THE RING COMPANION

Okay - not a graphic novel review this week, but a review of a non-fiction book analysing the whole ‘Ring’ horror movie series, as well as Japanese and Western horror fiction. I was sent this book to review in my capacity as a reviewer for the website UGO, but UGO never ended up using the review (yeah, that happens a lot - and probably gets publishers annoyed at me, thinking I never reviewed their book!) So I figure, ‘oh, heck, might as well use it here as the subject matter should be of interest to P&D fans.’
      The Ring mini-phenomenon has crossed multiple mediums and a few oceans, proliferating like the cursed video the story itself revolves around. It began in Japan as a modest novel by Koji Suzuki, was turned into a successful Japanese TV movie, which led to a hit Japanese feature film - and from there, spawned sequels, TV mini-series, manga comics, and foreign film adaptations - including both Korean and American (the latter, starring Naomi Watts, is probably most familiar to North American audiences). And, according to author Denis Meikle, revitalized the entire Asian horror film industry.
      And now the whole thing is rounded up for analysis in Denis Meikle's comprehensive The Ring Companion, from Titan Books.
      I'll admit, going into this book, my interest in the Ring was casual at best. I'd seen the Japanese version and then the American version - and, yes, the Japanese version is more effective. Nor do I say that as simply some knee jerk pretention, or 'cause I like to diss Hollywood - I don't. I just thought it was better (but I saw the Japanese one first, so maybe it had the advantage of seeming fresher). But my interest didn't really spread beyond an evening's entertainment.
      Yet I found myself enjoying The Ring Companion. When it comes to interviews and the like, Meikle hasn't done much in the way of original research, usually pulling quotes from interviews conducted by others. But he's clearly done his homework. Not only having watched the Ring in all its incarnations, and read just about every interview ever conducted with those involved (from Suzuki, to feature film director Hideo Nakata, to those involved in the American version) but also by delving into the history of Japanese, British and American horror, in print and film, going all the way back to MR James, HP Lovecraft and European-born Japanese anthologist Patrick Lafcadio Hearn for antecedents. As well, he considers Japanese society and culture as it has evolved over the last Century and some. In other words, if you're really into the Ring, you'll get a lot out of this book. But if you aren't into the Ring...you still might get a lot out of this book, as simply an analysis of Japan and of the last century and some of horror entertainment (or ‘Terror’ as Meikle calls it, distinguishing it from the more crass ‘horror’ genre).
      According to Meikle, the saga of the Ring has evolved from medium to medium, sequel to sequel, each one borrowing selectively from earlier incarnations. Suzuki's original novel, though paranormal, clearly owed something to being more a techno-thriller, a direction the author further went in when he wrote his own sequels to the first book, and his Sadako (the lethal presence at the core of things) is less deliberately evil. It was the 1998 feature film that established Sadako as a clear villain, and emphasized the supernatural over the paranormal. But Meikle shows how each version, movie, TV show, comic, from Japan, to Korea, to Hollywood has added to, and borrowed from, the evolving mythos.
      As part of reviewing this non-fiction book, I went out and read the original novel - and it's sort of interesting. Like so many things, there are ways where the movies are an improvement (more viscerally scary, as opposed to the novel which can be more academic, a mystery-puzzle more than a fright fest) but there are other ways where the novel is more intriguing, more complex than the movies.
      Meikle clearly really, really digs the 1998 Japanese movie version of the Ring (generally called Ringu) - claiming that ‘not since the Exorcist has a single horror film had so much impact on the genre’. But he doesn't bring a slavishly sycophantic eye to all its interpretations, more than willing to critically dissect versions he feels are wanting - including the source novel itself - or, in the case of the Hollywood remake, out right attack it. On one hand, that gives the book a greater weight and depth than if it was just some studio sanctioned puff piece...on the other hand, given that a large chunk of his potential readership will presumably come to this book from the American remake, one suspects he might alienate the very readers he's hoping to sell to.
      At the same time, he tries to back up his critiques with thoughtful analysis - you can agree or disagree with him, but at least he offers grist for the intellectual mill.
      As noted, of particular interest is the fact that a lot of the book analyses ‘terror’ fiction above and beyond the Ring, placing the movie in its cultural context - from 19th Century literature to the horror cinema of the 20th Century, in both the East and the West...including the big guy himself, Godzilla (and yes, the 2000 Japanese version was way cooler than the 1998 American version), creating a real scope to the book and Meikle's analysis.
