Horror Aughts #5: ‘The Ring 2’ — Oh, Those Silly Little Kids
Rachel. Rachel! Racheeeel!
‘Horror Aughts’ is a column in which I revisit scary movies from the 2000s that were big commercial hits at the time but have been largely forgotten ever since.
Flashback: I remember watching the highly-anticipated sequel — highly-anticipated by me, my ex-girlfriend, and half the world who enjoyed being terrorized by a 12-year-old girl with wet hair — The Ring 2 with my childhood friends and laughing a lot. Not the experience I had with Gore Verbinski’s classic remake three years prior, which provided nightmare fuel to my still-developing brain at 13. We were already a few drinks in before I decided to put the movie on, yes, but I doubt the outcome would’ve been any different if we were seeing it stone-cold sober. We wanted scares but settled for laughs — mostly because we couldn’t stop making fun of David Dorfman’s Aidan, the little weirdo protagonist, whose acting came across as a stressed-out middle-aged man stuck in a child’s body.
I mean, look at him (above) with his perfectly combed workday hair and piercing eyes, judging you like an angry, burnout general manager working at Target. He’s creepy and unsettling alright, but not in a ghost-horrory way.
Almost 20 years later, I can confirm that The Ring 2 wasn’t laughable only because we were tipsy. No, Aidan (the character) is one of the weirdest, least likable, and most irritating horror kids that ever graced the silver screen. He's both the hero and the villain, and you simultaneously feel uncomfortable and irked by his slimy presence. Compared to him, Samara (Kelly Stables from Superstore!), the actual ghost of the film, is a doll. That’s somewhat by design as the sequel’s plot, in a nutshell, is Samara returning and wanting her mommy — and to get her (or the next best thing, which is Naomi Watts in this case) she will possess Aidan. What an original premise!
Aidan and Rachel (Watts also reprising her role) basically spend the majority of the movie trying to outrun the weird little girl from the well, who’s now somehow more powerful, yet less mysterious, than was the first time around. Director Hideo Nakata (the man behind the Japanese original and its sequel) must have also been mesmerized, or rather bewitched, by Dorfman’s off-putting performance because he had forgotten what makes a good horror and how to direct one.
Without any palpable suspense or an eerie atmosphere, Nakata unleashes Samara on us about 15 minutes in, like she never went anywhere. Yet you can’t even call most of her recurring appearances jumpscares because that would require setups to have the thinnest chance of scaring the shit out of us. No, she mostly comes and goes without much spooky fanfare, demanding her mommy like a lost kid in a supermarket. It's like Nakata thought that simply knowing her from the first film would channel the same overwhelming dread that Verbinski created around the character. It doesn’t. In fact, Aidan constantly calling his mom Rachel (Racheeeel!) is more disturbing than any scare Samara attempts to lay on us. Sidenote: I can’t believe we didn’t think of turning his frequent shrieks into a drinking game back then, which would’ve made the whole watching experience even more hilarious.
Jokes aside, despite the inept direction and vapid atmosphere, Nakata had some good ideas. He just couldn't maximize them to exploit their full potential. Moments like the raw and intrusive deer attack (deer weren’t overused in horror yet), the bathroom scene with solid CGI, or the heart-pounding finale that brought us back to the infamous well. In 2005, these were pretty gruesome sequences, but it's unsurprising why they have faded over time. They simply lack that visceral, spine-tingling aura that Verbinski captured and capitalized on masterfully before.
Still, regardless of its evident shortcomings compared to the acclaimed first film, moviegoers ate The Ring 2 up like candy. Although the sequel wasn’t as big of a splash hit at the box office as its predecessor, it still ramped up a whopping $163 million worldwide on a $50 million budget. That's quite impressive, whether measured by the cinema standards of the 2000s or today. But I’d be lying if I said this re-watch brought me anything other than shrugs and facepalms. Unless I count my newly developed phobia of kids screaming the name Rachel.
Since it’s Spooky Season, here are some more positive “Horror Aughts” entries that satisfied my itch for nostalgia:
We entered the week of Halloween, so I’ll be bringing a surprise essay about a horror that I love to death. Stay tuned.
I remember at the time thinking that the subtext of this was Naomi Watts being concerned that her effeminate son was going to become gay or transgender. There are a couple of pretty peculiar shots of Samara and her long hair sort of shadowed or superimposed over Aidan's face that kind of hammered this home for me. Maybe I was just trying to make sense of a completely empty movie.
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