Headscratchers / The Ring

• What if you try to push Samara back into the TV?
  • The Ring Two provides somewhat of an answer; Rachel locks hands with Samara and gets pulled inside.
  • What the above troper said. But I think Samara wanted Rachel to be her mother-figure. If Rachel was someone else Samara probably wouldn't let her touch her and instead kill her on the spot.
  • This actually happens in the Rasen TV series, and it works! Then again, the character who does it is not actually under Sadako's curse, and Sadako's powers are widely inconsistent in that series.
• Can you just tape over Samara with American Idol? Sure, you might die, but you'd remove Samara's evil forever..t.
  • You cannot. In the American version Katie explains that her friends tried to use the tape to record a football game. When they tried to play the tape, the "game wasn't there, it was something else".
  • Slightly different circumstances, but in the original book, the teenagers at the cabin were actually able to tape over the very end of the video. This also happened to be the part that explained how to break the curse...
    • The second novel Spiral elaborates further and explains that this actually made the curse even worse. By removing the escape clause for the victims from the tape, the curse no longer had a means to spread itself causing it to mutate, taking on a new and even deadlier form.
  • Rachel does seem to be able to destroy the tape, burning the one she watched in the first film and another one in the second. But the first time, she's already copied it and showed it to Noah, so she's spared from the curse - so we can assume it balances out.
• What exactly does Sadako mean when she asks Mai "Why were you the only one saved?" Is it an Ironic Echo of when Reiko asked that at the end of the first film? What does it mean?
  • She's probably asking why Mai and Koichi were allowed to escape the well whilst she was down there for thirty years and no one came to save her.
• How many people even have VCR players now? And how many people will have VCR players ten years from now? Soon somebody's going to just receive Samara's tape and toss it because they can't even play it.
  • In the novel series by Koji Suzuki, Sadako figures out a way to spread to other forms of media... starting with the report that one character makes about the Ring tape... and the published book... and the movie...
  • And let's not forget about the many VHS converters out there.
  • This question becomes the main premise of the film's second sequel Rings, where Samara digitalizes her video so that it reaches the Internet and distribute to multi-digit numbers of people.
• They really didn't think out the whole, "Watch the tape, and a week later a crazy bitch comes out of your TV and kills you" thing, did they? I mean, what if, on the seventh day, you're camping or something, nowhere near a TV? Or, what if you had watched the tape at a friend's house, and didn't actually own a television? Yes, I know how absurd that would be, but these are hypothetical questions, OK? With hypothetical questions, I could suggest any situation, such as, if a dog watches the tape, does it turn into a gorilla? So, anyway, how about those Red Sox? They sure a baseball team, aren't they?
  • Speaking of which, what if you went to a baseball game on the seventh day? You know one of the stadiums with the super large screens?
    • In that case a twelve-story-tall Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl climbs out and gets you.
  • Does it matter if it gives you panic attacks?
  • Weren't a lot of kids in a car among the first casualties (in the original anyway)? And don't you "die of fright?" I assume if you're not near a TV she either just appears or you are overcome with a fatal sense of non-specific terror.
    • You put it well: in the original. In the remake, it does seem that Samara can only come from inside a TV, due to crappy writing or adapting, whatever. I think there is a trope for these cases where they don't seem to realize the Fridge Logic caused by a simple decision on the storytelling (e.g., all the deaths on-screen happen with a television).
    • Not true. Rings (appearing on the Ring Two unrated edition DVD) has the scene where Jake smashes the TV, and Samara comes out through the shards of glass, meaning she can come out through reflective surfaces.
    • But isn't that scene a vision one of the characters experiences? Is it actually confirmed anywhere if she actually can do the things seen in visions and dreams also in the "real" world?
    • Really? Oh...dear. Well, there's another reason not to watch the remake. (Honestly, how unnecessary! And all the deaths? Saving the revelation till the end is part of the point!)
    • Actually the death of the kids in the car is specified in the remake - they lost control of the car and crashed. The conventional fan explanation is that the image of Samara appeared on the windscreen.
    • Which... takes some of the mystery out of it. Part of the point in the original film was that it was strange because they died in a car that was both locked and parked.
    • Maybe the car was in a drive-in theatre (haven't seen the original)?
