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*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Japanese-Girls-Scared-Silly-by-Ringu-Prank

Well to be honest, I wasn't a big fan of Ring or Ringu. The Ju-On I actually liked was number 3 simply because it pulled the story together. Whereas Ju-On 1 was the beginning. Actually I wasn't a fan of it at first until I really contemplated the difference in "horror" within our two cultures. For The Japanese, ghosts don't need a "motivation" anymore than the devil does for us in our culture. Why does Lucifer's son want to hurt people in "The Omen"? BEcause he's the devil's child so there doesn't need to be a reason. Until I grasped that Japanese feel similarly about ghosts I couldn't really enjoy J-horror. ONce I accepted that, I could really appreciate the differences in portrayal, and other subtleties in J-horror vs American horror. Plenty of crappy J-horror just as plenty of crappy US horror but I tend to like the Asian stuff better.

I wasn't a big fan of Ju-On, to be honest. I feel as though J-Horror opts for the shock instead of the story a lot of times. Their stories feel lazy even if the concept is attention grabbing, such as in Ringu where the concept is a VHS tape that can kill you.

Ringu wasn't nearly as good as The Ring. I've analyzed the US version forwards and backwards, and it is about as damn perfect as a horror story can be. I can write my dissertation on it, but I'll save everyone from sheer boredom. Let me say this, however. In the US version, The Director, Gore Verbinski, did a great job of crafting a great pace and tone for the story, and the screenwriter(s) did an excellent job of taking the lazier and unpolished Japanese version of the story and creating something a touch more in-depth. For instance, in Ringu it is suggested that the mother of Sadako might have had sex with a sea monster or something like that, but in the US version the father of Samara was a horse breeder, and because Samara's mother was incapable of giving birth, well, you can probably see where it went from there. They imply that Samara was birthed in a horse. What makes this significant over the Japanese version, in my opinion, is that the the US theme can easily be summed up as demonstrating the price of "crimes against nature" and we recognize it as something cautionary which is where the great horror mythologies begin.

The Japanese version isn't insinuating a cautionary tale, but rather just displaying a series of supernatural or metaphysical evils, because if the mother of Sadako was to have sex with a sea monster or the sea itself (or whatever is being implied there), then it's not grounded within our reality and therefore it's impossible for us to glean a cautionary tale from their story. It becomes fantasy horror at that point, and without a solid theme for us to relate with on a subconscious Joseph Campbell sort of way, then (for me) the story doesn't succeed as well. I've kind of glossed over the differences in the interest of not writing a diatribe. These are broad strokes here, but I think I did a decent job illustrating my point.

"The Japanese version of The Ring."

"The Ring" is the North American version of "Ringu"