Arrow 4K Ultra HD Film Review

Ringu (1998) • Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD [Arrow Video]

A reporter and her ex-husband investigate a cursed video tape alleged to kill the viewer seven days after watching it.

Ringu (リング) is a film with a reputation that precedes it. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve likely seen any number of the things it influenced: from its US remake in 2002 to spoofs in things like Scary Movie 3 (2003), or even The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror XXXII” episode. Or just through cultural osmosis, you perhaps recognise the image of a girl crawling out of a television set with a curtain of sodden black hair covering her face. Like so many of the best images in horror cinema, it feels as if it now exists in the public consciousness. It’s transcended from being just a scene in a film to instead becomes an indelible image, separate from its origin; a nightmare that’s somehow always existed in the collective mind.

The memetic nature of Ringu’s iconography is fitting, as this is a film about symbolic cultural viruses, and death being spread from person to person. Likewise, horror in…