A Digital Haunting of the Analogue World: Hideo Nakata's Ring

This text is available to read in full in Dreamt by Ghosts:  Notes on Dreams, Coincidence, & Weird Culture available from Tenement Press here. 

Hideo Nakata’s Ring is haunted by the future of digital technology. Behind the conscious

horror of the story there is a larger, unsurfaced fear, lingering in the subconscious of the

film: that the world of analogue is being replaced by the world of digital. Most of us had sent

an email by 1998, the year the film was released, and had experienced the threat of a

computer virus at a time when we were still watching video tapes. In Ring, the digital applies

its logic to the analogue realm, which then begins to enact a future technology.

The plot of the film is focussed on a videotape that kills anyone who watches it

within a week; they’re stamped with their own deadline for obsolescence. The film gluts on

images relating to analogue devices: a fax-machine, an instant camera, VHS recorders, cube

monitors. There is only a single call received by mobile phone in the whole film.

Reiko Asakawa, the main character, has watched the tape and counts down the days

to her death. One night, Reiko wakes to find her son Yoichi watching the cursed videotape

and runs to cover his eyes. Anyone who falls under the curse of the tape can see the evidence

of this by taking an instant Polaroid of their face: the proof is in the melted and warped

image printed. Past technologies refuse to remain stable; polaroid distorts in the wake of the

hyper-digital technologies that are already changing the world. Made two years before the

end of the century, it’s worth remembering that the film was directed when fear of the

‘Millennium Bug’ was beginning to peak. The fact that anyone who watches the videotape

dies within a week also suggests, perhaps, that if we get ‘stuck’ in the analogue world we can

never be digital born.

As Reiko counts down the days to her death, she researches the source of the tape’s

curse, discovering that it came about through the suicide of a Spiritualist—a seer—called

Shizuko, which had taken place decades before. Shizuko’s daughter Sadako had then used

psychic forces to kill a journalist who had derided her mother’s abilities. When the world

races away from inner-vision and ritual—towards the alienation of algorithmic thinking—

dark forces emerge. Reiko works with her ex-husband Ryūji—who is also under the curse—

to try and find Sadako’s corpse, which they discover at the bottom of a well. They find out

that the curse was born when a video tape captured her rage. Reiko survives, believing this is

because they have found and freed Sadako, but Ryūji dies when Sadako’s spirit comes out of

the well and through the TV, frightening him to death. Although the new world might

promise reunification and harmony, this is something that it can’t deliver for the estranged

couple. Ryūji as a character is also a plot device that is completely hauntological: the exhusband

represents Reiko’s past, aligning him with analogue; after his death he continues

in Yoichi, whose future—like any child who was a child at that time—can only be digital.

We then discover the real reason why Reiko has survived: if the videotape is copied

and passed on to someone else within a week, the curse is broken. A ring needs to be

formed. In other words, the videotape needs to be treated like one of the thousands of

emails that asks the sender to forward it on to someone or they will receive bad luck.

Almost a decade after Ring was released, YouTube was swamped by the Katu Lata

Kulu message. People received an email or a post beneath their YouTube video saying that

in 1945 a young girl named Katu Lata Kulu came to America from Africa in a grey boat. A115

mysterious man killed her by cutting the words LATUALATUKA into her back. Now that you

have read this message, she will come to your house on a full moon and steal your soul

unless you do the following: copy and paste the chain letter and post it as a comment

beneath three other videos. In other words: free the spirit from the well by copying the

message, or you’ll die too.

What’s remarkable about Ring is that it captured this collective fear while it was still

nascent in the culture. It’s both aware of this cultural shift but also blind to it: no one could

have known that videotape culture would die out so quickly (DVD rentals did not surpass the

rentals of VHS until 2003); that the analogue world it depicts was in its final epoch. It took

more effort to copy a complete video tape than to simply copy and paste a message digitally

in a computer, making the new world would be primed for curse culture to go viral and the

collective subconscious knew it.

Copy.

Paste.

Repost.

Digital developed with an inbuilt capacity for the perennial fear of being cursed to become

part of our daily lives. The fear that began to haunt our collective analogue brain is

everywhere in our digital awakening.

This text is available to read in full in Dreamt by Ghosts:  Notes on Dreams, Coincidence, & Weird Culture available from Tenement Press here.