The Ring at 20: Millennial Horror That’s Still Infecting Movies Today

If you remember anything about Gore Verbinski’s cursed-videotape chiller, “The Ring,” released 20 years ago Tuesday, it’s probably the whispered threat: seven days. Or maybe it’s the eyes of a creepy little girl, peering out from behind a curtain of stringy black hair; or the uncanny images — a flaming-red tree, dead horses scattered along a seashore, a finger pushed through a rusty nail — that made up the film-within-the-film. In “The Ring,” any unlucky soul who watches this bizarre videotape receives a menacing phone call as soon as it cuts to static, and in a week they’re kaput at the hands of a soggy ghoul who crawls out of a TV… read more >