Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
I know the other guy said they're identical, but the Japanese version wasn't nearly as scary, and I didn't see the imagery, at least as realized, as the same. Maybe it wasn't as scary because of the subtitles, or maybe because the different culture makes it harder to relate (its okay if the calls are happening in Japan), or because I saw it second.
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They aren't identical at all, though I think the US version was a pretty competent translation of the elements of the Japanese original that would play here.
They had quite different plots at significant points (the US version had significantly more plot explication, and it was different from the explication in the Japanese version - though I might be bringing some of the explication from Ringu 2 in).
They also had quite different imagery & subtext (horses, lighthouses, pervasiveness of TVs, gorey bodies, all new; children's rhymes about goblins, demon imagery, active relationship between science and the supernatural, disease and contagion suggestions, all gone).
Some things that were the same: the implicit "guilt" of the working single mother; oddly precocious kid; juxtaposition of juvenile innocence and knowledge of horrible truth was downplayed in the US version but still present; natural/resort/sea imagery juxtaposed with urban imagery.
The Japanese one was ... very Japanese. It was extremely terrifying, in its way, but that was completely different from the way the US version was scary. Ringu was much less obvious, and it gave were no real
reasons for one to be scared. Western audiences seem too logical to appreciate being freaked just ... because you somehow are. OTOH, the Ringu camera work was friggin' brilliant - I found the editing itself creepy and disorienting.
