Table Of ContentThe Scary Screen
Media Anxiety in The Ring
Edited by
Kristen Lacefield
The Scary Screen
In 1991, the publication of Koji Suzuki’s Ring, the first novel of a bestselling
trilogy, inaugurated a tremendous outpouring of cultural production in Japan,
Korea, and the United States. Just as the subject of the book is the deadly viral
reproduction of a VHS tape, so, too, is the vast proliferation of text and cinematic
productions suggestive of an airborne contagion with a life of its own. Analyzing
the extraordinary trans-cultural popularity of the Ring phenomenon, The Scary
Screen locates much of its power in the ways in which the books and films
astutely graft contemporary cultural preoccupations onto the generic elements
of the ghost story—in particular, the Japanese ghost story. At the same time, the
contributors demonstrate, these cultural concerns are themselves underwritten
by a range of anxieties triggered by the advent of new communications and
media technologies, perhaps most significantly, the shift from analog to digital.
Mimicking the phenomenon it seeks to understand, the collection’s power comes
from its commitment to the full range of Ring-related output and its embrace of a
wide variety of interpretive approaches, as the contributors chart the mutations of
the Ring narrative from author to author, from medium to medium, and from Japan
to Korea to the United States.
In Memory of Douglas Brooks
The Scary Screen
Media Anxiety in The Ring
Edited by
KrISTen LacefIeLd
University of North Carolina, USA
© Kristen Lacefield and the contributors 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Kristen Lacefield has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the editor of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The scary screen : media anxiety in The Ring.
1. Suzuki, Koji, 1957– Ring. 2. Suzuki, Koji, 1957 – Film adaptations. 3. Motion
pictures and literature. 4. Horror films – History and criticism.
I. Lacefield, Kristen.
791.4’36164–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The scary screen : media anxiety in The Ring / Kristen Lacefield [editor].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6984-5 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Suzuki, Koji, 1957- Ringu. 2. Suzuki, Koji, 1957—Film adaptations—History and
criticism. 3. Film adaptations—History and criticism. 4. Horror in literature. 5. Horror
films—History and criticism. I. Lacefield, Kristen.
PL861.U92716R5673 2010
791.43’6164—dc22
2010023099
ISBN 9780754669845 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409421528 (ebk)
contents
List of Contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Media Anxiety and the Ring Phenomenon 1
Kristen Lacefield
PArt I SPreADIng the WorD
1 The Horror of Media: Technology and Spirituality in the
Ringu Films 29
Anthony Enns
2 Tracing the Transference of a Cross-Cultural Media Virus:
The Evolution of Ring 45
Greg Wright
3 From Gene to Meme: The Rhetoric of Thought Contagion in
Koji Suzuki’s Ring Cycle 63
Chris Miles
PArt II LoSS In trAnSLAtIon
4 Cultural Constructions of the Supernatural: The Case of Ringu and
The Ring 81
Valerie Wee
5 Video Killed the Movie: Cultural Translation in Ringu and The Ring 97
Steven Rawle
6 “Before You Die, You See The Ring”:Notes on the Imminent
Obsolescence of VHS 115
Caetlin Benson-Allott
7 Bleeding Through, or We Are Living in a Digital World and I Am
an Analog Girl 141
Jeremy Tirrell
vi The Scary Screen
PArt III teChno-huMAn reProDuCtIonS
8 Techno-Human Infancy in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring 161
Kimberly Jackson
9 Of Horse Blood and TV Snow: Abhuman Reproduction in
The Ring 175
Niles Tomlinson
10 Horrific Reproductions: Pathology and Gender in Koji Suzuki’s
Ring Trilogy 191
D. Haque
11 Computer Shy: Ring and the Technology of Maternal Longing 205
Douglas A. Brooks
PArt IV AfterWorD
Haunted Networks 215
Jeffrey Sconce
Further Reading 221
Index 229
List of Contributors
Caetlin Benson-Allott is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at the
University of California-Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on American
film history, new media theory, and gender and technology studies. Her work has
appeared in Film Quarterly, Journal of Visual Culture, Jump Cut, and Quarterly
Review of Film and Video, and she is currently completing a book manuscript
on video distribution and feature film aesthetics for the University of California
Press.
Douglas A. Brooks was Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University.
