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popularity on Internet newsgroups. Dark Water, on the other hand, has
been largely overlooked by film scholars, though it, too, spawned a
Hollywood remake in 2005. Viewed together, both Ringu and Dark
Water – with their focus on single parent households, recovered pasts,
and wetness as a metaphor for illness and decay – provide valuable
insights into a transforming contemporary Japanese culture.
As many horror fans around the globe well know, Ringu’s plot
involves an urban legend of a cursed video tape that proves all too real for
a reporter named Reiko, her potentially psychic son, Yoichi, and her ex-
husband. The tape’s images are as surreal as they are frightening, and
once viewed, the spectator(s) has seven days to live before the stooped,
drenched, and vengeful apparition of a young woman in funereal white
appears and frightens the hapless viewer(s) to death. When a series of
teenagers mysteriously die, expressions of abject terror contorting their
once youthful features, the resourceful reporter becomes determined to
solve the mystery behind the allegedly cursed videocassette. Retracing
the deceased teen’s final weeks, Reiko soon locates the videocassette at a
resort on Izu peninsula, watches it, and then answers a ringing phone that,
she believes, indicates that her life will end in one week. Rattled, Reiko
turns to her ex-husband for help; together, they attempt to decipher the
video’s images and eventually trace its origins back forty years to a
psychic woman, Samara, whose supernatural talents and uncanny
predictions elicit the violent derision of a room of angry male reporters.
Afraid for her mother’s life, Samara’s daughter, Sadako, kills one of the
reporters with a single thought. Consequently, Samara kills herself, and
soon Sadako, too, meets an untimely end when the primary scientist
studying Samara’s abilities pushes Sadako into a well. Hoping to put
Sadako’s anger to rest, Reiko and her ex-husband find the well into which
the young girl’s body was cast and, after some tense moments, succeed in
recovering her remains. Hopeful that all is now well, Reiko and her ex-
husband return to their daily activities. Sadako’s wrath, however, has not
been satisfied. Before long, her ghost emerges from a television screen,

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For an insightful analysis of this phenomenon, see Hills, M. (2005) ‘Ringing in the Changes:
Cult Distinctions and Cultural Differences in US Fans’ Readings of Japanese Horror Cinema’,
in McRoy, J. Japanese Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 161-74.