    • You got the wrong idea. The revelation is still saved till the end. The OP was just noting (inaccurately; see above) that there's always a TV near the victims. I really don't see any difference in clarity between the original and remake when it comes to Sadako's killing methods — the details are for us to hash out. Don't let this or any other second-hand evidence put you off watching the remake. It's still Ring through and through, and still scary as hell.
    • In a deleted scene, it turns out that the owner of the cabins watched the tape, and he is found dead in a boat in the middle of the lake. Samara's powers and apparitions do seem to be based more on water and reflections than TV, so she probably manifests out of the nearest reflective surface (like Sadako did).
    • Right, this troper's mistake (didn't like the movie anyway). Still, it doesn't actually solve the problem of specifically stated conditions for death.
    • Actually, there was a TV involved in the Shelter Mountain innkeeper's death. It was the first thing Noah noticed that eventually led to him locating the innkeeper's body - it even had some residual water in front of it that Noah stuck his finger in. It's implied that the innkeeper fled down to the boat on the lake in an attempt to escape Samara. There's even a set of bloody footprints on the dock that parallels Noah's own death scene.
    • The "water and reflections" part is probably the main reason. Japanese myths are pretty big on the concept of "reflections," especially mirrors. Mirrors supposedly enable a person to see into the otherworld.
  • What if you go blind during the one-week interval? And why am I thinking about a Toph vs. Sadako/Samara match?
    • On a similar note, what if you're already blind, or simply not looking at the TV when its playing the tape? Can it curse you if you only hear it play? If you're asleep on the couch in the same room as someone watching it, does the curse still affect you?
    • People don't seem to be affected unless they actually see the tape. After all, in the opening sequence of The Ring 2, a girl sits right in front of the TV while the video is playing. This is well within hearing range (and-ahem-grabbing range), but her eyes (and only her eyes) are closed. She remains physically unnaffected, even though Samara apparently crawled right out of the tv and attacked the boy she was with (who had watched the film).
    • It's also implied by the first film that the tape affects people through the eyes in some manner. They show a shot of Rachel's iris contracting just after she watches the tape. It contracts again just before Samara shows her what happened at the well and sets her free of the curse.
    • If it were up to me, yes. Sadako doesn't seem like the type to be generous about that kind of thing. Even if you're just in the room when she comes for someone else, she'll drive you insane and use you to deliver messages. And if we're counting the Japanese sequel Rasen, that's just the beginning. She can curse you in hundreds of ways and never quite lets go even if you pass the curse on.
    • True about her not being generous. There's a scene in the Japanese sequel, Ringu 2, that shows how a friend of one of Sadako's victims from the first movie got insane - she opened the door to the friend's room and saw some of the getting out of TV thing. IIRC, she started to affect the TVs around her, which scared people who watched the TV.
    • Why didn't anyone try using the VCR controls to run through the taped scenes backwards? Sure, it might not do jack-squat to reverse the effect, but it's gotta be better than just counting down the hours till you die.
    • What good would that do? If you've already watched it, you can't "rewind" it to get more time. Everyone in the novel, movie(s), and remake(s) played with the tape by fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing, printing, and it didn't affect their scheduled death one bit.
  • It should be noted that what actually kills people in the novels is different to the movie adaptations; its revealed that Sadako's will to live mutated itself with the viral information of smallpox (which she had contracted right before her death), the tape being used as a medium for the new virus to infect others in the hope that it's existence will propagate and continue its mutation. People die from this virus in seven days time unless they allow it to be "birthed" into a new medium.
  • At the beginning of The Ring Two Samara pops out of the body bag to give her "Mommy" a hug, so who knows?
  • OK, so. You watch a video tape and seven days later a crazy bitch comes out of the TV and kills you - fine. But what if the clocks go forward/backwards on one of the days? Do you lose/gain an extra hour (e.g. when daylight-saving time begins or ends)? What if you change timezones on one of the days, does that in/decrease your time? Do leap days count? What if the calendar changes during the countdown and you're "fastforwarded" further than your remaining time (e.g. when crossing the International Date Line)? Are you instakilled, does the counter reset, what? The more you know~
    • Scary Movie 3 spoofed that question, with Sidney haggling over whether she meant seven business days and whether holidays counted. (They didn't.)
    • Crossing a timezone/fiddling with a clock/flipping a calendar page doesn't affect anyone's actual age, so the curse probably would track how long it had been since someone watched the tape by judging that person's own time. Seven days worth of time out of their life, if you will.
