The Bechdel Cast - The Ring with Joseph Fink

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Ring Ring! You have seven days to listen to this episode in which Caitlin, Jamie, and special guest Joseph Fink discuss The Ring.  (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast Follow @PlanetofFinks on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante, and @jamieloftusHELP  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project.

All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister? Or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller

from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, They're just dreams. Join us for the new podcast, Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Santos! Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts.

On the Bechtelcast, the questions asked if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effin' vast. Start changing it with the Bechdelcast. Bring, bring. Oh, hello? Hi, Jamie. It's me.

Yeah. The ring. What? Watch out. You've got seven days before I come and get you. Oh, okay. So it's a timed thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow, the stakes are so high. Be on high alert. I'll be on high alert. I'm about to have the worst week of my fucking life. You know what would be really bad? What? You know what's the only way this week could get worse if i watched a horse kill itself on a boat oh well it's gonna happen oh shit no spoilers click bye i think that went well i think that went oh yeah seven days to live is

one of the most um the best easiest most iconic i never get tired of it jokes available every time i see my dog's bottom teeth i'm like there it is seven days just anytime i see something that makes me a little uncomfortable it's seven days each and every time i love it welcome to the bechtel cast uh my name is jamie loftus my name is caitlin dorante and this is our show where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point to inspire a larger conversation. But Jamie, what about little girls crawling out of TV? Feminist icon Samara. Samara. Yeah.

You joke, but I'm serious. So am I. Well, can I tell you what the Bechdel test is? Is that okay? I would love that. Okay. Not to explain things to you, but... Well, I am the ring.

You are the ring. I can't believe I'm spending precious time of my last seven days explaining what the Bechdel test is for the 5,000th time to people who know. Maybe this is someone's first episode. That, oh my gosh, that would be, this would be, I think, I feel like this would be a really fun point of entry for serious discourse. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the Bechdel test though? Okay. All right. The Bechdel test is a media metric created by queer cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel Test is a media metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace Test, originally created as a goof for a comic strip that she made called Dykes to Watch Out For, has since become an actual media metric that people

use and talk about all the time. Lots of versions of this thing. And we do that. And we named the whole show after it. And we do that. And we named the whole show after it. And we do that. And sometimes people who are like lying about listening to the show, they're like, wow, I can't believe you talk about that for a whole hour. And it's like, well, we don't. We talk about it for seven days. We talk about it for seven whole days. And then we explode.

Our version of the test requires that there be two characters of a marginalized gender with names who speak to each other about something other than a man for two lines of dialogue and it should be some sort of narratively impactful exchange such as ring ring seven days click that i would say would count and then the other person says, Oh no. Oh shit. Yeah. Or whatever it is that Amber Tamblyn says. Oh my gosh. That is Amber Tamblyn. How did I not piece that together?

Oh my gosh. There's so many 2002 treats. It's a charcuterie board of our, our generation's luminaries. All right. So I think that that covers our housekeeping. We have an incredible episode today, a movie we've referenced many times because due to seven days being a timeless reference. But today we are talking about The Ring, Gore Verbinski style, 2002, starring Naomi Watts and a horse. Yes. And the girl who is the voice of Lilo in Lilo and Stitch.

And we have an incredible guest. I did not look at the IMDb. Oh, the facts are fun. And there's more to come. But we have an incredible guest. We really do. He is an author and the creator of Welcome to Night Vale. It's Joseph Fink.

Hi, thanks for having me. Welcome. Welcome. It wasn't until this watch that I realized the title of the movie is a pun. Ring, ring. Yeah, ring, ring. That is, I guess I don't know what, is the other, well, I guess the ring on the poster is the ring of you being trapped in a well.

Yeah, before you die, you see the ring. That's the only version I had understood. And it wasn't until I was reading IMDb trivia that whoever wrote the IMDb trivia was like, by the way, also. This movie is deep. You're like, I actually did need that. It turns out.

Look, this movie is deep. There's so many layers. It is. And deep like a well. Now I'm thinking harder than ever. I love this movie so much. And Joseph, I'm very excited to hear more about your history with this movie because you requested this movie specifically. Yeah, a huge mistake on my part because it meant having to watch it again.

Yeah, now you're on thin fucking ice for the next seven days best of luck this movie was so deeply traumatizing for me as a teenager like it genuinely made my life worse for like a couple years after watching it just i i think it was thinking back i think a lot of it is it's the first actual horror movie i'd ever seen um i think that's probably true for a number of people my age like i don't know it's just it wasn't really marketed the way most horror movies were marketed movie I'd ever seen. I think that's probably true for a number of people my age. Like, I don't know. It's just, it wasn't really marketed the way most horror movies were marketed before then. Like it was just sort of a, I went and saw it on a date because it was what was in the movie theater kind of thing. And then it was just straight up like scary. And I had never really

watched a straight up scary movie before. And it, um, I didn't sleep well for quite a while afterwards how did the date go it was like a long-term girlfriend it went fine wait you didn't start watching horror movies until you were of like dating age I mean I was like 15 maybe uh 14 15 somewhere in there doing the math um yeah I mean watched like, my mom was very into like 1950s movies. So most of my childhood I watched, I watched like the original invasions of the body snatchers. I watched like a lot of B alien movies of like, it conquered the world. It invaded the world. There was, there was a number that had very similar titles, but I had a real strong opinions about which were better. Yeah.

It's funny. Cause now watching this again, I think if I had, uh, encountered it for the first time now, I wouldn't have thought much about it because now like 90% of what I watch is horror movies. It's kind of the only kind of movie I watch anymore.

Um, but I just, as a, at the time I had never seen a movie just be so mean to me before. Yeah. This movie is punishing. This movie does feel like it's hitting you.

I feel like given your body of work growing up watching 50s Iliad movies, it tracks. It makes sense to me. I was barely allowed to watch TV. And then, yeah, when I was, it was almost always movies from the 50s

Jamie what's your history relationship with The Ring I feel like maybe I've told this story on the podcast before I've definitely told you Caitlin this movie ruined my entire life when I saw it

this was like definitely the first like I think I'd seen like spooky movies but I hadn't seen when I saw it. This was like definitely the first, like I think I'd seen like spooky movies, but I hadn't seen a scary movie. I didn't see this in theaters. I would have seen it shortly. This movie came out, I was in like third grade, third or fourth grade.

I think like third grade. And we rented a copy of it. My older cousin, Tammy, rented a copy of this. She and my aunt and uncle like live in this old, crusty, terrifying house in Brockton, Massachusetts that is over 300 years old. A ton of people have died at the house. There's all these scary stories about the house.

Oh, my gosh. In her childhood bedroom. And as an adult, I was like, that can't be true. And then I checked with my aunt she's like no that's true there was like a woman who was like locked in the closet and then she tried to get out but she couldn't and she died and that happened in sometime in the 19th century and just like all these scary things happened at the house I was afraid of the house sleeping over didn't love it my cousin loved living in a haunted house and wanted to scare me and so we watched

this tape and it was the oh I think it was the only did you watch it on VHS the ring yes oh my god yes we would have rented this from the nearby blockbuster on VHS which makes me feel 9 000 years old it was so scary it was the scariest movie I'd ever seen I was crying during the movie I was begging her to turn it off and she was like just loving every second of it we finished the movie it's late at night I'm still crying and then I think Tammy is like oh this is actually a bad situation for me now. I'm no longer having fun. So then we watched another VHS, which would have been, I remember very clearly, she's

like, I know what to do for a palate cleanser. And then we watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding, another 2002 classic, because she was like, you'll feel better if we watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But unfortunately, it didn't work and um she still makes fun of me because i called my dad at like 11 30 and i was like you need to come get me i have seven days to live and i need to i need to be with my family um traumatizing movie that i've returned to many times over the years, but I haven't seen this movie in. It does make me uncomfortable to watch still. But this time, preparing for this episode and also watching,

I didn't watch the entire original Ringu, but I watched specific scenes and I wanted to know what the differences were between the two movies. But watching it this time, I was like, oh, I guess I was just 10 years old when I watched this I guess it's like I I didn't pee myself and I slept fine glad to hear it so in that way being a grown-up rocks all right what's your history with this movie so I was I saw it for the

first time when I was a sophomore in college which would have been 2005 uh friend of the cast my best friend jt was like you haven't seen the ring you gotta see the ring and so we watched it at his apartment because we would do this thing where we would watch scary movies together and then both get really freaked out and then i'd have to like stay over at his apartment sleep in bed with him for like a week because we were both like oh no the hills have eyes are going to get us. The ring is out to get, you know. That hill's a little too silent for my liking. Exactly.

