Ringu

This week i watched Ringu for my research paper. I gotta say it was pretty predictable and not at all scary. It should be interesting when I watch the American version. I watched it with my friend Allyssa so she could help me decipher some of the different aspects of the two films. Before i go into that i guess i should tell the basic story. There's a video tape that kills people. The tape is still pretty screwed up when you watch it but it is much more tame then the American version. As to be expected the Japanese ring video was more about superstition and featured some cultural scenes that would be lost on most American viewers. One such clip from the video is the scene where you see many men crawling across the ground almost in pain. One man is int the foreground crawling forward, another backward. All of the men in the clip seem to be in some sort of pain. My theory as to why this is is that it's a symbol of yin yang. I don't know how wide spread the concept of causality and the symbolic yin yang is in Japan but being that Americans adopted this symbol from the Japanese I think it is safe to say that this is what the Japanese meant. This same clip is not in the Americans ring video. It could be because in Japan leprosy was a major epidemic and one that scared the nation for quite some time. Leprosy is a quite nasty disease where a person gets sores on their skin and their skin eventually falls off (this is possibly where the Japanese zombie comes from), it is very painful and a very horrific way to go. With this in mind it is easy to see why the Japanese chose this clip for their video. When such a scary plague is still fresh in most peoples history books an image of it can chill you to the bone.