If ever my skepticism towards a movie was blown back in my face it was with The Ring. I never got around to seeing this one in the theater but it became one of the most buzzed about movies of the year during its very profitable release. The concept sounded interesting enough to me but I always have a hard time believing people when they say a movie will truly scare me. In fact, I can honestly say that before The Ring, no movie had truly scared me so my skepticism was not without reason. When I finally did see this movie, I swallowed all that skepticism and a good dose of pride as well. I must be honest and tell you that I did sleep with my lights on after seeing this movie. Granted, I saw it alone in my screening room in my basement in the middle of the night with no one else home so I’m sure that added to the effect a bit but regardless, it is that scary. Before you start calling me names, I am not an easy scare. I am usually the guy who ruins the haunted house because I walk through completely unfazed. This movie is deeply, profoundly terrifying and I’ll explain why later. The concept is basically a 21st Century spin on the classic urban legend. The story goes that there is a videotape floating around with nightmarish images on it and when you finish watching the tape, you receive a phone call telling you that you will die in 7 days. Scary stuff on its own but leaving it at that is not nearly enough for this movie. The opening scene of the movie shows us one of the tape’s first viewers on her seventh day and while we are certainly scared out of our pants, we aren’t shown nearly enough to have our minds eased, which is exactly what director Gore Verbinski wants. The rest of the movie follows a journalist names Rachel (played by the beautiful Naomi Watts) whose niece was the first victim of the tape. She sets out to discover what’s behind her niece’s death and along the way sees the tape herself, prompting a little extra motivation to find out the secret of the tape. As Rachel discovers more and more about the history and origins of the tape, things seem to get less creepy and since we know more about what really happened, we begin to sympathize with the tape’s creator a bit. This all is of course just a brilliant plot to draw us into a safe feeling and then absolutely scare the hell out of us in the film’s final ten minutes. It’s rather hard deciding what to tell you and what to keep from you in this review but I can tell you that when we finally see how someone dies from the tape, it is truly one of the most horrifying images ever put on film. Forget the girl from The Exorcist or Carrie, the evil little girl from this movie, Samara, will go down as the scariest little girl in all of horror film (I might give you those twins in The Shining but it would be a close call). This shock ending is constructed so brilliantly that it really adds so much to the resonating power of this movie and the fact that we are misled into a nice, safe little fake ending beforehand is just so brilliantly sadistic, you just have to appreciate it. Perhaps most impressive about this movie is the elaborate back-story that is dredged up. Most movies wouldn’t bother explaining such an in-depth character history but Verbinski clearly realizes the effectiveness of the source material (The Ring was originally a Japanese novel and film franchise) and takes full advantage of it. There are also some pretty good performances that make this film more serious and solemn than light-hearted like a haunted house. Young actor David Dorfman plays Rachel’s child-prodigy son who has some strange psychic abilities that are never entirely explained. This kid plays his role with jus the perfect note for this film, not too over-the-top but certainly not emotionless either. He comes off as a kid who knows far too much about the world to still act like a kid. Also impressive in this film is the brilliant Brian Cox, one of my favorite character actors, who makes a brief appearance as Samara’s troubled father. His scene also features one of the film’s many brilliant visual tricks, in this case the use of a lighthouse to periodically light up the room and then darken it again. Experienced moviegoers like me are just waiting to see something terrifying every time the light comes back around and the anticipation is just brilliant. The Ring is an incredibly three-dimensional, visually creative and conceptually brilliant horror film and if nothing else will definitely scare the hell out of you. This is not a movie you watch giggling with your girlfriends during sleepovers. This is a movie that will dry your throat, make your hair stand up and have you looking over your shoulder for the whole show. As Bogart’s Sam Spade would say “This is the stuff nightmares are made of.”