I watched "The Ring" again today. Like all my favorite movies, I thought I had watched it a few times and enjoyed it and now I wanted to analyze it.
I'm a traditionalist and love the gothic films, like the Hammer classics, but The Ring is a great film to start the Halloween season off right because it gets you in a "something's out there" kinda mood.
One thing you can usually catch in horror movies especially is a lot of extraneous info, a lot of scary things that end up having nothing to do with the main scary thing. I didn't catch any. All the little info bits and pieces added up in the end.
For the first time I finally latched on to why this film leaves such striking visual imagery, and why it holds your attention even in the slow parts. The entire film is shot in low contrast. meaning the brights less bright and the darks less dark, until everything kinda washes out. It's even hard in most scenes to pick out any color. I'll bet people who have seen it a dozen times can't tell you what color shirt anyone had on in any scene. What this does is forces the viewer to look hard to find details. You subconsciously pay better attention to sort out things washed out. The exception is the infamous video, which is shot in high contrast. High contrast is more dramatic, slaps you right in the face when parts of the video that is the subject of the story appears.
Anyway,I just noticed that today and I think is freakin' brilliant!