If you thought The Ring needed a big dose of Final Destination, maybe Rings is for you. The first trailer and poster for this new sequel hit the web last night, offering what seems like a very, umm, detailed look at the movie’s overall structure. Check the trailer out below!
Well, I’m not sure if it’s for authenticity’s sake, but this looks ripped right out of 2006 or 2007. Surely you remember that golden era, filled with J-horror remakes and forgettable supernatural horror movies full of bland, poorly lit twenty-somethings. We got a lot of PG-13 releases and “Unrated” DVDs. It was a dark time for horror.
But The Ring is one of the few American horror movies of that era to become a modern horror classic. Yeah, it’s a J-horror remake, but it’s got a leg up on the original. The concept behind it all was a cursed VHS tape. You watch it, you get a phone call, and seven days later the ghost of a little girl named Samara crawls out of your TV and kills you. Bummer, right?
Rings adds a new wrinkle to the mythology: Paramount’s synopsis mentions a young woman whose boyfriend watches the cursed tape. Seven days later, the young woman sacrifices herself to save her boyfriend. In doing so, she discovers a previously unseen “movie within a movie.” From the looks of the trailer, it seems like this will turn our heroine (Matilda Lutz) into a vessel for Samara’s rebirth. I’m sure Vincent D’Onofrio (reprising his exposition machine role from Sinister) will tell us all about it.
And while The Ring and its regrettable sequel both used elements of teen horror, they were surprisingly mature in tone. Rings seems to be aiming a bit lower, going for that “teen tone” that permeated the early 2000s horror landscape. That still offers plenty of opportunities for the movie to be good, but perhaps a less revealing trailer might’ve been more appropriate.
Rings comes out in two months, on October 28. Paramount pulled a similar marketing stunt earlier this with 10 Cloverfield Lane, which came out of nowhere and blew many of us away. We’re hoping Rings will do the same. I’m sure Paramount hopes so, too.