      Granted, one can quibble and suggest Meikle sometimes argues points that he hasn't entirely justified. With the success of the Ring, Asian cinema started churning out many like-minded Terror films and even Meikle seems to evince a certain ambivalence to some (often arguing they start out well...but go off the rails before the climax). Yet that doesn't stop him, toward the end, from launching into a predictable tirade about Hollywood's creative bankruptcy and Asian cinema's creative vitality. And some of his exploration of themes stretch a bit, whether it be seeing in Sadako a metaphor for Islamic terrorists who transmit messages through the media, to inferring a xenophobic sub-text to the American remake. But at least it's interesting that he's trying to extract meaning from what, so easily, could be dismissed as just another low-budget shocker.
      And although he has tracked down and viewed all extant versions of the Ring (from the original TV movie to its various sequels and spin offs) one suspects Meikle doesn't speak Japanese and must rely on translated versions, as he makes passing reference to a radio adaptation...but provides no analysis (radio being one medium resistant to subtitles!) How wildly circulated these various versions are in the west is also unclear. For example, the original TV movie (and even moreso its subsequent video release) apparently featured - gasp! - nudity, which might give it a cult appeal among western Ring fans (purely for comparative purposes, y'unnerstand). Meikle even provides a couple of illustrative stills to demonstrate that fact in his book!
      I'll confess, the Ring didn't have quite the profound affect on me that it did Meikle - but reading The Ring Companion, his enthusiasm is quite infectious, and the comprehensiveness scope of his analyses - so far beyond just talking about a single movie - is entertaining, making for an intriguing read.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            --DK Latta, Pulp and Dagger

This summer saw the disappointing release of The Ring Two, Dreamworks' obligatory sequel to their lucrative remake of the Japanese horror film Ring. As we cast a reflective glance back over the past year's cinema releases, perhaps its greatest significance was in its staggering insignificance within the cycle. This was supernatural horror of the lowest, most forgettable order.
      Its main point of interest was that it represented the Hollywood debut of Hideo Nakata, the man who had so assuredly helmed the original, and the pre-release promo puff was quick to make capital of his return to the franchise with which he had made his name (after the originally-touted director Noam Murro departed from the producers under somewhat acrimonious circumstances). However, while Ring Three has apparently been announced, The Ring Two's main legacy will no doubt prove to be, should the series continue along the same lines as other long-running horror cycles like Friday the 13th or Hellraiser, that it provides a convenient marker point before which terminal boredom sets in with audiences for whom, in this brave new digital age, the concept of a cursed VHS tape seems more than a little anachronistic. To these eyes at least, the Ring cycle has come full circle.
      For a director who had long expressed some degree of antipathy towards the horror genre, it must have been particularly depressing for his US break-through to have provided such a sense of déjà vu. It would be difficult to place the failure of Ring Two on the shoulders of its director: on a sheer technical level, Ring Two is not such a departure from the consistently high quality of Nakata's Japanese work. Broodingly atmospheric and providing a few significant scares along the way, it is let down by an idiotic script by Ehren Kruger (Scream 3, The Brothers Grimm), which ignored everything that had made the original so effective. Far worse, it also plundered ideas from one of Nakata's previous films, Dark Water (Honogurai Mizu no Soko kara, 2002), making the implicit maternal guilt subtext explicit along the way. That Dark Water had already just suffered from a lacklustre Hollywood makeover at the hands of Brazilian director Walter Salles didn't help its cause either.
      In a franchise that in Japan already counted a Fuji Television-produced TV movie directed by Chisui Takagawa in 1995; Nakata's remarkable original and the film it originally was paired with on a double bill - Joji "George" Iida's Spiral (Rasen) in 1998, an adaptation of Koji Suzuki's second novel in the series (which had been published in 1995); two official movie sequels - Ring 2 (1999) and Ring 0: Birthday (2000); the Korean remake, Ring Virus (1999); a TV series of Spiral (1999); a further TV series named Ring: The Final Chapter (Ringu: Saishu-sho, 1999); manga adaptations of all the original stories; Suzuki's final, as yet unadapted third novel Loop (1998), AND his compendium of related short stories The Birthday (1999) - all before the American remake rights had been snapped up, The Ring Two might just as well have been titled The Ring, Too.
      As can be seen from the above list, the heady brew of pseudo-science and the supernatural that marked out Koji Suzuki's original novel, published in 1991, provided plenty of rich pickings for its adapters to spin out the material in all manner of directions. Many of its ideas were either merged, extrapolated or spun out into new and increasingly fantastical directions, and this goes as much for Suzuki's own literary follow-ups too. But it was Nakata's deftly effective envisioning of THAT famous scene that sent the chain of hushed whispers across a rapidly expanding global fanbase, and nothing else connected with the series has ever matched it.
