There were two camps of people when The Ring came out in 2002; those who were terrified of it, and those who thought it was just stupid. Thankfully I was in group A because anyone who wasn't at least a little scared by that movie is a soulless husk just waiting the right gust of wind to blow them off the face of the earth. Honestly, I am not usually shaken by films. Creeped out, sure, but when I got home to my empty house just after dark, by myself, every fucking light in my house was turned on, and you better believe it stayed on until I fell asleep watching Care Bears or something equally as soothing.

The Ring is about Rachel Keller, played by the closet-Brit Naomi Watts, a journalist who begins investigating the death of her niece, whose heart mysteriously stopped at 10pm exactly seven days after her and three others watched a tape they found in a shady cabin in the woods.* In one of films all time genius moves, Rachel herself sits through the disturbing film thus marking herself for imminent death. Stranger and stranger things start happening as Rachel slowly unravels the meaning of the tape, looking for a way to keep her and her son from being ghostified by the tape's maker, Samara.

Once you forget that the horribly contrived plot jump off line is, "I got one better. Have you heard about this video tape that kills you when you watch it?" The Ring immediately drops you into scary-as-fuck land wasting no time taking out a pretty young girl, letting you know that this entity is not effing around. The movie pretends it's going to throw some horror movie cheap shots at you, but every time you expect to see something appear in a mirror, or behind a closing fridge door nothing happens, making each of the scenes scarier than the last, constantly reinforcing the fact that you won't be able to predict what The Ring will throw at you next.

The Ring is the first and only J-Horror port I included on my list because it was the one that started the entire craze to begin with, and in my opinion is the best one so far. Directed by Pirates helmer Gore Verbinski, The Ring proves that before they were over played, slimy little girls with long black hair were entirely creepy. Even in the footage of her when she's a normal little girl she is creepy, but dump a bucket of water over her head and have her crawl out of a TV and she becomes totally terrifying. Not to mention some of this ridiculousness happens during the day which you'd think would be less scary...not the case.

I can't not mention the horrific faces Samara leaves plastered on her victims. They can not be described, they must be seen to be believed. Not only does the mere sight of her rot and contort people's faces to near irrecognizability, but she always seems to be able to put her victims in a way scarier position than if they had just dropped dead where they stood. She shoved one in a closet even though she was standing in the door way when her face got the stretch, and she managed to get another victim in a chair just so it could be way more dramatic when some one discovered him. Samara is clearly only in this for the fame.

I couldn't believe how scared I still was years later and on my fifth or sixth viewing. I remembered quite a bit of The Ring, but everything still seemed to imbue my soul with a serious case of the creeps. I welcomed the Where The Wild Things Are screening I went to later that night, enabling me to forget about The Ring just long enough to fall asleep.