Ring Beat Sheet Analysis
Why We Chose to Do a Save a Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis of Ring
Ring, originally known as Ringu, is a landmark in horror cinema, relying on atmosphere, tension, and suggestion instead of gore. It’s a slow burn horror classic that, after its release in 1998, inspired many remakes of Japanese horror films in Hollywood. The film hits the Save the Cat! beats and illustrates many of the terms from our best-selling book, Save the Cat!® Writes Horror.
Ring
Written by: Hiroshi Takahashi, based on the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki
Directed by: Hideo Nakata
Genre: Monster in the House (Subgenre: What the Curse?!)
A hero is trapped in some location or situation (aka the “house”) and must survive a monster (human or otherwise). There must be a sin committed—often greed—prompting the creation of a supernatural being that comes like an avenging angel to kill the sinners. Monster in the House stories are commonly found in horror movies, urban thrillers, or comedies about people or things that just won’t go away.
The 3 elements of a MONSTER IN THE HOUSE story are:
1) A monster that is supernatural in its powers—even if its strength derives from insanity—and “evil” at its core.
2) A house, meaning an enclosed space that can include a family unit, an entire town, or even “the world.”
3) A sin. Someone is guilty of bringing the monster in the house… a transgression that can include ignorance.
Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis for Ring
Opening Image
We open on the atmospheric flag of a dark and stormy night, an ocean of rolling waves that appear black and almost oily, and then Ring does what it does best: a crossfade to a grainy black-and-white TV screen, shot in 35mm film for maximum creepiness. Never did a televised Japanese baseball game deliver such a dread flag.
Theme Stated
As two teenage girls share some delicious gossip, one whispers ominously, “Everyone else had heard that story.…” Ring will explore the power of a spreading rumor, how an urban legend grows and morphs, the suspicion and isolation that results, and how technology exacerbates all of these elements, especially with some supernatural sauce on top.
Set-Up
Our opening scare is a classic first kill: Masami (Hitomi Sato) and Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi) delight in frightening each other by sharing the story of a cursed video tape and subsequent dooming phone call that leads to death within seven days. Tomoko confesses that she and her three friends saw the video while they were staying at a cabin in Izu, but Masami laughs it off; unfortunately, as soon as Masami goes to the bathroom, Tomoko promptly dies a very mysterious death.
Coincidentally, Tomoko’s aunt, journalist Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) just happens to be investigating this story herself in her thesis world, interviewing some teens talking about the urban legend. Asakawa doesn’t seem to be taking the tale too seriously as there’s a lot of “a friend of a friend of a friend told me,” but she does her due diligence by asking her assistant to check out some of the details.
As Asakawa and her young son, Yōichi (Rikiya Otaka) prepare to attend Tomoko’s funeral, we begin to sense Asakawa’s shard of glass: her relationship with Yōichi almost appears to be one of peers rather than mother and son. Should a five-year old be home alone to set out his mother’s clothes and then zip up her dress? There is something rather odd happening in this little family and it’s about to get a whole lot odder.
Catalyst
In a double-bump Catalyst, Asakawa finds out from a family member that Tomoko’s death was very suspicious and her assistant calls to say that three other teenagers at Tomoko’s school died on the same day in a similarly suspicious manner.
Debate
Asakawa uneasily questions other girls from Tomoko’s school, who connect the dots by saying that all four teenagers had watched a weird video a week before they died. Our slow burn horror film then kicks up a notch with our first left for dead moment: Asakawa sees the (grainy, of course) found footage police recording of one of those teens as her body falls out of a car, her face frozen in an expression of absolute terror.
Gathering clues, Asakawa finds a receipt for a photo shop in Tomoko’s room and picks up the pictures herself. They’re of Tomoko’s fated trip to Cabin #B4 in Izu with her friends, and one of the photos is a dread flag: the four victims’ faces are blurred beyond recognition. In one of her questionable working-mother moves, Asakawa tells Yōichi she’s going to be out late so he’s going to have to microwave his own supper and she drives to the cabin, starting a literal ticking time clock onscreen and forcing an Act Two.
Break into Two
Asakawa finds an unmarked videotape at the reception desk and decides to watch it in Cabin #B4, because why not completely ignore all the warnings about watching a mysterious video that will cause you to die in seven days? As in most MITH films, we find ourselves screaming, “Don’t go in the attic, stupid!”
B Story
The B Story relationship between Asakawa and her ex-husband Ryūji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada) is fraught, to say the least, with lots of meaningful glances and tears and an occasional troubling slap to the face which doesn’t exactly endear us to the moody Ryūji. It also highlights the weirdness of this family unit, as Ryūji and Yōichi circle each other like rivals rather than father and son. Ultimately, however, these relationships will provide transformation for Asakawa, as small as the movement may be.
Fun and Games
We enter the twisted fun & insidious games beat with a bang as the video Asakawa watches is extremely dark and unsettling, full of disturbing imagery of a mysterious haunted woman, bodies crawling on the ground, a blinking eye with a symbol inside, and an uncovered well from which there just might be—maybe—OMG—is that a hand reaching from inside?!
We now know what the House is in this Monster in the House movie—a mind/body prison. Asakawa receives the dreaded phone call and can immediately feel in her spirit that she’s been cursed, reeling into her antithesis world with terror.
Enter the half-man, the mentor Asakawa needs to help her understand what’s happening to her, a psychic who carries the weight of the supernatural world on his shoulders, and who also just happens to be her ex-husband. Ryūji is skeptical at first, but asks for a copy of the video after seeing a creepy photograph of Asakawa with her face blurred out.
