For the entirety of its first half, Ring is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, in the company of The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, The Haunting. A videotape is on the loose, its popularity slowly spreading throughout Japan. Whoever watches will mysteriously drop dead one week later. Quite a tasty concept from original Ring novelist Koji Suzuki, weaving together the creepy strands of snuff movie, urban myth, and Bloody Mary pajama-party game.

When intrepid TV reporter Reiko (TV drama idol Nanako Matsushima) and her ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki "Duke" Sanada, man was he ever great in Message from Space) track down a copy, they sit down and make you watch it too. It's like that wonderful trick that Terrance Fisher used in that old Hammer movie The Devil Rides Out. Whenever something horrible happens, Christopher Lee begs you not to look at what's happening on the screen: it'll be the death of you. But you can't help it.

Ring's haunted tape is a collection of disassociated visual clues and lost-and-found images. There's a water well somewhere. There's someone with a white cloth over their head. There are words that float by themselves on the surface of a newspaper. There's a woman looking in a mirror. Nothing so odd about these things in of themselves, but the brain can't tie them together in any sort of coherent fashion. And of course it dearly wants to. And of course merely watching all of this will make you drop dead seven fateful days later.

Having both been cursed and now needing a cure, Duke and Reiko start to get down to the nitty-gritty. From there The Ring becomes a mystery film, the protagonists trying to bring order to the unexplainable. They uncover the sad story of an angry girl named Sadako and her very bad father, a doctor named Ikuma. The possibilities, so endless and nameless when first introduced in the form of the video, begin to shrink.

Amazing, then, that interest isn't lost. The saga of Ryuji and Reiko, a divorced couple, has plenty of drama to run on, and the burgeoning Sadako mythology has its own rewards. It's fascinating to see the traditional ghost story retransmitted through video signals and television screens. But, to its detriment, the movie assumes a working knowledge of things that would only be apparent to someone who's read the novel.

But forget for a while the details. Relish Ring's primal scene of terror, a point of no return, a lidless eye from where modern Japanese horror has sprung.

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