25 things you didn’t know about your favorite horror movies
The Ring – A viral marketing strategy to entice audiences
Scream made us scared to answer the phone, A Nightmare on Elm Street made us scared to fall asleep, and Friday the 13th made us scared of going to camp. But The Ring made us afraid of something we all did: watching videos.
Four teenagers wind up dead after watching a mysterious videotape. The urban legend surrounding the tape is that once you watch it, you’ll die exactly seven days later. Immediately after finishing the tape, you get a phone call that whispers “seven days,” and then your clock is ticking.
When journalist Rachel Keller’s (Naomi Watts) niece ends up dead because of this video, she vows to discover the truth behind the legend before it’s too late.
It’s widely known that The Ring is a remake of the Japanese horror movie Ringu. The film’s huge success actually lead to a number of Japanese horror movie remakes including The Grudge, Dark Water, Pulse, and One Missed Call. Even though The Ring takes place in America, there are still some references to the story’s cultural origins.
The tree with fiery red leaves featured in the film, for example, is a Japanese maple tree. The fruit that this tree produces is called a “samara.” And what’s the name of the young girl who haunts the viewers of the video? Samara.
Probably one of the most interesting points about this movie was the viral marketing strategy they used to promote the film back in 2002. The studio left copies of the “killer tape” at a variety of different events, with a note directing them to a website. The website had different links that led to notes from characters in the movie who worried about their missing friends (who died watching the tape).
After the movie was released, all the web pages were deleted, with production company Dreamworks saying it didn’t have anything to do with it.
Imagine the kind of terrifying viral marketing campaign a company could produce for a movie like that nowadays, with the amount of technology and social media presence surrounding us?