinctive terror" of the unknown, but it felt the need to reveal far to early. Ringu never succumbs, it builds tension upon tension, building the rising instinctive terror whilst hinting at older folkloric, eldritch terrors and as the cold, snow bitten wind slid through the trees in my garden I understood exactly the terror of the characters. When there is a final reveal of the true nature of the curse (and I've kept it vague deliberately, the power of this film is the power of the unknown, the unseen) it's a release, the tension that has been tightened throughout the film finally overcomes you and escapes in fear, terror, panic: This is no American happy ending, it's like opening the door to find out what the strange sound is and finding something terrifying and unwordly there-No explanations, no heroes just 6000 years of human fear of the unknown in no more than 30 seconds of film. As the film ended it felt like the temperature had dropped even further, that the cold creeping terror of the characters had saturated the room, and as our breath crystallised in the air, we watched the TV break into snow, a cold fearsome presence in the corner of the room. Film has to be an experience, Ringu is an experience you will never forget.
2 comments:
Brilliant. I remember you on the train after this looking haunted and not at all happy, saying you were never watching tv again. And then you watched the sequel and decided you couldn't use any electrical appliances at all. And I completely agree - how we watch stuff really matters, and I think you got the setting for this one just about perfect.
It did genuinely scare the crap out of me, and still does! and I do think if I watched it in a cinema it wouldn't have the same awesome power. It's a truly haunting film in the best sense of the word! To be fair though the fact I had to sleep in my coat probably added to the haunted look
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