  • What happens if you put the TV on a balcony or a roof so that its screen faces out of the building? Or put two TVs to face each other in a way there would be no distance between the screens? How does she come out if the TV is mounted on a wall and there's no table/shelf/whatever she could put her hands on? Does setting traps in front of the TV work? What if you turn it off while she's emerging? Or if you simply block or cover the screen? Or rotate the TV set in a way its screen directly faces a wall or floor, leaving no room for emerging?
    • None of that would do jack. Put two TVs in front of each other? She'll push one out of the way and come out the other, or come out from a different surface. No surface outside the TV for her crawl out of? She'll still crawl out, fall down, and get back up; simple as that. Traps? She's a ghost, not another physical living person. Block or covering the screen? She'll still push it out of the way. Turn it off when she's emerging? People have disconnected their TVs and it still didn't work. What makes you think that hitting the power button while she's coming out will work? Facing a wall or floor? Again, she'll come out through a different surface.
    • Coming through different surfaces might happen in the Japanese (and Korean, don't know) versions, but I don't think it was confirmed in the American movies that she can emerge from other surfaces than television screens (there are some dream/vision scenes where that happens, though, but they're just dreams/visions and to my knowledge we don't know if she can do that in the "real" life). I thought turning off the television might work, because in the beginning of the first American movie, one of the characters unplugs a TV which doesn't turn on after that. Of course, it is possible she never actually intends to use that particular television set right then but just wants to mess with her victim a bit before killing her (but if that's the case, how does she know about that other TV?).
    • In the new movie Rings a woman pushes the tv down to the floor but Samara just pushes it back up again. If you are trying to make her fall off the balcony then Samara probably wouldn't leave the tv and just come out somewhere else.
    • And here's the thing - most of her victims don't have this Machiavellian foresight to game the system. Anyone who knows that she kills by coming out of the TV won't be able to tell, because by the time they know she's already killed them.
• What if you don't answer the phone? Or what if your roommate, who is in the kitchen having some spaghetti-os answers? Would ghost-girl ask them to put you on? Or just leave a message?
  • "Okay let's see, in seven days she'll fry...oh I see, DIE, okay then, I'll tell her.".
  • You die of smallpox. Which is what actually causes the deaths, all the other effects are artefacts of the disease fused with Sadako's freaky powers.
    • Not... really. In the novel, the death curse really is the result of the fusion of the resentment and desire for reproduction of Sadako and the smallpox virus... but the symptoms of the deaths don't much match smallpox — it can cause heart failure, but also has other symptoms that'd be nearly impossible to miss; most noticeably, a rash of large pseudo-pustules. You literally die of fright — The Sadako/smallpox fusion uses a reflective surface nearby to show you a vision so terrifying it stops your heart and kills you — for Ryuji at least, it was a vision of himself as an incredibly ancient, decaying husk of a man, at least a hundred years older. We never get to see what the other victims saw, so if it's the same for everyone, or tailored specifically to the victim isn't clear.
    • The death in the novel is actually caused by virus induced tumours in the heart or arteries (I can't remember which) and the fear is just secondary to that, it is the blocked bloodflow that causes heart attack and death.
    • That must be one of the later novels — I've only read the first one, so far, and what was stated above is basically what it suggests. Either way, smallpox doesn't cause tumors — although there have been reports of malignant tumors forming in scars left by smallpox or smallpox vaccinations — so it's still not really consistent with smallpox. So... yeah. Apparently, it's a different virus causing the problems. Even moreso, given some of the stuff discussed below.
  • Noah watched the tape but did not answer the phone when it rang for him. He heard the phone ring and asked Rachel if she was going to get it. He still died.
  • This is specifically addressed in the movie. The boyfriend doesn't get the message, but later a clerk says, "You're going to die", referring to the effects of smoking cigarettes, but the implication is that that constitutes delivery of the message.
    • That was the movie indulging in a bit of Black Humor at Noah's expense. There's nothing to indicate that the clerk is "passing on" the message.
    • There was nothing to indicate that the clerk wasn't passing on the message too, why can't it be both?
    • This troper would like to vouch for the message theory: whilst one could see how it could be funny in a dark way, the general tone of the film, the attempted evasion of the message and Noah reaction to the comment does give the feeling that it was intended as a subtle, alternative delivery of the message, so it's probably at least both (humour and delivery).
