Images of Hell

Rating: 10/10 (26 March 2003)

This is not the most scary film since the Exorcist, the Blair Witch or the Sixth Sense, it's the most scary film ever. It's a remake of the Japanese film Ringu, which is apparently based on a novel(?), but I don't think the novel can have been as frightening. What does it is the suggestiveness of the images, the unimaginable terror that, it is hinted, lies behind the surface. Obviously the strange phenomena are not explained: what with the horses, the tree, the amulets, what sort of hellish method was used to conceive that child? What do the victims see in the last moment before they die (the short glimpses of their faces was possibly the most frightening thing in the entire movie)? If you have an vivid imagination, the images and thoughts that will come to mind for days after watching the movie will be at least as scary as the actual thing. (When the girl crawled out of the tv and took on corporeal form, the whole thing became more tangible, and then, in my opinion, less scary.)