So we did that with the ring. He knew what was coming. So he played a little prank on me where after the movie was over, I was like, I feel horrible. I'm scared. but also I have to go to the bathroom and then when I came back from the bathroom he had shut off all the lights off in the room and then turn the tv on to like static so it was just like static on the tv and then he disappeared like I didn't know where he was turns out he was hiding in the closet and then he came out and scared me but it was so freaky and i was like

oh my gosh i saw the movie the ring and now i only have seven days to live and and then i it's so effective is there anyone who's seen this movie who does not have a like traumatized story about it truly is like a trauma-inducing movie we should start yeah we should just like open uh a hotline for people to call in and say what happened when they watched the rings but then people will call us and the phone will go bring bring and then we'll only have seven days to live again tomorrow we'll call yeah um so i was like i never need to see this movie again i'm there's no reason for me to watch it so i went another i don't know whatever 17 years without

seeing it and then here we are talking about it so I had to watch it again I watched a couple nights ago as soon as I finished watching it a fly started buzzing around my apartment okay so the fly from the VHS tape found its way into my apartment also my doors started making creep like creepy creaky sounds like my apartment was just like being all weird and the fly was buzzing around and now i'm gonna die soon you you only have a couple days but it's a good thing that you're um spending it podcast yes a wonderful way to spend my time um and normally i watch a movie twice to prep for an episode but i could only stomach this movie once and i was also going to watch ringu to just kind of yeah like you said jamie note the differences and similarities but i was like no

i simply cannot i've got you i'm ready to So it's fine. My extra credit is I started watching The Ring 2, which I had actually never seen. Really? I watched probably like the first 20 minutes. It's fine. Is it the same cast mostly? It's Naomi Watson. It's the same kid. Everyone else is different.

It might have been probably it's the same girl playing Samara. I'm actually not sure. Okay. But it's directed by the guy who directed Ringu. They brought in the Japanese director to direct the sequel. It just doesn't have that same intensity of the first one. It's a little more like, let's dive into Samara's background some more and find out more about her childhood. I think I didn't have a ton of questions um at the

end of the first movie i will say the kid from the ring is just not doing it for me the little girl or the little boy no the little girl is life-changing yeah no the the little boy but we'll talk about that sure the little boy he now works as a lawyer for congress by the way his current job i looked i'm like what is he doing these days and he works as like a lawyer for one of the committees oh wow good for him he's a ranking member of foreign affairs subcommittee on asia so he lived the seven days and that is encouraging thank goodness all right should we are you good who is at your door was it samara i don't know someone was at my door and it was a stranger

and he told me i have seven days to live so oh how many times can we make the joke uh okay it will never get old to me should i do the recap recap? Yeah. We'll go from there. Let's do it. Actually, let's take a break. Let's put this phone call on hold and then we'll come right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere,

a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Teddy Mellencamp. And Tamara Judge, better known as the Twats.

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Most of the time. And we're back. So we open on two teen girls flipping through the channels. One girl is Becca and she's like, Hey, have you heard about this videotape that kills you when you watch it? This woman comes on screen and then when the video is over, your phone rings and a voice says, You will die in seven days. And then when the video is over, your phone rings, and a voice says, you will die in seven days. And then seven days later, you die. And then the other girl, Katie,

I think that's Amber Tamlin. Oh, wait, Amber Tamlin. Yes, with the chunkiest highlights I've ever seen in my entire life. So 2002. Yeah. She's like, Oh, no, I watched the tape. And then she pretends to die to play a prank on becca but then a few minutes later katie is walking around her house the tv comes on there's static then we see an image of a well and then katie does die yeah and then when they flash back to show you what katie's face looked like when she died oh scary i feel like that's the thing most people remember from the movie even more than the little girl is Katie's face. They wrecked Amber Tamblyn.

They wrecked her. In her Joan of Arcadia era and everything. Pass. Did not like it. Then we cut to Rachel Keller. That's Naomi Watts. She's an investigative journalist. We meet her and her son who has made some creepy drawings depicting his cousin Katie's death.

So Katie, who died in the first scene, is Rachel Keller's niece, her son Aiden's cousin. And she died three nights ago now. Which Rachel is stunningly chill about. She doesn't give a shit. She grieves quietly or possibly not at all there i one of my favorite i get like horror movie tropes is like the teacher who's like these drawings like they're so because it's always just like yeah kids suck at art and every teacher knows that kids are famously bad artists but she's like i don't know could be it could be a sign your son is just blowing it at art kids doing creepy things in

horror movies is the scariest thing to me of all the like sub genres of horror or all the horror tropes the scariest thing to me is creepy kids doing creepy things and it's happening in this movie so he's making these creepy drawings and katie died three nights ago but aiden's teacher is like but aiden drew these last week as if i'm like get a life lady you got like 25 students how are you keeping this close track on aiden i don't know but also naomi naomi watts is being super weird and that's seeking in a way that isn't called back where she's just suffered what is it extremely imagine if your niece died like that and then three days later you're like well i don't know she's like life happens she's like

talking on the phone to her boss and like making alliterative comments about like calling him a prick or something like that and i'm just like your beloved niece just died brutally yeah anyway my question about the teacher is did she get those drawings be like wow these are fucked up and then sit on them for a week just in case someone died she was just waiting what did she know she had a special like aiden scary drawings folder like ready to go maybe she just had it for every kid and then she's like all right all these kids are creating absolute garbage. I'm just going to wait for it to seem like evidence. I had to check the synopsis because it was like, Naomi Watts is not acting like she and Amber Tamblyn were related.

True. Because she called him my son's best friend instead of her niece, which was just like, it was very bizarre also I was like oh this cousin of his who's also his best friend I did not make the connection that it would have been Katie because Katie is a teenager and Aiden is like I don't know seven so I'm like that happens with cousins does it what are you talking about when you're like best friends like oh that age difference thing. I mean, I understand that they would have been close, but like, I don't know.

The point is Aiden calls his mom by her first name. I don't like that. Yes. I feel like that is done. That was supposed to be scary, right? Or was that just sort of how they're, is that just what Seattle is like? I think we're supposed to be like,iden is creepy which he is i feel like i'm gonna disagree with the statement you made earlier i think this kid nails it like he is so off-putting in just the right way but is

he trying to be i don't i mean look this the kid from the ring is gonna take me to court now i'm gonna have to go to he's a lawyer who can represent himself. He's going to fuck me up. Yeah. Okay. So then Rachel and Aiden go to Katie's funeral. Katie's mom slash Rachel's sister. I don't even know if we learn that they're sisters, but I think so.

They're both blonde. I think we're supposed to. Yeah. learn that they're sisters but i think so they're both blonde i think we're supposed to yeah so she asks rachel if she could try to figure out what happened because doctors can't explain why or how katie died and then that's when we see the shot of katie's face and it's all disfigured and scary looking so and that's like pulled directly from ringu like that oh oh thanks the the japanese movie the sections of it i've seen because it's streaming for free on to be for all you to be heads out there uh you can watch it for free on to be right now and it's also on shutter yes it's on oh okay so if you have

if you have money it's on shutter and if you have to be shutter has like the entire ringu japanese series like all like seven no way movies or something oh no kidding i still haven't subscribed to shutter it's like one of my holdouts for for no reason i've got seven dollars i could do it do it you've got seven dollars and you've got seven days jamie so make it count dollar for each day baby i and and if you've only got seven days, Jamie. So make it count. Dollar for each day, baby. And if you've only got seven days to live, this is just becoming an ad for Shudder. But if you've got seven days to live, you can't blow it watching ads on Tubi. And there's so many ads on Tubi.

Also, I think you get a seven-day free trial when you sign up for Shudder. Speaking of seven days, Shudder should sponsor us. Clearly, we are good at it. And Joseph introduced it so smoothly into the conversation. Wow. And when you do watch Tubi, when I was watching Ringu, it was interrupted several times by the same Febreze commercial on a loop for seven minutes. So seven is really the number of the episode. Yeah, it is.

But the imagery in the first Ringu movie is so scary. So, so scary. I got maybe five minutes into Ringu and then I was like, I cannot. I simply cannot do this to my brain and my feelings. So I stopped. I respect that. My report from The Ring 2 is that it repeats the exact same scare of the teenager with a fucked up face at almost the exact same point in the movie.

Okay. Really? It basically starts the same way. And then it starts with two teenagers. One of them gets killed by the ring girl. And then Naomi Watts finds the kid and the kid has the face. Very similar structure. Does she care this time?

