98 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.

The actress who plays Samara in The Ring (2002) voiced which Disney heroine that same year?

Lilo, the lonely Hawaiian girl of Lilo & Stitch, reached cinemas earlier in 2002 than the horror film. The voice work won her an Annie Award.

The director of The Ring (2002) followed it by launching which blockbuster adventure film series?

Pirates of the Caribbean began with The Curse of the Black Pearl, which earned over $600 million internationally. He directed the first three films.

In The Ring (2002), what happens moments after Rachel Keller finishes watching the cursed video?

She gets a phone call, and a whispering voice tells her how long she has left. Strange things begin happening around her soon afterwards.

In The Ring (2002), how is reporter Rachel Keller related to Katie Embry, the first victim shown?

Her aunt agrees to look into the death when her own sister, Ruth, begs her to. Three of Katie's friends had died at the same moment.

The Ring's title partly describes what sight seen by Samara from the bottom of the well?

A circle of light is the mouth of the shaft seen from below, where she was left to die. The same image turns up in the cursed video.

The 2016 Japanese crossover film featuring the ghost from Ring was first announced as what?

An April Fools' joke on 1 April 2015 became real that December, when the film was confirmed as a genuine production. It opened in Japan the next June.

Publicity for a 2012 Japanese sequel to Ring sent its long-haired ghost to perform at which event?

A baseball game saw the ghost throw a pitch, as marketers swapped scares for laughs to win over teens and twenty-somethings.

To mark The Ring's release in 2002, what ceremony was held for the Japanese ghost at a Tokyo museum?

A public funeral took place at the Laforet Museum in Harajuku that August, alongside a Ring exhibition. The novels' author attended.

The lead actress of The Ring (2002) had broken through a year earlier in which David Lynch mystery?

Mulholland Drive began as a rejected TV pilot that its director later reshaped into a feature. Playing an aspiring actress brought her international attention.

The Morgan family's ranch in The Ring (2002) stands on which island, reached by ferry?

Moesko is fictional; the animals Anna Morgan bred there drowned themselves off its coast before she took her own life.

In The Ring (2002), how does Richard Morgan, the widower who raised Samara, take his own life?

He electrocutes himself after insisting to Rachel that Samara is evil. She had come to his home looking for the truth about the girl.

In The Ring (2002), who is killed by Samara in the final shock after the curse seemed to be lifted?

Noah Clay is killed even though he and Rachel had given Samara's body a proper burial. Rachel's boy had warned her that helping the girl was a mistake.

Oregon's Yaquina Head supplied which landmark for the Morgans' coastal home in The Ring (2002)?

A lighthouse at Newport, Oregon, stood in for the one on the Morgans' island. Most of the shoot took place further north, in Washington state.

Outside American cinemas in 2002, where did The Ring's marketers plant copies of the cursed video?

On car windshields, left at random for filmgoers to find. Websites about the film's characters and places added to the puzzle.

Which MTV Movie Award did the young actress playing Samara in The Ring win in 2003?

Best Villain went to a girl whose character keeps her face hidden behind long black hair. The Ring was also nominated for the top film prize.

Before The Ring, the actress who plays Samara was the hero's little sister in which 2001 cult film?

Donnie Darko cast her as Samantha, younger sister to Jake Gyllenhaal's title character. She came back to the part for a 2009 sequel.

David Dorfman, the reporter's young son in The Ring (2002), entered which law school at eighteen?

Harvard admitted him at 18, after he had entered UCLA at just 13 and graduated as valedictorian. He left acting for a legal career on Capitol Hill.

The Ring's screenwriter, Ehren Kruger, went on to write three films in which blockbuster series?

Transformers hired him for three sequels in a row, starting with Revenge of the Fallen. He also wrote The Ring Two.

After The Ring's success, Hollywood remade which Japanese ghost film in 2005 with Jennifer Connelly?

Dark Water came from a story by the author of the Ring novels. Connelly had earlier been among the stars offered the lead in The Ring.

In The Ring Two, which character does Samara possess after following the Keller family to a new town?

Aidan becomes the host because Samara wants his parent, Rachel, all to herself. His temperature drops and bruises appear on his arms.

Which future star of The Mentalist plays newspaper editor Max Rourke in The Ring Two?

Simon Baker's editor gives Rachel and her boy a place to stay, and is later found dead in his truck. He became TV's Patrick Jane three years on.

Which future Revenge star plays the schoolgirl who only pretends to watch the video in The Ring Two?

Emily VanCamp's character never sees a frame of it, which leaves the boy who set her up to face Samara. She was a regular on the TV drama Everwood at the time.

Which Weeds actress plays Dr. Emma Temple, who suspects Rachel of child abuse, in The Ring Two?

Elizabeth Perkins plays the doctor who reads the boy's bruises as signs of abuse and orders Rachel to leave. She does not survive the film.

In Rings (2017), the mark seared into Julia's hand turns out to be a word in which script?

Braille dots spelling the word rebirth are what Professor Gabriel Brown finally reads in the mark. He is killed before he can warn her.

