Reiko is researching into a 'Cursed Video' and interviewing teenagers about it. When her niece Tomoko dies of 'sudden heart failure' with an unnaturally horrified expression on her face, Reiko investigates. She finds out that some of Tomoko's friends, who had been on a holiday with Tomoko the week before, had died on exactly the same night at the exact same time in the exact same way. Reiko goes to the cabin where the teens had stayed and finds an unlabeled video tape.
Yes, it's one of the most well-known horror films in history, but no asian movie list is complete without it. And we're not talking about some sequel, remake or reboot, we're talking the 1998 original Ringu. The film that hundreds of others movies copied and tried to imitate in its wake. I know many say it's somewhat dated and by now the whole 'ghost with long black hair'-thing has been done to death (no pun intended), but see this film alone, at night in a pitch black room and try not to get scared. It gets all the important things right; the scares are not over-used, the main characters are sympathetic and likeable, the soundtrack is haunting and minimalistic, and it all centers around a great original mystery that you just have to see to the end. It's more or less essential for every horror fan to have seen it.
It's humorous to imagine back to the time of Ringu's release, when it emerged only as a bootleg in the West and had a reputation of being one of the scariest films ever made, just like The Blair Witch Project (though that came out the year after Ringu). Nowadays it has been released countless times on DVD and Blu-ray, but once it only existed as a hard-to-find, almost mythical piece of cinema.
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