Or is she like still not worried about it? I mean, she, she like seeks it out this time. He, he's not related to her. He, he,

she like, she basically hears there's a teenager with a weird face and she's like, wait a second. I know this. I will travel. I like that gordon rubinsky this is just kind of his like warm-up lap before he starts directing every pirate to the caribbean movie like less than a year after the ring he's just directing jeffrey rush as a ghost and then a whole series of kind of terrible movies starring johnny depp because he went from straight from that to like was it ringo yes and then the lone ranger it was

just like that was his next 15 years yeah he which is um a different kind of curse i would say he did rango he should have been doing ringu whoa makes you think I was also trying to make a Rango Ringu joke but I couldn't get there so thank you Jamie for doing the work I I drank some cold brew I'm good wow okay so what happens next um Rachel now starts trying to investigate Katie's death and she talks to Katie's friends. Adam Brody is there. And he tells her about this tape that kills you when you watch it. He's in it for 45 seconds.

They just had some downtime on the OC or Gilmore Girls, whatever he happened to be starring on at the time. And he's like, sure, I'll be in the ring for seven seconds. Is it allowed to like Adam Brody? I hope so, because I like him. I hope he has not done anything bad. OK. I'm a fan.

OK. I just I'm like, if you've been famous for more than 20 years, it's chance that like the chances just it becomes a kind of a scary situation. But I know I love Adam Brody. Just not just never Google. Just never. Yeah. Never Google Adam Brody crimes. situation but i know i love adam brody just not just never google just never yeah never google adam brody crimes so then rachel pokes around katie's room and finds a stub for photos that she was getting developed so rachel goes and picks up the photos looks through them we see katie her

boyfriend josh and two other friends all on a camping trip. Everything seems normal, but then Rachel comes across a photo that shows all of their faces really blurry and distorted. So Rachel continues investigating and discovers that Katie, Josh, and the two other friends have all died on the same night and at the same exact time, 10 p.m. So scary. Very scary. Yes. It's scary yeah so then continue so then rachel goes to shelter mountain inn where the teens stayed on this camping trip in a cabin and the inn lends out vhs tapes and she notices one tape in particular on the shelf with no case. So Rachel snatches it. It's menacing. I wonder if people who didn't grow up with VHSs understands the menacing nature of an unmarked VHS tape. I don't know. I don't know. Let's ask Gen Z. Thoughts? I mean, we can get to

this at the discussion, but i just am fascinated by how much of this plot is built around technologies that not only are defunct now but they went defunct within like two years of this movie coming out right yes everything this movie depends on is gone two years later yeah this is maybe the last the last movie that I remember having a VHS related plot point. And they really, uh, I guess it, because this movie isn't as scary if it's a Blu-ray.

If it's a DVD. A haunted Blu-ray though. I mean, that's a ring in and of itself. That's a different kind of ring. A haunted DVD menu. Like there, well,

isn't there that horror movie called Vhs that came out oh what year did that come out there's a whole series of them they're excellent there i love i love those i feel like those are a little more like banking on like vhs nostalgia if i'm remembering because now i feel like gen z does know what vhs tapes are because everything is a nostalgia machine now so like there's vhs is on what it that's i'm like on stranger things like the kids are watching but this movie has it has vhs it has photo developing like the whole plot point of the photo developing she works for a newspaper landline she gets answering machine messages she takes photos with a digital camera like it's everything in this movie is gone so soon after it comes out she does google something she does but oh the interface but then she's like i gotta go i actually the encyclopedia

is more efficient she's like i need to go to the library and find a book called america's lighthouses and that's what leads her to the information she needs. Anyway, this is maybe right up there with one of my favorite research scenes in all of cinema because she uses Google for exactly one second and then she bails on Google and looks at a book full of lighthouses and gets the information she needs.

It rocks. Love it. So she has gone to the inn. She snatches the VHS tape with no case. Then she checks into cabin 12, which is the same cabin the teens stayed in. She plays the tape in the cabin. So we now, as the audience, see the entire tape. There's static, there's a ring of light, a ladder, a chair, a creepy girl with long hair a mommy looking in the mirror and then saying hello there hello there i hadn't re-watched the video itself in a long time and it did give me some comfort that watching it back as an adult it's goofy as noah says well we're about to meet noah but he's like it's very student film

and it's like yeah it is yeah it just feels like a little like a kid's haunted house it's like here's separate fingers yeah like it's very like here's some scary stuff you watch it in line for like a roller coaster and you're like oh no what's gonna happen oh i love that i i did crack up when the mom is looking at the mirror and then she turns around and then it cuts to like new scary thing it's just kind of scary vaguely menacing b-roll um yeah it's a bunch of mostly disturbing images i still found the tape a little scary but i'm a big old baby so she watches it and rachel is freaked out and right then the phone rings in the cabin she picks it up and it's a young girl's voice saying seven days that passes the bechdel test caitlin it passes she responds with gasp that to me counts

as a me that's a meaningful and is there a more meaningful exchange that is plot relevant ring seven days click come on i don't i don't think so i mean not to get ahead of ourselves but i think there's an even more meaningful scene that passes the bechdel test in this movie wow well yeah we'll we'll get there but is it well it passes it passes a bunch with amber tamblyn as well but okay we'll get there i mean literally the opening lines yeah yeah yeah okay so we cut to thursday aka day one rachel has noticed that pictures of her face are all blurry and distorted the way the teens faces were in those photos and then rachel goes to her friend noah played by martin henderson for help and she tells him about the tape and the four teens who have died he wants to see the tape and he watches

it despite rachel telling him not to then the phone rings for him but no one picks it up and rachel deletes the answering machine message um she wants to know who made the tape, where it came from. And Noah is like, okay, make me a copy and I'll help you figure all this out. So she makes a copy. Big mistake. Big mistake. You're not going to want to make a copy of the ring tape. Well, if you see it, you do want to make a copy.

I know. I know. But I'm on samara's side so i'm that's where i'm coming from sure don't make a copy of the ring i also love um here's a useless comment martin henderson's hair is so funny to me in this movie he's got a bit of a bob going on he's got a bit of a bob and he's got he's also has some kind of chunky highlights. He and Amber Tamblyn have sort of the same stylist. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's nice. It is. It is nice. So then it's Friday, day two. Rachel gives Noah the copy she made of the VHS tape. And he's like, why are the time code numbers all messed up? That's what's going to tell me where the tape came from.

And now I don't know. And it's like, I'm sorry, what are you talking about? None of that made sense to me. So he's like trying to figure out where the, who made the tape and where it came from. I don't understand how he would have been able to do that based on the time

code. Anyway, I hadn't thought very hard about that. No. Then Noah's assistant slash girlfriend comes in rachel's like i gotta leave and so as she's leaving she sees a ladder propped up against the wall the same ladder from the tape question mark i love his girlfriend she's she's a bit of a she's she's a little hot topic there's a little hot topic flavor going on there sure and naomi watts is like i have to get out of here so so a question to think about excuse me moving forward through the rest of this plot is at this point she has

copied the tape and shown it to someone yes a question is why does anything else in this movie happen just given what we learn at the end um it's a really really good question yeah i see your point thoughts my thought i i mean at this point even though the movie should end here it can't end here because we haven't gotten to brian cox so unfortunately the movie does have to continue. For that reason alone, it does have to go on. Yeah, my in world theory is that Samara does actually want someone to dig into her story and kind of recognizes that maybe this person is able to do it. That's sort of how I justify it to myself is that it kind of keeps happening, not because she hasn't fulfilled the curse, but because Samara is like, hey hey come visit my island and talk to my dad yeah right like she's

she's changing she's making the rules she can change the rules as she goes and she i mean ultimately samara wants she's just trying to go viral you know she's i was gonna say she wants a mommy but yeah she no she's trying to she's an influencer and she's trying to get followers. I believe it. I this movie does work for me on the on the mommy horror front. I feel like she just she just wants to be understood by an adult woman who's not going to push her into a well, for example. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so now it's day three saturday rachel

scrubs through the tape again does something that i also don't understand but she kind of moves the recorded image that she's able to see on screen kind of moves it to the side where there's another image of a lighthouse in one of the scenes so she has discovered this lighthouse in the tape and then which is not that's not how tapes work right like they're not like negatives where it's okay you could just scan okay right i have literally wrote down maybe that is how that works like i just like this i mean maybe if the if the original footage was shot in like panovision but the aspect ratio of the tv is only like four three maybe you can do some kind of buff she had really high tech she had great gear she's shooting in 16.9 but the tv

is only four three so i was like maybe but i do not understand and i think the like the movie's just like relying on the audience to assume yeah i guess this could maybe be a thing or just be like so focused on their own mortality that by that point they're like sure great fine i don't have time to ask these questions right Right. Yeah. I have to call my mom. So it's Sunday, day four. Now that Rachel has seen this lighthouse in the tape, she's trying to figure out where this lighthouse might be via a library book that I mentioned earlier called America's Lighthouses. I want that book.