In Rings (2017), a swarm of which insects announces Samara's arrival at the blind man's house?

Cicadas pour in moments before she appears. One later hatches from a clump of black hair that Julia coughs up.

Which Law & Order: Criminal Intent star plays the blind Galen Burke in Rings (2017)?

Vincent D'Onofrio's character blinded himself so that Samara could not kill him. He turns out to be the priest who once held Evelyn captive.

In Rings (2017), Professor Gabriel Brown discovers the cursed video hidden in which purchase?

A VCR that belonged to a dead man has the cassette sitting in it. The professor turns the curse into a campus experiment.

In Rings (2017), Samara climbs out of what kind of device to kill Galen Burke?

A smartphone, Julia's own, becomes her doorway. She gives the man back his sight before she kills him.

At the end of Rings (2017), how does Samara's cursed video finally reach a mass audience?

It goes viral online after Julia's version of the video is sent to everyone on her contact list. Her boyfriend cannot pull the plug in time.

Which studio released Rings (2017), a film once slotted into its Paranormal Activity October date?

Paramount Pictures pushed the release back three times, from November 2015 to February 2017. The film went on to earn $83 million on a $25 million budget.

To promote Rings (2017), where did an actress dressed as Samara leap out at unsuspecting shoppers?

An electronics store was the setting: she burst out of a screen on display. The prank video drew 200 million Facebook views in a day.

Which Friday Night Lights actress plays Skye, who tries to force Julia to watch the video, in Rings (2017)?

Aimee Teegarden's character runs out of time and is killed in her own apartment. On TV she was Julie Taylor, the coach's daughter.

Which Oscar-winning writer of A Beautiful Mind was hired to co-write Rings (2017)?

Akiva Goldsman was brought in for a third draft of a script two other writers had already worked on. All three share the credit.

In Rings (2017), what kills Professor Gabriel Brown before he can warn Julia about the mark?

A falling utility pole strikes him at the scene of a car crash. A voicemail he left reaches Julia's boyfriend too late.

Which screenwriter of Out of Sight gave The Ring (2002) an uncredited rewrite after three drafts?

Scott Frank earned Oscar nominations for Out of Sight and, years later, for Logan. His polish on The Ring never appeared in the credits.

Which medieval Latin chant melody is echoed by the strings in the score of The Ring (2002)?

Dies irae comes from the Requiem Mass, and the film's score echoes it amid strings, pianos and synthesisers.

In Rings (2017), what do Julia and Holt do with Samara's remains in the hope of ending the curse?

They cremate them, ignoring the blind man's warning that doing so would unleash something far worse. He was right: Samara is reborn in Julia.

A 2016 crossover film set the ghost from Ring against the spirit of which other Japanese horror title?

Ju-On, remade in America as The Grudge, supplied the rival ghost Kayako. In the crossover the curse's deadline shrinks to two days.

Which country produced the first remake of Ring, a 1999 film titled The Ring Virus?

South Korea had banned Japanese cultural imports, so the original could not be shown there and a home-grown version was commissioned instead.

In the 1998 Japanese film Ring, what is the only part of the ghost's hidden face ever shown?

One eye, glaring through a curtain of hair, is all the film allows. The American remake chose to show its ghost's whole face.

In the 1998 Japanese film Ring, which relative, an ESP researcher, throws the future ghost down the well?

Her father, Dr. Ikuma, had staged the psychic demonstration at which a scoffing journalist dropped dead.

Which Robert Wise ghost film did the director of Ring (1998) watch at least five times before shooting?

The Haunting impressed him by frightening audiences without ever showing its ghost. He kept the deaths in Ring off screen in the same spirit.

In which overseas market did Ring (1998) out-earn The Matrix during the first half of 1999?

Hong Kong made it the territory's highest-grossing Japanese-language film, a record that stood until a Doraemon film in 2015.

In the prequel Ring 0: Birthday, the young woman who becomes the ghost joins what as an understudy?

A theatre troupe takes her on, and when its leading lady is found dead she inherits the part.

Which composer of the anime Ghost in the Shell also scored the 1998 Japanese film Ring?

Kenji Kawai dropped out of a nuclear engineering course before turning to music, and returned to score Ring 2.

The director of The Ring (2002) later won the animated feature Oscar with which film?

Rango, his 2011 animated Western, also won the BAFTA for animated film.

Which major Japanese studio, the home of Godzilla, distributed Ring on its release in 1998?

Toho saw Ring become the highest-grossing horror film in Japan. It went on to win the Asian feature prize at the 1999 Fantasia Film Festival.

In the 1991 novel Ring, the curse turns out to be psychic rage fused with which virus?

Smallpox reached her through the doctor who attacked her, described as the last patient in Japan to carry the disease.

The Ring: Terror's Realm, a survival horror title from 2000, was released for which console?

Dreamcast owners played a researcher locked inside the US Centers for Disease Control, where the curse spreads through a computer program.

The actress who plays Samara in The Ring also voiced the heroine in the English dub of which anime film?

Spirited Away gave her the English-language voice of Chihiro Ogino, in the dub of Studio Ghibli's 2001 film.