By its own cyclic nature, the horror genre has spawned “more examples of sequels, prequels and remakes than any other popular film genre in the history of cinema” (Hand and McRoy 1). But as studios and producers continue to unearth new, potentially lucrative material for recycling, twenty-first century trends reveal an “acceleration in the number of remakes” (Hutchings 262) and “increasingly trans-cultural activity” (Hand and McRoy 4). Several Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror cinema have appeared over the last decade, broadening the genre’s recycling trends and taking its cultural appropriations to new commercial heights. When DreamWorks acquired the film rights for the Japanese cult horror film, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), the remake became “a substantial commercial success” (Hutchings 265), but as the project also left director Gore Verbinski conceding that the genre has been “reinvented so many times that it’s hard to set a shot, and not feel like it’s a shot that’s in someone else’s movie” (qtd. in Ozawa 2), it would appear that, in the contemporary horror film, hyper-intertextualization has indeed reached its limit.
It is perhaps our very acceptance of horror recycling ad nauseam that has led spectators and critics to ignore some of the mutations that lie at the heart of Verbinski’s remake. In several reviews, Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) was described as “stick[ing] very closely to the original script” (Newman 50) of Ringu, but in Nakata’s tale of the video curse, Japanese audiences were confronted by the ghost of Sadako, a murdered young woman who was thrown down a well by her father. For Western audiences, the story behind the video curse was somewhat different: in Verbinski’s remake, it is a mother, Anna, who kills her adopted child-daughter Samara by placing a bag over her head and pushing her to her watery grave.