She finds what she thinks is this lighthouse on a place called Moesco Island. And then she starts to piece some other things together. A photo of some people standing in front of this lighthouse includes a woman named Anna Morgan, who is also seen in the tape. Mrs. Scary. Mrs. Scary. Rachel then looks through some newspaper archives and discovers that Anna was a horseback rider, but a bunch of horses on this island died mysteriously. And then Anna Morgan started having hallucinations and then died by suicide. Then we cut to Monday, day five. Rachel has a scary dream

where she sees the little girl with dark hair this scene by the way points to my theory about what's happening here because what samara does in this dream is she shows her the hospital that they put her in it's it she's kind of pushing her in a a direction of information rather than just haunting her here right i mean that's how i've understood the movie that like samara wants people to and like you know you survive by making a copy because you know she wants the spread of this information to happen she wants to go viral as you said that's what i'm saying she i do i uh the forthcoming twist that it's like even when people know samara's story that does not quench her rage she's like i well now you know unfortunately um i still want to kill you but thank you for

hearing me out they like i uh something like about samara getting you all the information and then killing you anyways is just so um incredible she's like i gave you all the clues mr police but also you have to share the clue yeah mrs reporter but also you have to share the clues with other people the thing is like samara needs to at least wait for you know rachel to get to press like come on then that takes more than seven days in 2002 probably i don't know um okay so then rachel discovers her son aiden watching the tape the phone rings the whole thing she's like oh no now my son is going to die in seven days and then she calls noah and she's or noah calls her i think and she's like Noah he watched the tape and he's like who did and she's like our son and we're like twist alert Noah and Rachel made a baby together completely missed that I think at both times watching this movie did not realize he was the dad yeah it's such a useless

twist that I also forgot when I want but um but i was like oh okay well good for that creepy lawyer kid like well prior to that you see some scenes where rachel and noah have kind of weird interactions based on what you understand their relationship to be which is like right friends and maybe like colleagues or former colleagues. But then they like have these conversations where it's like, you think I'm a bitch and I think you're blah, blah, blah. And let's just, you know. That's how I talk to my colleagues. Yeah.

And then like the scene where his girlfriend walks in and it's a problem. And then she's like, grow up, Noah. And then she storms out and it's like, what is this relationship? And then you find out. Maybe he sired her creepy kid maybe that's what happened he got her pregnant and now she has a greg now she's stuck with this little greg yeah this creepy greg who calls her rachel oh my god for the yeah this little greg who won't stop first name assaulting her at any given opportunity like it's just okay so we get that twist then it's Tuesday day six the time and we still have an hour left of the movie at this point so Rachel goes to

Moesco Island where the lighthouse is on the ferry to the island a horse gets loose and jumps overboard um which is obvious watching it back but i i i did not know that was a cgi horse when i was 10 and i was so sad and scared and that's the image more than samar crawling out of the tv or amber tamblyn's scary head the horse jumping off the boat was where i was like i'm done i need to go home. Traumatizing. Yeah. Yeah. My wife joined me for this watch. And I actually I warned her ahead of time because there was just no way she was watching that scene. No go scene for her. It's upsetting. I mean, it's and it also establishes Gore Verbinski boat lore. You're like, now this guy knows how to shoot something on a boat. Soon there will be ghost pirates on boats. Wow.

Wow. Okay. So on the island, Rachel goes to speak to Anna's husband, Richard Morgan, who's played by Brian Cox. Logan Roy. Oh my gosh. What a treat. This is definitely the first time I've watched this movie in a post-succession world. And it's so fun to watch Lighthouse Logan Roy, whatever, electrocute himself. I do feel like he's kind of playing the same character both times.

A fun fact from the IMDb trivia is that he did not audition. They wrote that role for him. Oh, Brian. Well, he knocked it out of the park as usual what uh yeah what a weird role to write for someone specifically you're like you know what you would be great at brian cox being samara's killing yourself right you know what i can't wait to watch but but he does that scene always i mean obviously that scene was really really scary yeah when i was a kid but i didn't know that it was um one of our greatest actors uh doing it

yeah uh okay so rachel tells richard morgan that she thinks the videotape is a message from his his wife but he's not having any of this and he shoos rachel away as lighthouse guys are want to do sure yeah yeah meanwhile aiden is back home being completely neglected by his parent parents yeah no wonder he calls her Rachel. He barely knows her. He's drawing some creepy pictures over and over again. And Rachel calls him and he tells his mom over the phone that this little girl talks to him and shows him things. Apparently, this little girl being Samara. So Rachel then goes to a doctor on the island, Dr. Grasnick, who tells Rachel that the Morgan family adopted a daughter, Samara, after which Anna Morgan started hallucinating, seeing things, and she thought that Samara was making her have these hallucinations. Shortly thereafter, Anna dies and Samara was sent to a

psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, Noah is like back on the mainland investigating and he discovers more info on Anna Morgan and finds the cover of a different VHS tape tape but it's empty the tape is missing so he goes to look for it back on the island rachel goes back to richard morgan's house the door is open so she just like goes in and snoops around she finds the missing tape that noah was looking for and it is of samara so much tape antics deep in the second act. And it's all tapes, tapes, tapes. This movie is 90% people researching things. Yeah.

That's most of the plot. Exactly. And once you're not scared of the movie anymore, you're like, wow, this is a lot of busy work that they're doing. What was that? High risk busy work. What was that movie where they work at the Boston Globe and they're researching or they're like investigating priests? Yes.

Spotlight. Yeah. This movie is basically Spotlight. Okay. So she finds the missing tape and it is of Samara in a hospital room being questioned by a doctor. Samara is saying that really aggressively to the doctor. I love that.

The doctor is very unprofessional. He's like, Samara, we're here trying to figure out what's wrong with you. I'm like, that's not how you talk to a kid at a children's psychiatric hospital. I hope I know. I was like,

is this doctor a cop? Like what is happening? He's blowing it. So Samara tells the doctor that her dad doesn't love her and wants her to go away. And then, which I'm sure helps then richard morgan is right behind rachel as she's watching this tape and she's like you killed

samara didn't you and then richard hits rachel over the head and then he starts kind of carrying on about how samara is still showing him images, whispering in his ear, tormenting him, and then he electrocutes himself to death. I mean, the performance. He makes a meal of the electrocution scene. When they had to bring this movie from an R to a PG-13, apparently this was one of the scenes that they heavily cut.

This is a PG-13 movie? It it is and that was like a big thing this and then later the murder at the well were both radically cut to hit pg-13 i i do remember this is definitely one of those movies that like when it was released on like dvd there was like uncut versions right like there were other I vaguely remember that but I also definitely did not watch it again yikes um sorry I was trying to think of a joke because like rings have gems on them uncut ring uncut gems thoughts we're with it we're on our way we're on our way thank you thank you so much we're on a train to somewhere I think I didn't see this movie when it came out in theaters in 2002 because lord of the rings was coming out and i was like that's the only ring i'm interested in how badly do you think this movie suffered from

ring exhaustion right people are like we've had we've had enough rings from Lord of the Rings. That is very funny. Yeah. Okay, so Richard electrocutes himself. Then Noah shows up at this house on the island. He and Rachel go into the barn on this property. They discover a room where Richard apparently kept little Samara while Anna was having mental health issues. And then under the wallpaper in this room, they discover an image of a tree that was like burned into the wall.

And Rachel recognizes the tree. She's like, oh, it's at Shelter Mountain Inn where Katie and her friends camped and watched the tape originally. It's also definitely just the tree from the Six Feet Under opening credits. I have no idea if that's true. It just looks exactly like it.

It feels like it, though. They copy-paste it. Yeah, Six Feet Under would have been on already at that point, right? When did Six Feet Under start? I don't remember. I think it looks like the white tree from Gondor from Lord of the Rings, Return of the King.

Wow. We've got our ring head over here, folks. So then we cut to Wednesday, day seven. Uh-oh, it's the last day. The stakes are high. And it's hump day? Yeah, it is. All right, that's the end of the joke.

Rachel and Noah go to shelter mountain inn they go to cabin 12 where they discover a well under the floorboards then rachel is knocked into the well by some supernatural force noah goes for help and while he's gone the heavy stone lid kind of slides over the top of the well to trap rachel inside the well from this movie is on the campus of because of this movie was shot between actual seattle area and a few locations in our area in southern california and it was shot uh the well itself is from california it's a sea i think sea sun channel islands yeah okay yeah and one of our nation's worst boyfriends drove me there once um and it was really exciting and and I don't know if we're going to go on a field trip there, Jamie, maybe take some pictures, put them on Instagram. I'm willing it to. What if we peed in Samar as well is what I want to throw out there.