He authored and edited a number of books, including From Playhouse to Printing
House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, Printing and Parenting
in Early Modern England, and Milton and the Jews. Brooks published essays
in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Shakespeare Studies, ELR,
Philological Quarterly, Genre, Renaissance Drama, Studies in English Literature,
Poetics Today, and in several collections.
Anthony Enns is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Culture in the Department
of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His work has appeared
in such journals as Screen, The Senses and Society, Culture, Theory & Critique,
Journal of Popular Film and Television, Quarterly Review of Film and Video,
Popular Culture Review, and Studies in Popular Culture.
D. Haque is currently a PhD candidate and teaching fellow at Cornell University
in Ithaca, New York. Her current project focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-
century American literature, particularly the work of religious minorities, and their
engagement with narratives of secularism and human rights. Her essay in this
volume stems from her interest in gender theories and the horror genre.
Kimberly Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast
University. She teaches nineteenth-century Gothic literature, literary theory, and
tech-noir literature and film. Her publications include article-length pieces on
Gothic literature, contemporary Gothic music, reality televisión, and tech-noir
films. She is currently working on a book-length project on the posthuman in
contemporary tech-noir film titled Techno-Human Infancy.
viii The Scary Screen
Kristen Lacefield is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, where she specializes in English Romantic literature, film, and cultural
studies. She has an essay forthcoming this fall on Julie Taymor’s film Titus and is
working on a dissertation about the depiction of violence in Romantic drama.
Chris Miles is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Communication & Media
Studies at Eastern Mediterranean University, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,
where he teaches courses in marketing theory, rhetoric, and persuasive strategies.
His interdisciplinary research focus is reflected in his publications for a wide
variety of academic journals including Marketing Theory, Cybernetics & Human
Knowing, Rhetoric Society Quarterly and The Pomegranate: International Journal
of Pagan Studies. His book length study of marketing rhetorics of interactivity
and dialog, Interactive Marketing: Revolution or Rhetoric?, was published by
Routledge in March 2010.
Steven Rawle is a lecturer in film studies at York St John University. He has recently
published work on repetition in the films of Hal Hartley, memory in Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the transnational features of the films of Kim
Ki-Duk and Miike Takashi. A co-author of Basics Film-making: The Language
of Film (AVA Books), he is currently in the process of completing a book on
performance in the films of Hal Hartley (forthcoming from Cambria Press).
Jeffrey Sconce is Associate Professor of Radio, Television, and Film at Northwestern
University. His first book, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy
to Television, was published by Duke University Press in 2000. The author of
more than a dozen journal articles and book chapters, Sconce is the editor of a
collection of essays, Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and
Politics, published by Duke University Press.
Jeremy Tirrell is an Ass istant Professor at the University of North Carolina
Wilmington, where he teaches courses in the Professional Writing Program. His
primary research area is the intersection of technology, rhetoric, and writing. His
other scholarly interests include complexity theory, video game studies, and digital
data mapping. Dr. Tirrell’s work appears in publications including Computers and
Composition Online and Kairos. He currently serves as a Managing Editor for the
journal The Writing Instructor and as an Assistant Editor for the journal Kairos.
Niles Tomlinson is currently a lecturer at Georgetown University and George
Washington University in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from George
Washington University in 2008 where his focus was on Gothic American literature
and its intersection with animal theory and natural history. His essay in this volume
is derived from his dissertation, Animal Crossings: Contagion and Immunologic
in Gothic American Literature, and grew out of his abiding fascination with the
animal/human border.
List of Contributors ix
Valerie Wee lectures on film and media studies in the Department of English
Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. Her research
areas include teen culture and the American culture industries, American horror/
slasher films, and gender representations in the media. Her work has appeared in
the Journal of Film and Video, and the Journal of Popular Film and Television.
She is the author of Teen Media: Hollywood and the Youth Market in the Digital
Age, published in January 2010 by MacFarland Press.
Greg Wright teaches composition and humanities at Kalamazoo Valley Community
College. He earned his Ph.D. in American Literature and Film at Michigan State
University in 2007, and his dissertation—‘Textual Evolution: Adaptation in
Literature, Film, and Culture’—synthesizes evolutionary theory with narrative
theory in order to explore how texts adapt, mutate, and proliferate over time
and space. Wright has taught courses on film, media studies, critical theory,
screenwriting, humanities, composition, and literature, and he has published
articles in Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Journal of Popular Culture.
