Ringu

Saw Ringu, the Japanese original that The ring was based on. It was a very faithful adaptation, it turns out. The pre-story intro has silly school-girls talking about boys and trying to scare each other. This film then introduces the main female character who is a bit of a wimp but at least is not repellent. I think in an effort to make her character "stronger," the Americans just made her "pushier." Anyway, the writing is weakened slightly by the introduction of her actually-psychic boyfriend (who was a mere AV-tech in the American version.) This allows them to extract information from fathers of spooky little children without having to do a song-and-dance interrogation and reveal. This keeps the film moving along but at the price of straining our credulity a bit.

The film is sort of a paranormal police procedural. By the end, you don't get the sense the heroes are facing down a ghost so much as closing in on a perp. There's not so much screaming as there is scouring through books in libraries. It's a nice reprieve from jumps and gore. It also has a theme of abandoned children that didn't come through as much in the remake. To say much more is to kind of give away the ending and if you have seen this film, I think you know what I mean. Anyway, it's there.

So, much easier for me to watch but this may be confirmation bias talking. I may be falling prey to fetishization of original works, but in any case I think this was the stronger Ring. Perhaps even the Ring to rule all versions of this film, and in the darkness bind them.