How hard would it be to pee in the well? Is it like, I remember it being, it's a bit, I mean, it has to be. It's like not, you can't see a building, you know. I watched a YouTube video. I don't think you can get to it. It's like not, you can't see a building, you know? I watched a YouTube video. I don't think you can get to it. It's behind a lot of fencing. No. As I mentioned to you when we were talking about this episode, I grew up 10 minutes from that campus.

And so living near one of the filming locations did not help things. Right. That you lived in the well, no less. Where the ring originates. Shocking that you lived at and the well no less the where the ring originates shocking that you lived shocking that you're still with us so so rachel is still in the well and while she's down there she sees samara in the well with her she grabs rachel and shows her like a vision of samara's mother anna morgan throwing samara into the well and then the last thing that samara ever saw was this ring of light right before the well was sealed shut with like the heavy stone lid then rachel finds samara's skeleton in the well and

she's like cradling it we cut to rachel out of the well apparently noah went to get help and saved her and then rachel realizes that samara was in the well for seven days before she died hence the you have seven days to live thing it's sad and it seems like rachel and noah will not die because discovering the truth about samara set them free right but then you check the runtime you're like oh no there's still 20 minutes right so then rachel and noah go back home rachel tucks her son aiden in and it seems like maybe rachel and noah are going to rekindle their romance wow this was just a long elaborate parent trap from weird kid Aiden. Oh, love it.

So the next morning, Rachel tells Aiden that she helped that little girl. And Aiden freaks out. He's like, you weren't supposed to help her. She never sleeps. This will keep going. God, that line is good. It's good. The line where he's like, you don't get it.

She never sleeps. And you realize what he means. Oh, that is just, I genuinely think that's great writing. It's very scary. So then we cut to Noah's place. Static comes on his TV. There's a shot of the well. Then we see Samara crawling out of the well and then crawling out of his TV. Meanwhile, Rachel is rushing to Noahah's place because she you know

realizes they're still in danger she bursts in and finds noah dead as hell static on the tv she's freaking out she burns the tape but she's like wait why didn't i die why did he die and i didn't what did i do that noah didn't do and then she realizes she made a copy of the tape because samara you know she just wanted to be heard she just wants people to know her story she wants to go viral so then she has aiden make a copy of the tape so that he won't die and then he's like but what about you know what are we going to do now we We have to show this to someone. Again, it's such a VHS based thing. You have to make a physical copy of the physical media and that will save your life. Yes.

Great. And that's how the movie ends with like, now they're like, oh my God, we have to keep spreading the story. The end. So that's the movie. Let's take a quick break and we will come back to discuss. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts

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I now have some thoughts. Do you want to share? Well, she immediately was like, I think it's about motherhood. And I'm like, I think they already have that. I think she's on to something. But her interpretation, having, we went through this whole thing last year when we had a kid, is, man, those first few months are rough. And so she thinks the idea of having a daughter and having her not be who you think she's going to be and putting terrible images in your head is a metaphor for postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety. Ooh.

I like that. There's definitely, I am glad to hear that because I was like, motherhood is definitely a theme in this movie, but it's like the way it's treated is kind of, I couldn't make heads or tails of it in certain moments. I like with Anna Morgan specifically, but I feel like maybe that's why we needed the ring too, to give us more information.

And then they made a third movie rings, which was about the birth father. I put Brian caught. Oh no. The lighthouse dad. We don't have to get into, I read the Wikipedia summary and I now there's an entire story to her birth. That like is why she's an evil child.

Whoa. This is where she, is she from the Seattle area or is she from hell um it's a not not to bring down the mood it's a bit of a bummer of a story she's like born because a priest sexually assaulted the mother and then oh my god tried to kill her and they gave her like a whole traumatic birth story well if there's one thing that movies like to do it's over explain why women are traumatized and revel in that trauma and be like isn't it so doesn't women's trauma make for such a good scary movie there's a lot of money in that turns out okay so the so I mean maybe that's a good

place to start I just the the background on this movie as we've already said it's a pretty close remake of a japanese movie from 1998 ringu which was based on a uh novel by koji suzuki which was influenced by a bunch of scary Japanese folktales. There's like two. And in all of the Japanese versions of the story, her name is Sadako Yamamura, which was rather lazily anglicized into Samara Morgan. She's also an adult in the Japanese movies, which seems like a major difference.

Yeah. Which, I mean, she's also very scary. I do feel like it's scarier when she's Lilo from Lilo and Stitch with her hair all messed up. And what's her name from Spirited Away? Wow. She really was on a tear there for a while. Now, should a small white girl have been performing those roles? Probably not.

Probably not. while now should a small white girl have been performing those roles probably not but probably not this i mean it is like the question with this remake is why does it need to exist when it's very very close to the japanese version and it because it is just a completely whitewashed uh version of a famous japanese story in english when it's like you could have just released Ringu with the subtitles and it would have worked just as well. Yes. Yeah. This is a movie. So normally for episodes, I have like pages of notes and thoughts that I've accumulated.

And I don't know if it's just because this movie freaks me out a lot and just makes my brain not work as I'm watching it. But the only thing I wrote in my notes is Aiden calls his mom Rachel. And that was my big takeaway. Which is a little scary. And it also just feels like kind of no disrespect to Seattle. But I'm like, I could just see kids in Seattle kind of just doing that and having that be a normal thing to do up there. They're just on like very curt terms with their parents.

They're peers. They're peers. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot to talk about with this movie, especially around the subject of like motherhood i feel like this movie and this franchise or at least ringu as well like kind of manages to subvert a lot of uh horror mommy tropes by giving rachel a really i mean like a really strong connection to the story because it's like she's investigating the death of her niece which she does which i keep forgetting because she I don't know if Naomi Watts was told

because I just like was not seeing the grief but whatever everyone agrees differently sometimes you have to if this movie was remade now it would be a podcast it would not be um she Naomi Watts would be playing a podcaster and um we would have to watch that yeah but yeah I guess I wanted to talk about how motherhood is explored because I feel like in a lesser movie sometimes in horror and just in movies in general it's like well of course she needs to like figure out what's going on with Samara because that is what a mother does and like there's this in this little mommy alert that goes off and inside you and you have to you know do the mommy thing I feel like we see that all the time in sci-fi

uh you see it in horror you see I mean you see it kind of across the board but the spoofy I feel like explains really well why Rachel's doing what she's doing and also she's she's like she's you know she's a single mom and um she and Aiden are on a first name basis. So she's not necessarily mother of the year. And I liked that. That's important representation. Yeah, I mean, I appreciated that Rachel's character is an active participant in the story in the way. I mean, it depends on what sub-genre of

horror you're examining I think slasher movies are maybe the worst at this as far as like well there's just going to be a bunch of horny teen girls and they're going to have sex and then they're going to get murdered and we do we do uh lose a horny teen right at the top of the movie we do yeah and yeah, female characters in slasher movies are just usually not allowed to be very active in terms of, you know, figuring out a way to escape or to fight back or anything like that. With, of course, the exception of the final girl, which is obviously very characteristic of the genre. But at least Rachel is, you know, actively investigating the mystery and choices she makes and discoveries she makes

push the story forward and ultimately, well, I wouldn't say resolve the conflict because the conflict is still... Samara, she doesn't sleep. She doesn't sleep. But what Rachel does allows her and her son aiden to survive thereby you know resolving that conflict so yeah i you know she's an active participant in the story which makes sense she is the protagonist that is how stories work i know

but that's not necessarily how horror moms are always treated true. One of my notes that I wrote down was, I really, just overall, I think this is actually a very well-written movie, just objectively. I think this movie does a lot of things right. And one of the things it does is it does a structure that horror movies almost never do. And I think it's a really good one,

which is it's like, it's a PI movie mixed with a horror movie. Like it's about a person solving a mystery, which is a super interesting way to structure. Usually a horror movie is about something coming to a person, but this is about a person coming to a thing. The only other one I can think of is the very good movie The Empty Man. Oh, I don't know that one.