As they try to figure out clues, they discover the origin of the mysterious woman in the video. She is Shizuko Yamamura (Masami), a seer who committed suicide 40 years prior after she was ostracized by townspeople for her prediction of the eruption of Mount Mihara in Oshima.
Ryūji wants to travel to Oshima alone, but Asakawa insists that she must go with him and brings Yōichi to her father’s house to stay while they’re gone, which we suppose is preferable to leaving the five-year old in their apartment to microwave his own meals for a couple of days.
Midpoint
It’s a truly monstrous midpoint with a big plot twist as Asakawa wakes up in the middle of the night to hear Yōichi’s creepy kid scare laughter. He’s watching the cursed videotape! And he says that his dead cousin Tomoko told him to! Asakawa is overwhelmed as the stakes are raised exponentially and the ticking time clock speeds up with Yōichi’s very life on the line.
Bad Guys Close In
Asakawa and Ryūji take a boat to Oshimo Island, black water raging beneath them, fearful of their external bad guys and lamenting their internal bad guys. Asakawa is feeling terrible guilt about being a bad mother (ya think?) and Ryūji is depressed about Yōichi’s newfound psychic abilities as he’d always been ostracized for being different himself. As we’ll soon see, ostracism is the Sin that’s been allowed into our House, and this injustice will be paid for in blood.
On Oshimo Island, Asakawa and Ryūji have a prolonged psychic vision of what actually happened to Shizuko Yamamura. Forty years prior, Shizuko was giving a demonstration of her abilities, facilitated by her doctor, Heihachiro Ikuma (Daisuke Ban), when a protestor in the crowd was struck dead, his face frozen in a mask of terror. But it wasn’t Shizuko who did the deathly dirty deed—it was her daughter, Sadako (Rie Ino), whose horrifying appearance finally gives us the Monster we’ve been waiting for: a scrawny girl in a white dress with snarled black hair completely obscuring her face and filthy hands with no fingernails, which is a dread flag we’re not exactly thrilled about discovering the reason for.
Asakawa and Ryūji know they must find Sadako to break the curse, but there’s a typhoon brewing and no one will take them back to the mainland. Asakawa calls her assistant and enlists him to track Sadako down, even though Ryūji is brooding again, certain that Sadako is dead.
All Is Lost
The typhoon hits just as the assistant calls with the news: there is no trace of Sadako anywhere. Asakawa and Ryūji are stranded on Oshimo Island and they’re going to die of her curse, separated from their son.
Dark Night of the Soul
Her shard of glass exposed, Asakawa breaks down in anguish, screaming, “Yōichi!”
Break into Three
Asakawa rallies, suddenly realizing that Ryūji never received a phone call after watching the cursed video at her apartment; the phone only rang at the cabin in Izu, meaning that Sadako probably died at that location.
Finale
Asakawa and Ryūji immediately gather the team, forcing someone to sail them off of Oshimo Island, and make it back to the cabin on the afternoon of the seventh day after Asakawa watched the video. Time clock ticking madly, they execute the plan, finding the old well from the videotape in the crawlspace underneath the cabin.
When Ryūji touches the well, he has a vision: Dr. Ikuma threw Sadako down the well to kill her. Asakawa and Ryūji determine that they have to rescue Sadako’s body from its watery grave to break the curse.
Ryūji lowers himself into the well on a rope and we have the nauseating answer to where Sadako’s fingernails went; they’re embedded in the stones, showing that Sadako tried to climb and claw herself out. Asakawa and Ryūji try to bail out the well, but soon Asakawa is too exhausted to keep pulling up the water buckets; they’re going to have to switch places. Terrified but knowing she has to do this to save Yōichi, Asakawa digs deep down (literally) letting Ryūji lower her into the well.
At the bottom, the distraught Asakawa cries out for Sadako and we get one of the few jump scares in Ring when a bloated, fingernail-less hand pops out of the dingy water and grabs Asakawa’s arm. Asakawa pulls Sadako’s skeleton up from the depths and cradles it as mucous pours from Sadako’s eye sockets like tears, which is every bit as heartbreaking—and gross—as you’d imagine.
Ryūji calls down joyfully that the exact time when Asakawa should have died has passed; they’ve broken the curse and everyone lives happily ever after.
Just kidding. Come on, we need one last scare, don’t we?
After turning over Sadako’s body to the authorities, driving home together, and giving each other meaningful glances that suggest a possible reunion, Ryūji is alone in his apartment the next day when the TV turns on by itself. He looks up to see the cursed videotape playing and yep, this time, that is most definitely a hand coming out of the well, followed by an arm, followed by Sadako’s whole body.
Now this would certainly be terrifying enough, but we are then treated to the mutha of all high tower surprises when Sadako stumbles forward and climbs out of the TV set, right into Ryūji’s apartment, scaring him to death. Literally. Ryūjii screams in horror and his face freezes into a death mask we’ve seen before.
Asakawa is devastated. Why was she spared and Ryūji wasn’t? And what does this mean for Yōichi? Through a vision, Asakawa realizes that the only thing she’d done differently was to make a copy of the cursed videotape and force someone else to watch it. Sadako’s vengeful spirit has made sure she will not be forgotten.
Final Image
In a rather quirky The Evil Lives On final moment, we find Asakawa in her car, a small smile on her face, as she drives out to her father’s house to force him to watch the video so Yōichi can be saved. She may not have been Mother of the Year before, but damned if she’s going to let Sadako kill her kid when there are other options.
And just like a rumor, an urban legend, a curse, a technology virus, or the final image of a road that disappears into the horizon, this story will keep on going…
