48 Fun Facts About The Ring

Who directed the 2002 American film The Ring?

Gore Verbinski directed The Ring (2002), whose success set off a run of Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films, among them The Grudge and Dark Water.

Who plays journalist Rachel Keller in The Ring?

Naomi Watts plays Rachel Keller; she had broken through the year before in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001).

How long do viewers of the cursed tape have to live?

Seven days: when the tape ends the phone rings and a voice whispers 'seven days', the time left before Samara comes for the viewer.

In The Ring (2002), who throws Samara into the well?

Her adoptive mother, Anna Morgan, tries to smother Samara with a bag and drops her into the well, as Rachel sees in a vision; in the Japanese original the girl is put there by a scientist, Dr. Ikuma.

Which young actress plays Samara in The Ring (2002)?

Daveigh Chase plays Samara, the same year she voiced Lilo in Lilo & Stitch; she said the ending frightened her so much in the cinema that she covered her eyes at her own scene.

Who plays Noah, Rachel's ex, in The Ring (2002)?

Martin Henderson plays Noah Clay, Aidan's father; he said that on set he and his co-star would look at each other and say 'This is embarrassing, people are going to laugh', unsure the film would scare anyone.

Which veteran Scottish actor plays Samara's adoptive father Richard Morgan in The Ring (2002)?

Brian Cox plays Richard Morgan, who tells Rachel that Samara was evil and then electrocutes himself in his bathtub; Cox later played Logan Roy in Succession.

Which actress plays Katie Embry, the teenager who dies in The Ring's opening scene?

Amber Tamblyn plays Katie Embry, Rachel's niece; the friends who watched the tape with her die at the same time she does, as Rachel learns after her sister asks her to look into it.

In The Ring (2002), what does Samara crawl out of to kill her victims?

A television: Samara crawls out of the screen to kill Noah in the film's climax, an image taken directly from the Japanese original.

Who wrote the 1991 Japanese novel Ring, the basis of The Ring films?

Koji Suzuki wrote Ring in his spare time as a stay-at-home father of two daughters; its success later earned him the nickname 'the Stephen King of Japan'.

In which US city does reporter Rachel Keller live and work in The Ring (2002)?

Seattle: the director said the Seattle setting pushed him toward an overcast mood he called 'wet and isolated', and it rained nearly every day of the Washington location shoot.

Where do Katie and her friends first watch the cursed tape in The Ring (2002)?

Shelter Mountain Inn: Katie's group watched the tape in cabin 12, beneath whose floorboards Rachel and Noah find Samara's well.

What was Anna Morgan's occupation?

Anna Morgan was a horse breeder on Moesko Island; her horses drowned themselves, and a horse on Rachel's ferry leaps overboard to its death.

The Ring's crew nicknamed the cursed tape's fiery red tree after which red-haired star?

Lucille Ball: the red Japanese maple was called 'Lucille', but it was a fake built of steel tubing and plaster, and the wind blew it over several times during the shoot.

Which studio released The Ring in October 2002?

DreamWorks Pictures paid about $1 million for the right to remake the Japanese film Ring, then released The Ring on October 18, 2002, when it opened at number one in the US.

The Ring cost about $48 million to make; roughly how much did it gross worldwide?

$249 million, about five times its budget: it earned more in its second US weekend than in its first, as the studio added over 600 cinemas to meet demand.

Ehren Kruger wrote The Ring two years after scripting the third film in which slasher series?

Scream: Ehren Kruger wrote Scream 3 (2000), then three drafts of The Ring before another writer gave it an uncredited polish while the cameras were already rolling.

Who composed the score for The Ring?

Hans Zimmer composed the score for The Ring, yet no official album appeared until 2005, when its music shared a disc with The Ring Two's; until then fans traded bootlegs.

Which actor, an Oscar winner months later, had his scenes as a child murderer cut from The Ring?

Chris Cooper played a child murderer in scenes that opened and closed the film; test audiences kept wondering where he had gone, so he was cut entirely. His Oscar came for Adaptation.

How did the studio slip The Ring's cursed video to unsuspecting viewers in summer 2002?

As unexplained late-night TV spots: the video ran with no title or mention of a film, and unmarked VHS copies were also left on car windscreens outside cinemas.

How did The Ring's director first watch the Japanese original?

On a poor-quality VHS tape, many generations removed from the master, sent by one of the producers; he said the murky picture added to the mystique once he realised the film was about a videotape.

What did The Ring's director and cinematographer try to eliminate from the film?

The actors' shadows: under overcast skies, scenes were lit softly to keep anyone from casting one, an effect meant to alter viewers' sense of perception without their knowing it.

Who directed the original 1998 Japanese film Ring?

Hideo Nakata directed Ring (1998) and its 1999 sequel Ring 2, then crossed the Pacific to direct the American The Ring Two in 2005.

What is the name of the vengeful spirit in Ring (1998), the Japanese film The Ring remade?

Sadako Yamamura was thrown down a well; her mother Shizuko's psychic abilities had been publicly demonstrated and mocked.

The novel Ring follows a male reporter; the 1998 Japanese film made its lead what?

