Keeping In Touch
Do scary movies induce fear?
By Michelle Ciriacruz
They say that the worst fear is fear of the unknown.
I say otherwise. I say that more fearful is when you are given a glimpse of the unknown, and you realize to the depths of your soul the unending abyss of that place. And I say the worst fear is the knowledge that, soon, you are to be part of it...
Such is the nature of this fear that only rarely are people unlucky enough to experience it. But such is the nature of movies that only rarely are moviegoers lucky enough to experience it.
With Ring, we were both.
Before there was SARS, the country was hit by an epidemic, an epidemic of fear. Responsible for the contagion was a cursed video. If you watch it, in seven days you die.
You have to make a copy to escape death. But in so doing, you pass on the curse to someone else.
 Fortunately, this is only the premise of one of Japan's most horrifying movies ever, Ringu, known to us as Ring.
It was produced way back in 1998, but a Hollywood remake and its accompanying hype revived the original. Which was fortunate because, as visually stunning as the copy was, it did not have the fever pitch intensity of the original. Directed by Hideo Nakata and adapted by Kozi Suzuki from his own book, Ring was a masterpiece of restrained but enervating terror.
How scary really was Ring?
Majority of those who watched it felt as if they had woken up to a new reality, characterized with a clarity of the senses so sensitive to every dark corner and the endless possibilities that an ordinary scene or object can be transformed to something more sinister and threatening.
Psychiatrist Aida Muncada says that everyone who watches a movie, somehow integrates an experience called up by the theme or what was striking in the movie into the movie-watching experience. She speculates that what was so scary in Ring was its ability to conjure up the anxieties that a person inevitably builds up from childhood to adulthood.
Beneath the deceptive calm and measured pacing of this movie, so reflective of the typical Japanese psyche, a cauldron of ancient myths and modern legends burbled a barely coherent message to the Pinoy's own sense of the supernatural and suppressed anxieties about technology.
Sadako, the personification of otherworldly evil and vengeance, haunts each scene with an unnerving silence. She is there reflected on the television screen; from the corner of your eye, you see her feet, dripping mud, walking past-even in broad daylight; the dread of this visitation clamping the muscles of your throat shut, stealing volition and human reason.
"That makes it scary, because you don't know, you don't see... It's a vague feeling that there's something there, but you cannot identify it," Muncada elaborates.
The presence of evil is sustained in the simplicity of Ring's direction-none of those hysterical, screaming fits Hollywood horror movies are so guilty of. It presses upon the viewers, so gradually building up to a crescendo, that you wonder which will break first-it or you.
Like our own myths of the "white lady," Sadako is malevolent only because she was wronged. And her spirit, imprisoned in brine and mold inside a well for 30 years, has grown in power and rage that she was able to project visions into a video tape, played by a group of teenagers-to their doom.
Certainly, not everyone had the living daylights scared out of them by Ring. Muncada explains that how we react to a movie, or to anything in particular, depends on the experience we carry with us.
Which makes me wonder about my own baggage, that Ring so perfectly tuned in to the vibration of my own fear.
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