  • The impression I got: the phone call and 7-day wait are not rules that Sadako/Samara has to follow. They're things she chooses to do, because she wants people to suffer the way she suffered. Dodge the phone call, or keep yourself safe on the 7th day, and she'll get you some other way, sooner or later.
    • Or it's just her way of being sadistic: giving her victims the illusion of a chance before they inevitably die.
  • Hilariously enough, in the (non-canon) video game, this happens. Sadako calls, someone else picks up, and they put Sadako on hold.
  • In the novel and 1998 film, the phone call only happens in the cabin where Asakawa first watches the tape, and it doesn't actually say anything (in the novel, no sound is heard, but Asakawa feels a malevolent presence on the other end of the line. In the film, an eerie metallic scraping sound is heard). The fact that the phone call only happens in one location even becomes a vital clue to figuring out where Sadako's remains are. So the phone call is not important for the curse to happen.
  • This ties in to her psychic abilities in life being nensha. She can only affect things where she is close to. Hence why the tape and the phone in that cabin. What's rather confusing between the books and films is that in the books Koji Suzuki clearly intended this is to be more sci-fi based than ghost based. As such in Ring and Spiral the only real things being done from the beyond the grave are from people who were psychic in life. Are they a physical ghost somewhere? Are they just like a consciousness waiting for their resurrection or is this what their physic abilities set in motion before they died? The third book took the series into a retcon to find a way to continue the story but from there on things were much harder scifi that we never really understand how Suzuki's world intended this. In the films its much more straight forward Sadako/Samara is clearly a ghost that comes to do her own killing.
• Why does Sadako's ghost appear as a full-grown woman? I can't think of a single in-fiction reason for it; it might as well appear as a capybara, for all the relevance it has. Out-of-fiction... there still isn't a lot of reason, except that it throws the viewer off a bit about just who the ghost is and what happened to the person it's the ghost of. Granted, I've only seen the original film... but the implication there seems to be that she was murdered when still a child — don't know about the novel or the other films.
  • Er, no, Sadako was killed as a young adult. Sadako (as Samara) was only killed as a child in the American remake.
    • I've actually been told this since posting, but from just watching the original film, I got the distinct impression that... she didn't quite live that long. Not quite sure if I just misinterpreted the film, or if it really does give the wrong impression about how old she was when she was killed.
    • In the original novel and Japanese movie, Sadako was old enough to go to graduate from college. She also looks like an adult woman in the first film when she gets the meaty-sounding whack on the noggin.
    • The book is quite clear about she having 19 years old. The first movie doesn't says explicitly how old she was, but the third (Ring 0) shows her as a young woman.
    • At the beginning of the second movie (Ring 2), it is explicitly mentioned that Sadako died only a couple of years prior to the first film, meaning she would have been in her 40s. This is never brought up again, and there is a lot of speculation as to how she could have survived for being trapped in the well for around 30 years before finally succumbing to death. A popular theory is that her powers of self-healing may have played a part even as she was withering away, and that her body was finally allowed to die when the TV that was installed in the cabin above the well allowed her to pass on her curse.
• What was the point of the hinting that Sadako was actually fathered by an Eldritch Abomination, rather than her human father in Ringu? It coalesced so late in the film that it didn't have a chance to go anywhere. I haven't watched the other films, but I've been told it wasn't followed up on in those, either.
  • Probably just so it clicks in people's heads, "Ooooh, she's something inhuman. That explains the freaky powers." And then prompt WMGs on what exactly the being is.
    • Considering the ocean-related symbolism, I'm guessing Cthulhu. As least as far as the original novels are concerned, what with her mother dredging up that obviously possessed figurine. And then The Reveal shows that it's not that simple.
    • The second movie goes even further. It explains that her mother gave birth to her in a cave which was presumably haunted by the spirits of dead, unwanted children. Probably as a justification as to why Sadako is so hell-bent on revenge.
    • It is based on the original novel where it is shown that her mother's powers seem to start from when they pulled the figurine out of the water. There's also the indirect suggestion that Sadako's younger brother dies young with no powers, that perhaps Sadako and him had different fathers. This plot idea so far at least has never been followed up on but to be fair Sadako has had more important things on her mind than going on Maury to see if sea demon is her daddy.