      Though Gore Verbinsky's 2001 remake made more money at the box office, both in Japan and elsewhere across the world, in terms of takings as a ratio of original budget, the Asmik Ace-produced original was by far the most profitable. Its internet-driven word-of-mouth sleeper success proved far more efficient than the high-investment, safe-returns marketing methods of Hollywood, where the gap between shooting and market saturation on supermarket sell-thru is now well under a year. Like The Blair Witch Project, however, such marketing methods are difficult to replicate, and as such, Ring's triumph is as much related to the time and circumstances of its original release as to its own merits.
      In fact, the short-lived J-horror boom which the original Ring spawned was already well over by the end of the millennium, before the momentary resurgence of interest generated by Verbinsky's remake and the synchronous arrival of Takashi Shimizu's Juon in 2001. In the meantime, further Ring-inspired offerings from Korea and Hong Kong have ensured that Asia is now seen as a fertile breeding ground for a more classical breed of terror that has long been forgotten in the West. And still the faceless, lank-haired figure of Sadako imprints itself on the popular imagination; I even saw a similar image popping up in a trailer for a new Russian adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's The Viy recently.
      One might have thought that by this late stage everything that there is to say about the Ring and its associate phenomena has been said - at least on the internet and in the popular film press. Certainly the string of recent Japanese horror releases that have followed along the same lines seems to have reached something of a crisis point, bringing little more to the table for discussion. For this reason, and those others stated above, 2005 seems a particularly propitious time to go back and sum up the full legacy of the Ring films and books.
      Denis Meikle's The Ring Companion does just this, and a more thorough tome one couldn't wish for. In no way a promotional tie-in for the latest American addition to the cycle - the author is quick to point out his reservations with the Dreamworks films - it looks at the inspiration behind Suzuki's influential novel, as well as giving full summaries of all of the titles already mentioned that emerged after its publication, how they differ from their source, and the curious manner in which they lead on or diverge from the previous versions. But it also includes much more.
      In my review of the ponderous collection of essays that made up the academically-pitched Japanese Horror Cinema book, I mentioned that, in book form at least, a full (and accurate!) overview of the traditions and precedents of the recent J-horror boom has yet to be written. To be honest, I really wasn't expecting The Ring Companion to deliver the goods, but it has to be said that chapter three's history of Japanese fantasy cinema is the most complete I've seen in print to date, even going so far as to cover in some depth the only tenuously-related field of the Godzilla-led kaiju eiga sub-genre. There's a few minor omissions in it: I've yet to see anywhere in Western writing any recognition of the ranks of low-budget horror titles that Daei put out in the early 1960s, though this is chiefly because of their invisibility on Western shelves. Also, Jun Ichikawa's No Life King (No Raifu Kingu, 1989) a tale about the urban legend surrounding a cursed video game remains a curiously-overlooked antecedent to Sadako's videotape. And I still remain bewildered as to why Nikkatsu's Angel Guts series finds itself so often lumped within the timeline of Japanese horror cinema, being that, while perhaps contemporaneous with the nasty low-budget rape-and-revenge thrillers of Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave that find themselves discussed in the context of the evolution of US horror, they would never be considered as such in Japan, instead existing within a different pre-existing domestic tradition of softcore sex movies. Still, these are but minor gripes in what is generally a surprisingly in-depth and well-researched overview.
      Going way beyond its brief, The Ring Companion also takes a look at the Western literary tradition of the ghost story, as practised by authors such as MR James and HP Lovecraft, and the numerous ways in which the supernatural has found itself worked into European and American film. This is all crucial background, for in literature as much as in cinema, Japanese genre fiction has always benefited from this cross-fertilization between its own myth and folklore and that of outside. Nakata himself was quick to admit the influences foreign titles like The Haunting and Poltergeist had on his seminal version of Ring.
      Meikle is never shy of providing his opinions on any of the films under discussion (though this is all counterpointed with excerpts from contemporary reviews from Western sources such as Variety), and his touting of Asia's ability to produce innovative and inspiring new riffs on the genre where Hollywood has failed might seem a little too gushing. Still, reservations about the forceful championing of his own tastes aside, The Ring Companion is far more than just a cash-in on a high-profile movie franchise, casting its net far and wide in its attempt at bringing together all the disparate elements connected with the phenomenon. Providing more info on the works in question than one could ever hope for, until such time as Japanese horror finds a new direction, it is going to take a very diligent researcher to top it.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          --Jasper Sharp, Midnight Eye