“Before you die, you see the ring.”
So read the classic tagline for Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring,” itself a movie based on Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese horror film “Ringu” and the 1991 Koji Suzuku novel of the same name. It also might as well have been the law of the land among horror fans in 2002. There was just no getting around seeing the mega-popular movie if you loved the genre, and, sure enough, C. Robert Cargill was among those who trekked out to a theater to watch it one fateful day.
When he returned home that night, Cargill decided to take a nap, only to suffer quite the nightmare. In his dream, he walks up to the attic of his house and finds a box filled with Super-8 film reels. After loading one of the reels into a projector, he discovers it contains horrifying footage of a family being hung to death from a tree all at once. “That stuck with me,” he told Complex, adding:
“That haunted me for awhile, and I figured, there’s a story there. I thought, If I find the right story, that could be a pretty cool movie. And I think we may have made one.”
Cargill’s dream would go on to provide the basis for the opening scene in “Sinister,” which shows a home video of a family being killed by hanging. What’s interesting is how, on the surface, this “found-footage” is very different from the cursed videotape in “The Ring.” Where you can clearly grasp what’s happening with the “Sinister” video, the VHS tape in “The Ring” is filled with disturbing yet enigmatic and seemingly unrelated visuals. On a deeper level, though, they both tap into our fears about the potentially harmful effects of the media we intake.