It kind of got buried, but it's on HBO Max, question mark. But it, I mean, it's a movie that starts out feeling like a direct rip off of The Ring because it's about a similar, like you, something happens and three days later you get killed and a guy starts investigating, but then it ends up going a very, very different direction. But it has the same thing of like, tonally it's's a horror but structurally it's just a straight up private detective self in the mystery yeah that works for that worked for me for this movie and yeah it just means that like i guess when yeah when i was looking back on uh the legacy of of horror mommies it's usually like yeah like things are happening to them and they

are trying to avoid things happening but she i don't know she's she's doing all this stuff for so many reasons like she's uh trying to avenge her niece question mark although i am still convinced she doesn't care she's on the clock she's trying to save her son she's trying to save her baby daddy she's like trying to save herself there's all these different sort of factors and and there's not a ton of like uh well I guess when she goes into the lighthouse you're like probably don't go in there but there's not like the typical like don't go in there because you're acting irrationally in a very horror movie way like she's I don't remember feeling that way or or on their

rewatch either because you're like, well, yeah, she needs to she needs to go and she has to pursue the bad thing or. Yeah, I do appreciate that there's a compelling reason for her to investigate and like go into scary places and because she's like trying to solve the mystery. This won't be any spoilers, but I recently saw barbarian and in that movie the main character who is a woman keeps going back into the scary place and you're like but why she loves going into the scary place i had so much fun at that movie he just it was so fun it's literally the first movie i had seen in the theater since january 2020 it was the first one that I was excited enough about to be like all right I'll go on 11 a.m on a Monday good time to see a horror movie

truly oh that's that's so fun I I had such a blast yeah no no spoilers for listeners but highly recommend she does she is addicted to going down to the scary place. Yeah. But ultimately, when Bill Skarsgård answers the door in a movie, you aren't supposed to go into the house. Yeah. Haven't you seen It? Of course. Well, I also like have a huge Bill Skarsgård crush. I love.

I knew it. Pennywise, are you joking? Yeah. Look, Bill Skarsgård, I'm going to show up. I'm going to show up at the movie and I'm gonna love every second of it there's also okay last barbarian comment there's a scene in which one of the actors even though the movie takes place in between Detroit and LA inexplicably one of the main characters wears a hat from a Boston-based pickle company, and I cheered.

Grillo's Pickles. Grillo's Pickles. Where in the world of this movie did he get that hat? They're the pickles we buy at the supermarket. I mean, Grillo's Pickles, a Boston institution. Ultimately, when the big one hits, that's how my city will be remembered, is where Grilloos were hawking i used to get like this makes it sound like i'm actually 100 years old i used to buy they used to sell grillos

pickles like near the park street stop and you could just get a fistful of pickles to go loose pickles and then get on the train just some loose pickles on the train that's disgusting okay i'm learning so much i i also got excited about the gorilla's hat i'm so glad i was i was like it doesn't make sense for a character who's going between detroit and la but um look you a gorilla's hat it can be it can be anything you want it's versatile to go back to um the motherhood thing i think there is something really important to the fact that there's the twist that samara just is evil that there there is no thing you can do to make her not evil that she just wants to hurt people um because i think there is this just going a bit off personal experience here

there is this some of this horror to being a parent of there's only so much you can do to help shape someone like you do your best and you try not to fuck it up but ultimately they're going to become the person they become and i know somebody who's a parent who was like her older kid. She was like, yeah, he just is. Um, he's an asshole and I don't know what to do about that.

Like, he's just, he's just a huge dick. And like, I don't think, I think that's just who he is. And so there's this horror that like, yeah,

this person becomes part of your family but you you only have so much control over what kind of person you're bringing into your family and it's i just want to clarify but that my daughter seems great my daughter seems very cool i'm glad so far so good so far so good so far so good but like yeah this idea that yes there was a lot of problems with the way she mothered samara including throwing her in a well but samara also sucks samara was okay so we have some parenting notes so i do feel like there is this um and maybe i've this has just been on my mind because there is inexplicably been another entry into the orphan franchise recently yes where it's like kid

secretly old um but there is this uh sort of anxiety in movies around adopted children um and like oh what's which i i am not adopted i can't imagine if is super fun if you're an adopted kid watching the ring to be like oh no like i brought this kid into my home and something it's the most wrong child that's ever existed um and like drives her adoptive parents out of their minds and must be killed um okay so what wasn't clear to me was if samara was like turned out the way she was where she's like imprinting scary images into her adoptive parents minds because like her dad brian cox was like not wanting to have her because he says something like my wife was never supposed to have a baby you know

and she had all the anna morgan had all these miscarriages and i was like was he like doing like abusing his wife and like forcing her to miscarry like i wasn't sure exactly what was happening and then when like this baby did get adopted was he abusive toward the baby and that's why samara i wasn't sure how much of like a nature or nurture thing it was. To me, that wasn't necessarily clear enough in the movie. I don't even know how much it matters for this specific movie. It's not necessarily operating on a lot of logic, as most horror movies do not. Is this a ring to thing, Joseph? Yeah, I mean, I guess the sequels make it clear.

To me, it's obvious that she's evil. Just she's evil. That's sort of the ending twist is there's nothing you can do. She's just a monster. The sequels make that more literal. Like they specifically, like her birth mother tried to drown her because she was evil. Like she was evil from birth. Like, I think that's a, there's the scene where she's

being interviewed and he's like, um, you don't want to hurt people, do you? And she says, but I do. And I'm sorry. And it won't stop. And I think it's a very clever bit of writing because the first time you hear, I don't, you don't want to hurt people do you and she says but i do and you interpret it as but i do keep hurting people um and then in the end you they show her face and you realize she's saying but i do want to hurt people um right because she's bad to the bone i really okay so i've been thinking about this recently for an unrelated reason have a book with me right called lady killers it's about uh female serial killers but more so like the um the media narratives that tend to form around them

throughout history um and i do want to cover more uh women murdering uh and being evil kind of movies on the show first of all because they're fun to watch but also because um there is like i think it's like interesting that the ring franchise sort of goes into this territory of like needing to over explain the evil because around most actual quote-unquote evil women who have you know killed murdered burned etc there is always this kind of compulsion to be like but but why and like connecting it to motherhood or connecting it to like a kind of feminine explanation for why she would be driven to kill and sometimes that is there is some truth to that but sometimes people are just fucking evil. And there is not a highly

like, you know, socialized reasoning for it. And so I like that after like being kind of entrenched and stuff like that, the twist that Samara is just evil, super worked for me, because you get that whole narrative of like this kid had a really difficult life they were abused they had like their parents were way out of their depth they were murdered by their own mom all this horrible stuff and but uh and yet uh two things are true and she's also just evil and like wants to kill people and can't explain why and that's just like the reality of the world and I don't know I thought it was cool that it's like I like this is not a fully formed thought and so by the time this release releases I might feel different already but I do think it's like fun to see a character

like allowed to be evil without there being this like really intense trauma background explainer it's fun when people are just evil sometimes when you're watching a movie at least i think especially because in horror movies centering around men being the evil killer sometimes there will be like a backstory where it's like, this is how he got evil. And other times it's like, no, Michael Myers was just born evil.

Well, there's, there's some that's explored, right? Michael Myers is origin. I don't remember. I think, I think you're right though,

that it's kind of, even when they explore it, like he's just, it, he's very similar to Samara. Like they're both these kind of faceless entities that are just born evil and kind of haunt the world right watching this again i i think this is a really well done twist in a movie that is never talked about when people talk about very good movie

twists this one never comes up but it's the only one i can think of where the twist is the thing you think for most of the movie. Like for the most of the movie, they're like, Samara is evil. And then they're like, actually, she's just misunderstood. And then the twist is actually the first thing you thought was right. It's just right. I keep coming back to I just think the writing in this movie is very clever. The structuring of it is just very smart.

And if you're trying to like scare your audience that is like such an effective way to do it is like to get you all the way around to like empathizing with samar or at least sympathizing with her and you're like oh this poor kid and like i was trying to put myself in the 10 year old brain and as scary as the the story of the well in the seven days and all that shit like it's really scary but it is sort of comforting when you have the well and the seven days and all that shit. Like, it's really scary, but it is sort of comforting when you have the explanation and she's holding the skeleton. You're like, oh, okay, Samara's not going to be scary anymore.

But then guess what, bitch? She's going to be scary forever. She never sleeps. And yeah, and then it's like, okay, if you had considered leaving this movie without being absolutely, like, afraid forever. Yeah, like you're saying, just like the takeaway is that some, some evil is just like truly unstoppable and irrational.

