In the Flesh: The Ring (2002)

“Very student film,” Noah (Martin Henderson) quips upon seeing the haunted tape at the heart of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. He’s right, in a way. Like the darkly prophetic scribblings created by Noah’s eight-year-old son, Aiden (David Dorfman), the tape is the work of a child. It’s a child’s attempt to make sense of things beyond her comprehension, to express her feelings over her betrayal and murder by her adoptive mother, her neglect by her adoptive father, her institutionalization and torture via isolation. Squirming maggots become swimmers in fractal formations. A dead horse bobs in the receding tide. Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran) brushes her hair in an ornate silver mirror. These are the same images the young Samara (Daveigh Chase) burned into the minds of her adoptive parents with her uncontrolled psychic abilities, a combination of apparently random memories, recollections of acutely stressful or upsetting images, and even pleasant sensory memories. A comb gliding smoothly through hair. 

That Samara is sadistic is clear, but what young child isn’t? Every toddler eventually screams, “I hate you” at their beloved parent, knowing it will hurt, wanting to leverage what little power they have in an inherently unbalanced relationship. What The Ring presupposes is that there is power behind that impulse, that Samara can punish her father, Richard (Brian Cox), for caring more about his beloved horses than he does about her, that she can even torment the horses themselves. “She’ll never whisper in my ear again,” snaps Richard in the moment before he electrocutes himself to death. It’s this unsolvable problem that makes The Ring so enduringly powerful. What do you do with a child who holds power over others? You can feel the Morgans’ desperation and fear, their inability to check their adopted child except through the unthinkable act of infanticide.

Verbinski draws on both the original Ringu and, more subtly, on the 1980 Canadian horror classic The Changeling to illustrate these fearsome emotional and social quandaries. We see the antipathy of the once-loving parent toward a child who proves to be other than expected. We see the murder by drowning of the problematic child, in Samara’s case grotesquely prolonged. The titular ring itself is of course revealed to be the eclipse-like image of Anna covering the well into which she has just thrown the half-conscious Samara, her own power to burn images into the minds of those around her turned at last back on herself, her existence concentrated down into the reliving and metastasization of that single unthinkable experience. It’s a very close analogue to the self-harm to which disturbed and neglected children often turn as a last resort to meet their needs. That The Ring dares to offer up no pat solution to the horror it presents is a creative decision which functions as an early stepping stone to our modern Renaissance era of dramatically and narratively daring horror.