• Why do you have to make a copy of the tape in the film? In the novel, it's quite handily explained by Sadako's pseudo-hermaphroditic circumstances and her being infected by smallpox. It's about reproduction — the reproduction that is the very reason for existence of a virus, and which Sadako was denied during her life by her biology. The "death curse" bit is a side effect of the smallpox being involved and their combined resentment of humanity — Sadako for the destruction of her family, and smallpox for being driven to the brink of extinction. But the movie dropped both the smallpox and testicular feminization (or, if you prefer, complete androgen insensitivity) from the plot, so... there's no particular reason that you should have to copy the tape, instead of just showing it.
  • In the remake, at least, the characters rationalize it as Samara wanting as many people as possible to experience what she went through (and making them suffer horrible hallucinations, natch.) It's a lot harder to spread her curse with just one tape, hence the copy. As for why it kills people... well, it's a supernatural curse.
  • The death part of the curse is probably to encourage people to copy the tape. If it is coppied the curse may spread much faster.
  • Samara in the remake seemed to be able to drive people to kill themselves. When she was alive, she did it to the horses. In death, her powers manifest in the form of the curse; she's punishing everyone for her parents taking away her chance to hurt people. Copying the tape allows her curse to spread. Plus it probably makes it more enjoyable for her; to save yourself you have to condemn someone else to the same fate. Either they do the same, passing the curse on, or they get to be another person for Samara to kill.
• More a question to do with the Japanese strain of movies/books, but what fucking difference does it make if Samara is female or not? No mean to offend, but that just seemed like a ridiculous excuse for angst.
  • To begin with the plot point doesn't apply to Samara, but to Sadako. Even then, the movies ignore that particular aspect because they also changed her killer (Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma, Sadako's father, or Anna Morgan, Samara's stepmother.) It's VERY relevant in the novel because she was raped by a doctor from the nearby clinic, at which point he discovered her true gender. While he was busy being outraged at "her deception" (even when he was the rapist!) Sadako was so humiliated and enraged that she tried to kill him with her psychic abilities. He fought back, strangled her, and tossed her down the well. If not for her physical gender confusion, the Ring Virus never would have existed in the first place. But it doesn't end there! As the sequel novel explains, because she had male gonads, she was able to use her psychic abilities to mutate the smallpox virus into the Ring Virus. This doesn't just kill you, but it's also a fertilizing vector that impregnates unlucky watchers (like Ryuji's assistant) and allows Sadako to be reborn as a full-on hermaphrodite who can impregnate herself. Which has its own consequences... Yeah, the movies and remakes went for the supernatural, the ghosts, and the metaphysical, so they removed that aspect entirely and all of Sadako's film incarnations are 100% female. The novels aimed more for the Body Horror route, so that little tidbit about Sadako is crucial to the entire thing. Incidentally, she never does angst about it. She has... higher goals in mind, and sees it as an advantage in Spiral and Loop.
• So... what would happen if someone uploaded Samara's video to YouTube?
  • xkcd did it.
    • Right. But the result would be...?
    • This is Headscratchers. You are supposed to ask in the Mass Speculation page.
    • This bugs me; how the hell does she do it? Where the heck does her power come from? Is she the only eldritch thing in the world, and if not, why is there no defense against her? What's with the tendency of horror movies in general to make their villain a Diabolus ex Nihilo?
    • This is answered obliquely by the second novel, where the curse has spread to novels, TV series, and film adaptations of the Asakawa Report. Basically, anyone who watches, reads, or even listens to media derived from The Tape is every bit as cursed as one who has watched The Tape itself. And the uploader wouldn't be safe from the curse, anyhow, since the tried-and-true method of copying the tape in the films doesn't work as well in the novels. Yeah, the world is doomed. It would simply happen a LOT faster than it did at the end of Spiral.
    • Hold, on... I watched it on YouTube like a year ago. Does that mean... I've been dead the whole time?! Damn! No wonder my boyfriend freaked out when I trashed his house after he'd been ignoring me for a month.
    • Welcome to Purgatory.
• In the American movie. Keep making tapes to share her story? Um, how are other people expected to gather the information about her that you found on their own, lady? Not every has access to fancy news devices to read stuff found just off the tape's screen. Not everyone's going to know to look through piles and piles of old local news papers. They can't exactly find out about Samara's past because her dad is sort of dead now. She could atleast tack on a stickie note giving the basic gist of it to the next poor sucker she's giving a death sentence to.