And that is the scariest thing in the world is just that people are irrationally evil and want to hurt you and they can't even tell you why. You can't therapy them out of killing you to be fair i think that that doctor did a real bang up job of of samara yeah yeah he's like samara what the fuck is wrong with you why doesn't brian cox like you although question like was that just one of the more realistic scenes in the movie right right because i mean it's also not to be like brian cox is i'm just like what what year are these samara like what year does this take place in um i know that like it takes place in the current day in the main narrative but it just

seems like samara's story is so old-timey and all of the videos are so old-timey and brian cox is like old and then you're just like when and anna morgan and all of the videos are so old-timey and Brian Cox is like old and then you're just like when and Anna Morgan always kind of is dressed a little old-timey like almost Victorian era they look like they're like pioneers yeah like but but then you're like well Brian Cox isn't that old that seems maybe a little mean they figure out at some point that Anna Morgan died 28 years ago I think is what okay okay said so it would have been in like the 60s or 70s i can't math right now also has brian cox just not aged since this movie or i had the same thought isn't that like that's kind of a good scenario if you're an actor where

you're just like okay i'm in my old era so let's just try to like hold this let's hold the line and like not look and then at some point I feel like in a couple years he's allowed to look really old and that's the final act is just like great actor objectively crusty at the edges so okay so but this all the Samara stuff happens sometime in late 60s early 70s from what i understand i i do i do agree with you joseph that like the i mean of of what i've like child psychology uh certainly and the further back you go uh there's a lot of blamey shame weird stuff that goes on so it's not like unfortunately it's just childhood psychology it's like adult yeah but like especially if you're little samara i just she could have she could have used a gentler touch i'm like man you're asking for it you're asking to like die in seven

days uh quick aside i am seeing on the wikipedia page that chris cooper appears in this movie as child murder uncredited those scenes were cut i have him yeah i did you read about this i i have information on that please please give me the rundown on why esteemed actor chris cooper appears as child murder uncredited his His character existed entirely to answer the question. It was like the main question my wife had, which is, wait, who did they give the tape to at the end that the kid made a copy of, which the movie just doesn't answer. But originally, the movie opened with a scene in which Chris Cooper playing this creepy child murderer is like, I found God and I'm good now and you have to help clear my name. And she's

kind of ignores him and then he doesn't appear for the entire rest of the movie. And then at the end, when they need someone to give the tape to, they give the tape to him because he deserves it. They cut it. That's kind of satisfying. Test audiences had the reasonable question of

we don't understand why Chris Cooper is in this movie and then not in it for the entire rest of the movie. It is weird because it's like, I mean, I and I do like when movies do that when they just bring in like a famous actor. And this is kind of like peak Chris Cooper to like American Beauty came out a couple years before. This is also the year he's in adaptation like he's he's really in his bag and he also happens to be child murder uncredited which like i mean i i i do appreciate i was like okay he's not he's he's not too you know there are no small roles there's just child murder uncredited and then part of the viral i did a lot of imdb trivia reading i'm sorry part of the viral campaign for this movie was they made a fake website that was like by this guy telling the story of the ring

from this character who they ended up cutting from the movie well what a waste of time but that's so fun i love that i want i know actually I don't want a whole movie about Chris Cooper being a child murderer I take that back uh but I like I like that he was that he was technically in this movie that's that's a treat that's comforting to know yeah I don't again this movie just breaks normally if I'm watching a movie for the podcast, I'm like, I turn on my analytical brain and I'm like, I have so many thoughts and, but not, not today. I don't know. This movie, there is, what I like about this movie is it does, it has a lot of things that a lot of horror movies has, but it just does it well. And in a way that uh makes

more sense to me than usual like you have like i guess naomi watts technically counts as a final girl but she's also got a final son she's not like like you said joseph she's not running from something the entire time she's actively pursuing it and it's like not in an irrational horror way it's in a all these ways that make sense way you do have like the creepy child but you get kind of like a two punch of like you understand why the child is creepy but also you don't have to really understand why the child is creepy she is just inherently creepy and that's her whole thing um and then creepy child number two in aiden right and then the ultimate twist is that he's going to work for the u.s government and that's a bit scary and we don't have to feel great about that

i don't know i don't you know what are his politics i couldn't they're not listed on his wikipedia page who's he voting for we don't know good question that should that should be on everyone's wikipedia page because it's a lot of what we want to know it's just like who's this guy i'm just like should i bother should i get should i care there i did find out uh here's a jump scare my favorite cast member of the chronicles of narnia movie is now a huge influencer in the in the conservative party in england do i know i mean given chronicles of narnia that doesn't surprise me i know but i was really rooting for skandar keens or whatever the fuck is not skandar you know but indeed skandar wow anyway my last thought on samara that um i this is another thing I didn't catch back when I was being terrified at 14 or 15, whatever it was, is what she's actually doing when

she kills people, which seemed kind of vague the first time I saw it. But I realized this time they actually pretty clearly lay out the mechanism of how she's killing people. Yeah. Cause her whole thing is she just puts scary images in people's heads and they die of a heart attack. So that's just, she crawls out of her TV and she makes you think of scary things until you have a heart attack,

which once you think of the mechanism, it actually becomes a little less scary. Yeah. But, and especially, and it's like, well, it's on you.

If you, when you, when you rewatch the tape, I'm like, well, if you're that, if you're so scared of that tape that your heart explodes, I don't know what to tell you,

buddy. It's, it's mostly b-roll um i don't think i even can made that connection oh because yeah um rachel's sister question mark slash katie's mom is like the the actual grieving one yeah right she's like yeah katie died from a heart attack but she was 17 like in in good health otherwise like why did this happen i did not connect that either and the creepy face is like i guess them being scared to death so they end with the like right because both times we see her do it they flash every frame from the cursed tape as they die which i think is supposed to be like her implanting those images i don't it just was like way more they die which i think is supposed to be like her implanting those

images i don't it just was like way more logistical than i think i remembered it being where i'm like oh they they like laid out how she's killing people yeah i did not make that connection no no trace she it's all psychological torture um and then it's on you it's still very scary to me even though you're like wow you thought about a ladder too hard and then you died. But it's still scary. Yeah. Does anyone else have thoughts on the Ring expanded universe? I guess.

Yeah. I mean, again, since I came in with broken brain too scared to have you know thoughtful analysis but upon you know reflecting and you know from this discussion it's a it's a female character at the center of a horror movie in which she is far more active than female characters tend to be in the horror genre you have a female character who is the antagonist who doesn't have like a gendered backstory the way that that like kind of revels in like girlhood or womanhood trauma at least not in this installment apparently right right um yeah i guess that gets explored further but in in this

if you just isolate the first movie it's just like yeah a female character who is evil in the way that male characters are allowed to simply be evil uh without any kind of gendered backstory so i guess that's good question mark i don't know how i feel about it but i also you know a subversion i guess i was also kind of like ready to go into it being like uh i don't know like because i sort of always forget that noah is a character in this movie but i'm not mad about it he does i like i i was sort of whenever a a new male character is introduced in the same job as like the the woman protagonist i'm like oh no now he's just gonna start doing things and she's not gonna be allowed to do any more things because that will happen in movies

sometimes but uh that doesn't happen here like they're just sort of uh there's a lot of clerical work involved in this investigation and she needs another set of hands and uh you know like he uh he dies ultimately so i was like well you know and she had the foresight to be like noah don't watch this tape you might die and he's like pish posh i'm watching it he's like what am i a scaredy cat and then he thought about a ladder so hard his heart exploded. I don't know if there's a conversation to be had around, how did other people feel about the reveal that like Rachel and Noah were like former lovers

and they had a son together and then they start to kind of rekindle their romance toward the end. I don't know. I think you could argue that that feels kind of wedged in or maybe that's just an appropriate piece to the story. I don't really have a thought about it one way or the other. Because, again, I'm too busy being scared about the latter.

I'm too scared. I mean, I literally did not notice that. Right, right, right. I think I was so focused on the scary bit, I totally did not notice that aspect of their relationship it's like it's bare yeah I think it's like it I think you're right that it could very easily be cut and change basically nothing because the kid doesn't seem particularly affected by it like just no one seems affected by that revelation and then the movie just keeps going so it just in my mind I'm like was that just like a studio note and then they're just like but we're not changing the rest of the script we just have to say that noah's the father but he's only got like two days to live anyway so

um well in the way that like female characters it's rare to see a female character existing in a movie especially as the protagonist if she's not also involved in some kind of romance yeah but there's not like a love interest but again it's it's barely noticeable for some members of the audience so maybe it's not a big deal yeah an interesting thing about the gender dynamics here is that uh in the novel this is based on which i have not read but i just read the wikipedia of it most of the roles are gender swapped it's the the protagonist is male the noah character is female and instead of a son he has a daughter interesting so just everyone swapped and then sadako is it actually intersex in the novel okay interesting okay huh i don't know what any of that does to

the meaning of the story but it is just what it is yeah yeah right i guess it's like i mean as much as i would like more intersex characters in movies i feel like samara is maybe not an excellent candidate especially because she's the villain extremely evil i think that could load some rough meanings to this movie yeah i i am i think the the this movie's primary uh crime is that it was made kind of to just whitewash an existing japanese movie that is so similar like it's there are like a lot of shot for shot moments um between the two movies but nevertheless nevertheless, Gore Verbinski persisted. And that's feminism, baby. Yeah. I have no... I think that's it for me.

