It’s been eleven years since the last Americanized remake of the popular Japanese horror franchise The Ring. In that time we’ve seen a mountain of low budget horror successes, including the likes of 2007’s Paranormal Activity and 2013’s The Purge. But nothing has captures the general public with such fear as the haunting phone call with those chilling two words: “seven days”.
The new trailer for The Rings re-establishes the basic premise that propelled the franchise into mainstream success: some innocent soul witnesses a haunted VHS tape, immediately receives a call with a warning and then dies a horrid death after what can only be described as the worst week of their life. But the near fifteen year-old premise appears to be merely the basis for the film’s overall plot as the plural title would appear to suggest that the events within the film will be amplified.
Hannibal’s Vincent D’Onofrio, Friday Night Lights’ Aimee Teegarden and The Big Bang Theory’s Johnny Galecki lead an entirely new cast, facing off against the ghostly adolescent with hair down to her knee that finds it funny to crawl into people’s living rooms by way of their television set.
The trailer does give hints that audiences might uncover a bit more backstory about our pint sized villain, and I pray that director F. Javier Gutiérrez takes at least a second or two to focus on a VHS joke or two.
Samara Morgan entered your nightmares when she first graced the screen in 2002, and she is looking to reconquer your psyche when The Rings hits theaters on October 28th.