  • Rachel thought that Samara wanted her story told, and it's fairly likely that she (as a reporter investigating the case) would've gotten word out on the newspaper and such. But when she realized that Samara's goal was to kill everyone, that whole "share her story" thing became moot and the game became one of survival. Hence the copying of the tape. She couldn't care less what happened to the poor schmucks who came after.
• Why did Samara possess Aiden? Couldn't she have picked a comatose girl or something? Growing up in a male body would be awkward, even if you are a Yandere Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, wouldn't it?
  • Samara wants Rachel to love her, and only her. Possessing a random girl would mean a) getting away from, or getting rid of the girl's own family, b) finding Rachel all over again, and c) sharing Mommy time with Aiden. While she could probably do A easily enough with her Psychic Powers, it's an unnecessary hassle, what with Aiden being right there. And possessing him means Rachel can't leave him behind, either. She didn't plan on being discovered, after all, so as far as she was concerned Rachel would still be a loving Mommy to her "son" and everyone would be happy. Plus, he had already come under her influence once. Maybe the only reason she was able to possess a living creature was because he had watched the Tape and become susceptible to her powers in the first place.
• This one is about Ringu 2. While the whole film is kind of a contrived mess, three points really stuck out to me. When did Mai develop psychic powers? What exactly does water have to do with breaking the curse? The whole weird science thing in general didn't make much sense. Also, Yoichi getting angry summons Sadako. How? Why is this never explained?
• I have a few problems with the opening scene of the remake. Was the tape created when Katie and her friends were at the cabin? The beginning of the film seems to imply this, with Katie saying "We tried to record the football game, but when we played it, it wasn't there. It was something else." But then how come her friend Becca had already heard the story? She's the one who starts the conversation about the tape. If those kids at the cabin really were the first to see it, then at that point no one had even died yet. So how could Becca know about the curse? In a similar vein, when Katie realizes what Becca is talking about, she acts shocked and scared, realizing the story is about the tape she's seen. Then a minute later, it turns out she was only joking. But as we find out, the kids really did watch the tape in question, so why wasn't she more concerned?
  • Aside from the possibility that they took what they thought was a blank tape but was actually already cursed and just couldn't get recorded over, Becca's account of the cursed tape is inaccurate (she describes a woman at the end who looks at you and smiles, when the real ending is the shot of the well)—considering that she's in Katie's general friend group, it's possible one of the others who watched the tape started telling some stories based on it because they thought it would be fun, and it spread/got distorted over the course of the week. As for the other point, Katie might have been joking around as a sort of false bravado about the tape—she's clearly legitimately scared later when the phone rings, because that's what convinced Becca that, all jokes aside, her story is real.
  • Katie and her friends could not have been the first people to stay in that cabin and watch a videotape. There could have been other people who died the same way, and told other people about the tape and phone call during the seven day interim. But none of them had aunts who were reporters to investigate their story.
• What happened if someone spliced the cursed video with some other video. Imagine if not only were you cursed, but got Rickrolled as well.
  • In the remake, the teens claimed they tried to tape over it but it didn't work. So you can't overwrite the video.
• If an infant were to watch the video, would it get cursed too, or would it be too young to even register the material in the first place?
  • It's unconfirmed in the movies, but in the first book Asakawa's wife watches the tape with their baby daughter on her lap. In the second, they both die of the curse, even after copying the tape.
  • Note that Book Sadako is a bit more explicit that simply copying the tape isn't actually good enough to get you a pass. You have to actively help her spread the curse or vow not to interfere in her goals. Which ironically despite her being cruel enough to kill the infant, from as much as was written Sadako does appear to keep her word if she does grant you a pass.
• What happens if the victim watching the video was blind and deaf? Would they still get cursed because the video got them to see and hear it through supernatural means?
  • I don't know about deaf people, but at the beginning of The Ring 2, one of the viewers escapes the curse by covering her eyes, so it shouldn't have any effect on blind people.
  • Note that Rachel's iris contracts when she watches the tape in the remake. It seems that you physically have to see it.
• If you were to take every single cursed video tape and show them to one person simultaneously, would they get quadrupal cursed?
  • I don't think so. Like a disease, you can only get infected once. It's not like you get twice the amount of disease or something.
• So Aiden apparently knew ahead of time that helping Samara was NOT the right thing to do—hence his What the Hell, Hero? reaction. So why did he keep that simple fact to himself until after the fact?