Yeah. I mean, this movie is hard to talk about because we're all afraid of it. Is what I learned today. Because I'm like, objectively, I'm like, okay, listeners are going to be like, no, but there should be a shoehorned in romance you're

like yeah but I was scared as my response and it's like okay the horny teenager died immediately I'm like yes but in my defense I was so scared when that happened and so I can't possibly have a cogent discussion about it because it was scary to me yeah um to advertise shutter again they have I haven't watched this yet but they have in japan they made sadako versus and i don't remember her name but the girl from the grudge so it's a straight up like a freddie versus jason movie but it's the ring girl and the grudge girl scary little girls and i i read the wikipedia it's like them fighting over who gets to haunt a house it sounds incredible i have to watch that rules i still

haven't um seen the grudge because my yeah i was just like no you're not doing this to me again i refuse to be a part of this scary little girl narrative as a scary little girl myself um i feel like the scary little girl community has been absolutely decimated by samara and the grudge girl yeah okay yeah as as as a 10 year old who did not brush her hair we were really in the trenches during these years yeah these movies but i do want to watch the grudge is that does the grudge hold up in any way shape i've never seen i've never seen it yeah wow okay Wow. Okay. Wait, come back next year. After the ring, I couldn't do it. I was like, absolutely not. I love when we have a guest that comes on the show like once a year for a very particular

kind of, we have a guest who comes on the show specifically to cover the Santa Claus franchise, for example, Grace Freud. And she's gotten so good at talking about so come back next year with another scary little girl for me oh god that's not the nation i want to end up in and then that will just appear on your wikipedia page one day um yeah i think that's all i have to say about the ring um this movie yeah does pass the bechdel test it and as you pointed out earlier joseph immediately between becca and katie who are talking about a videotape well first they're talking about like how many television rays

pass through our body they have a really interesting conversation about like being afraid of tvs just like right off the bat and then they do talk about katie's boyfriend josh and like if she if katie fooled around with him or not so they have to establish that she's that she's a horny teenager who deserves so that you don't feel bad when she dies right that's just canon and then they talk about the tape uh and then later on rachel and dr grasnick speak about samara and anna morgan and then also rachel talks to her sister about oh yeah katie's death like there's it it passes and rachel talks to samara and samara goes scary images and then in the biggest win for feminism i believe the mother murdering a

daughter scene passes the bechdel test yes okay this is actually a feminist text now that we're now that we're getting down to the nitty-gritty women are talking about all sorts of you know women murdering women mothers hating their daughters uh aunts actively not giving a shit what happened to their niece when her heart exploded earlier this week question mark like it's just there's a lot of women when women are talking to each other it does look as we've talked about in the last 500 years that this show has been on the air, it doesn't need to be a pleasant pass. It can be a mean, aggressive, evil pass. Ring, ring, seven days, click, gasp.

That passes. That's a pass. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. So the ring feminist text. How about our nipple scale, though, where we rate the movie on a scale of 0 to 5 nipples. Nipples being kind of the same shape as a ring when you think about it um i guess uh and and uh that scale of course is based on how the movie fares when examining it through an intersectional feminist lens um i truly don't even know where to begin rating this movie because again i had

no analytical thoughts i only had i don't like that this movie is making me feel scared you're just screaming and crying yeah yeah so um i'm gonna go like two and a half i'm just like oh let's just go down the middle yeah why i don't know maybe even three I don't know why not three and the answer is I don't know the answer is ring ring you have seven days to live I think I'll go two and a half just to split down the middle because that's what rating I give a movie when I have no idea how to analyze it. Yeah, no, as we've discussed, there's interesting things that the movie seems to subvert. But I also, I don't know how to like, I don't know how to analyze a movie that doesn't operate on logic the way that horror movies tend not to operate on much logic. So it just kind of breaks my brain i don't

really know the movie isn't doing anything like overtly like reductive or harmful as far as i can tell or maybe it is i have no idea i feel like ultimately yeah it's the if we're uh pitting this movie against other movies of that era, the early 2000s is such a fucking cesspool. Oh, yeah. And so this movie managing to effectively subvert some stuff and just have a really strongly motivated central character that is a mother but is not strictly defined by motherhood,

which I feel like is kind of hard to find in this genre a lot of times. In fact, there's only a handful of scenes where you even see her interacting with her son. She's mostly out investigating. I would argue she's like not an awesome mom. But also, we're not parents and she's a single mom and she doesn't exist. So there's a lot going on. Yeah, yeah, I feel like this i i don't know and and this movie just does the smart thing of just having a lot of different women who are a lot of different ways and so yeah it's like not making any sort of i feel like prescriptive statement it is saying something about motherhood but honestly i don't know what it is no what yeah i feel like this is going to be one of those episodes where our listeners are like i can't believe you didn't talk about this obvious thing well we were scared we were too scared and that's

my real defense we're screaming and crying and we only have and we can't we we won't get your message we won't get your emails because we'll be dead because um um yeah if you want to reach me give me a call ring ring i'm gonna give it three nipples and and and five rings oh and no seven rings seven and which is an Ariana Grande song what is that everything's connected um okay yeah I'm gonna give it seven rings three nipples I'm giving all my nipples to Samara because I'm honestly rooting for her to get Naomi Watts's ass and she doesn't I'm honestly rooting for her to get Naomi Watts' ass. And she doesn't. I'm rooting for Samara to go viral and get one million followers or more. I will give the movie two and a half nipples and seven days.

And I'll give all of that to Becca, the other teen from the opening scene who is hospitalized because of the trauma of seeing her friend who... Explode. Died. Yeah. The end. Joseph, what about you? Well, on one hand, I think this is a very good movie. I think it's well written and well made.

On the other hand, I hate it. And it ruined, it like made my life worse for several years after watching it in a very real way. So I think I'm also a solid three nipples. Just like very good movie. I loathe it and wish it hadn't been made. Yeah. Gore Verbinski on notice for this one. Yeah. And not yeah and not well whatever we don't have time to talk about gore verbinski also behind the scenes it is worth saying there are uh it's mostly men

behind the scenes mostly white guys there is a uh female producer on the movie but that was about all i was able to find and uh you gotta you gotta dock it for being a whitewashed remake for no reason right that said this movie ruined it sounds like everyone on this zoom calls life uh and continues to do so and and this is why horror is the genre i engage with the least i do not like movies that, that I feel punished by watching them. Oh, I love it.

And I feel very punished. I do. I hate, I do not like to be punished. I went through all this and then, yeah, now like the reason I bring up shutter is because it's the only streaming service I use basically anymore.

Like I almost never watch a movie unless it's a horror movie anymore. Fascinating. I've been really horror pilled in the last five years. I am excited for Malignant, which is coming out on the Matreon very soon, or maybe just came out. It's coming. Malignant.

I love that movie. The best. The best. James Wan, undisputed genius. Love him so much. Yes. So Joseph, thank you so much for joining us.

Yes. Thank you for having me. You know, solidarity in all of us being tormented by this movie once again. Let's check in in a week. Yeah, seriously. Where can people follow you and check out your stuff online? Plug away. Well, I make a podcast called Welcome to Night Vale, which is at welcometonightvale.com. And there's also info about we make a bunch of other shows. Most I also write books. And I have

a number of books out that you can find at bookstores, most notably for this season. I don't know when this episode is coming out. But I have a novel about Halloween called The Halloween Moon. Oh, yeah. That actually takes place. It takes place in Camarillo, where The Ring was filmed. No way. And it's a middle grade novel about a little girl who loves, not a little, she's a 13-year loves halloween until one year halloween doesn't end and it just is halloween forever um so that can be found at bookstores and is a good read

for the season cool check that out for the samara in your life uh thank you so much for coming on joseph like i just such a big fan of all of your work and it's one of the reasons that i wanted to do podcasts um so in a way you've committed a crime wow and how dare you and yes come back for the grudge next year do i have to this is the curse we place on you yeah you are doomed to return to the bechtel cast every year to cover a different scary kid movie. And then you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Bechtelcast. You can check out our Patreon at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast where we cover two bonus episodes a month.

And you also have access to the entire back catalog. This month we are doing Malignant, as we mentioned. And Final Destination 3, three baby the scariest one the one that i liked the most and apparently you liked the most because our matrons voted for that yes indeed you can also uh get some merch over at tpublic.com slash the bechdel cast it's beetlejulejuice season. Tis the season to talk about if Beetlejuice comes wet scabs or dry scabs. Something to always be having on your mind. And ultimately, I think our most impactful contribution to the discourse.

Yeah, indeed. So, and with that, uh, ring, ring, ring,

ring, uh, hello and goodbye. Click. Perfect. Stuck the landing. Bye. Bye. ring ring ring ring hello and goodbye click perfect stuck the landing bye bye Daphne Caruana Galizia

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