A divorced single mother: the novel's Kazuyuki Asakawa, a husband with a baby daughter, became the film's reporter Reiko Asakawa, racing to save her young son Yoichi.

Which future Shōgun star plays Ryūji in the 1998 Japanese film Ring?

Hiroyuki Sanada plays Ryūji, who helps the reporter investigate the tape; a child actor from the age of five and a 1980s action star, he won a wider international following with this role.

Ring (1998) was released in Japan on the same day as which sequel, shot back-to-back with it?

Spiral (Rasen) opened alongside Ring because the studio hoped two films at once would earn more; it flopped, and 1999's Ring 2 simply ignored its story.

How was the ghost's jerky, unnatural walk created in Ring (1998)?

Filmed backwards, then reversed: the actress Rie Inō walked backwards with jerky movements, so the reversed footage shows the ghost advancing in a way no body quite moves.

What form did the first adaptation of the novel Ring take, three years before the 1998 cinema release?

A made-for-TV film, shown by Fuji TV in 1995, came first; later sold on video as Ring: Kanzenban, it follows the novel far more closely than the cinema versions do.

At the end of The Ring Two, how does Rachel finally stop Samara?

Seals her inside the well: dragged into Samara's world, Rachel climbs the well shaft with the girl scrambling up behind her and pushes the stone lid shut just in time.

Rachel and Aidan move to which coastal Oregon town in The Ring Two?

Astoria: Rachel takes a job on the local paper hoping the tape will not follow them, but it is already circulating among the town's teenagers.

Which animals attack Rachel and Aidan on the way home in The Ring Two?

Deer: one appears in the road ahead of Rachel's car, then a herd surrounds and charges it, smashing the windows, and she hits another as she speeds away.

Which Oscar-winning actress plays Samara's birth mother Evelyn in The Ring Two?

Sissy Spacek plays Evelyn in a brief, unsettling cameo: confined to a psychiatric hospital, she is the birth mother who tried to kill Samara as a baby.

In The Ring Two, what does Rachel do with the cursed tape she finds at a dead teenager's house?

Burns it, hoping to end the curse for good, but that only angers Samara, who turns her attention to Rachel's son instead.

What was released in 2005 to bridge The Ring and The Ring Two?

A short film, the 16-minute Rings, came with a DVD reissue of The Ring: it follows a teenager who joins a group built around the tape and leads into The Ring Two's opening scene.

Where does Samara strike in the opening scene of Rings (2017)?

On a passenger plane: a man on board admits he has watched the tape, and moments later Samara brings the whole aircraft down, two years before the main story starts.

Which Big Bang Theory actor appears in Rings (2017) as Gabriel Brown?

Johnny Galecki, Leonard on The Big Bang Theory, plays Gabriel Brown, a professor who buys an old VCR with the cursed tape inside and turns it into an experiment on his students.

Bonnie Morgan, Samara in Rings (2017), is a professional what?

Contortionist: Bonnie Morgan first doubled for Samara in The Ring Two, where by her account her spider-like climb replaced a planned computer effect; she later took over the whole role.

In the novel Ring, the girl in the well was born on which volcanic island near Tokyo?

Izu Oshima: the investigators trace her birth to the island, where her psychic mother, branded a fraud by the press, threw herself into the crater of its volcano, Mount Mihara.

In the novel Ring, what once stood on the site of the holiday resort where the well lies hidden?

A tuberculosis sanatorium once stood on the site; Dr. Nagao, who had worked there, threw the girl down its well before the land became a holiday resort.

Which 1998 novel is the third in the Ring book series?

Loop (1998) is the third Ring novel; it recasts the events of the earlier books as taking place inside a computer simulation, and it is the only one of the trilogy never filmed.

Where did the Morgans shut Samara away from the family in The Ring (2002)?

In the barn loft: the Morgans kept Samara apart there, and behind its wallpaper Rachel finds the image of a tree that the girl's mind had burned into the wall.

In The Ring (2002), where does Katie's mother find her daughter's body?

In a closet: Katie's face was frozen in a distorted grimace, and with doctors blaming heart failure in a healthy teenager, her mother asks Rachel to find out what really happened.

In The Ring (2002), what must a viewer do to survive the curse?

Copy it and show someone else: Rachel survives only because she made a copy for Noah, and the film ends with her helping Aidan make one of his own.

The Ring's director had made his feature debut with which slapstick comedy about a rodent?

Mouse Hunt (1997), in which two brothers are outwitted by a single house mouse, was his first feature; The Ring's producers had made it with him, and they came back to him for the remake.

Which 2003 spoof built much of its plot around a parody of The Ring?

Scary Movie 3 opens with two schoolgirls discussing a killer videotape and sends Anna Faris's TV reporter after it, while also sending up Signs and 8 Mile.

Who said The Ring 'teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous'?

Roger Ebert admired the craft, writing that the film 'looks just great', but found the story absurd and complained that its ending 'explains and explains and explains'.

Which American painter's muted, wintry palette did The Ring's production designer borrow?

Andrew Wyeth: the designer took his dormant trees and somber greys and browns, saying the paintings had 'a haunting flavor' that would add to the film's mystique.