  • From his reaction, it seemed like he didn't expect anyone to assume anything but the same as he did.
  • Aiden wasn't really in the loop for what Rachel and Noah were doing. As for how he knew in the first place, it could simply be the "all children have some form of psychic powers."
  • And Aiden was staying with his aunt when Noah and Rachel really got proactive. Rachel is merely trying to find out information when she goes to the island. It's only after she's gone there that it becomes about helping or saving Samara. So at this point Aiden doesn't know what's going on.
• You watch the video but have no phone. What happens? FB message? What if you're not in any kind of social network? Postcard?
  • The phone call is probably not a necessary thing. It's just a way of Samara to let you know that you're cursed. If you don't have a phone you'll still die seven days later.
• You watch the video in another country. Does she reverse the charges or is she kind enough to pay for the international call?
  • She's not calling from another phone, she's projecting her voice through the lines psychically. So it probably wouldn't have any charges.
  • Also, you don't generally pay when people phone you.
• What if several people watch the video at the same time and are in the same room when they hit the deadline? Does Sadako/Samara kill them sequentially or duplicate herself so she can kill them simultaneously? Does the number of TV sets in the room have any effect (e.g. two people who will die are in the room which has two televisions, will she come out of both)? What if they are in different places when their time comes? Can Sadako/Samara kill them all at the same time? If she can appear in multiple places simultaneously, what if one of her clones gets "killed"? Does it affect the rest?
  • Considering that the very beginning of the story in the first movie features her killing multiple people (all of them in different locations) at once at precisely 10PM, I'm guessing duplicating herself to get all of them at the same time is not an issue. And while I'm not familiar with the lore in the other versions, in that movie at least no one has shown any ability to "kill" her so I don't see why that would come up at all.
  • This is one thing that is lost from the books. As while Sadako still is an impressive telepath she was still rather limited in range. The idea that her curse is an actual telepathic virus most certainly gives her far more range to kill then she ever had before she created it. I'd imagine she can telepathically shut as many people down as she wants with the ring virus no matter where her spirit or reincarnated body are. Movie versions usually just have her ghost show up to kill you, which makes this more an Adaptation Induced Plothole unless you just assume she goes from one to the other.
• She is after you. You surprise her from behind and throw a bucket of water on her because she is hydrophobic (in the American version). Will she be scared to "death"?
  • No, you'll just piss her off some more and you'll be dead before you blink.
• Does it matter which technology the televisions in your area use or have used (PAL, NTSC, SECAM)? Is she aware technology has marched on and can she use TVs that use modern digital techniques (such as DVB-T)? Can the curse be passed on if the video is copied to a non-VHS format (such as DVD or Blu-Ray)? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, has this been officially confirmed in the movies/books/games/whatever?
  • Sadako 3D and the 2016 film Rings seem to imply that Sadako/Samara is indeed taking full advantage of the advent of digital technology. In both films the video is now online, and the former states that Computers, Laptops and Cell Phones can be infected with the curse, and the latter has Samara coming out of HD TV's and the in flight entertainment systems and cockpit displays of airplanes.
• You happen to be there when she kills someone who saw the video but didn't pass on the curse. However, you have watched it, copied it and shown it to someone else who hasn't seen it before that. Therefore you're safe. Nevertheless, does anything happen to you when she's near you?
  • You'd still be alive since you beat the curse, but Sadako/Samara would probably still fuck you up for shits and giggles; remember, Masami and Becca never even watched the tape, but because they were around when Tomoko and Katie got killed, they still had their heads messed around with.

• I understand that Sadako/Samara kills people through fear (right?). But aren't there always SOME people who are just not to be shocked, and who would survive the attack?
  • If there are, she doesn't appear to have found them yet.

• This is kind a hypothetical based on the way the ring virus was set up in the first two books. Obviously in general it is a physical virus but is one that is spread via psy rather than traditional infection. Her choice of the video at first is obviously because she practices nensha and no one knew anything about her new plan until after she died. But later in Spiral we learn she later learns to basically achieve the same ability to pass her virus on by various things that simply manage to tell her story. So if Sadako broke out of her book like she did in Loop into our modern world, could give us all her virus just by making a simple online article or youtube video? I feel like the American version nerfed something that the original version would realistically be our conqueror already.

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