THE RING
Plot
Summary
Reporter Asakawa Reiko (Matsushima Nanako) is in the midst of investigating the latest urban myth--a videotape that kills all who watch it--when her niece Tomoko (Takeuchi Yuuko) suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. Her investigation reveals that not only her niece but also three other friends died on the same day at exactly the same time.
Asakawa traces the activities of the four friends back to the Izu Peninsula, where apparently they had stayed overnight in a rental cabin... and viewed the very cursed videotape that she has been investigating. When Asakawa watches the videotape herself, she enlists the help of her ex-husband Takayama Ryuji (Sanada Hiroyuki) to help solve its deadly riddle.
Together, the two begin to identify the mass of jumbled images found on the videotape. One of these, a mysterious woman brushing her long hair before an oval mirror, is identified as the long-dead psychic Yamamura Shizuko. Asakawa and Ryuji travel to Oshima, the birthplace of Yamamura Shizuko, in search of clues. What they find is the secret of the Yamamura family--that Shizuko had given to a daughter that mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. The child's name: Yamamura Sadako.
The latter half of the Ring has Asakawa and Ryuji discovering that the video was in fact created by Sadako, who three decades ago was thrown into a well and left for dead. With nothing left to try, the duo resolve to find the well and recover Sadako's body, in the hopes of appeasing her vengeful spirit...Trivia: The title of this movie in Taiwanese was Ghost Story of Seven Nights, though it can also be found on the Internet by the name of Seven Nights' Strange Talk, a literal rendering of the Chinese characters. In Spain it is El Circulo, while in mainland China the title translates to something like Deadly Ring of Night.
More trivia: The famous scene of Sadako's "appearance" does not appear in the novel. Director Nakata has credited Videodrome for its inspiration, just as he cites Terminator for the final shot of Asakawa driving her car into an oncoming storm.