Sadako DX

The latest in the Ring series of films, Sadako DX is a surprising horror comedy that isn’t afraid to make fun of the legendary series and its J-horror icon, right to the very end of the credits… Several people are found dead all over Japan. A rumour goes around that they died 24 hours after watching a mysterious videotape. Of course, it doesn’t take long before Sadako’s name is dropped, and everyone is destroying their old VHS player. Ayaka, a young TV journalist, doesn’t believe in the curse, but after her sister stumbles across the videotape she is in a race to debunk it.

Sadako, the long-haired ghost who first crawled out of a well on the silver screen in the 1998 horror hit Ringu, has since become a global pop-culture icon. One reason for this is the sheer number of films in which she has appeared, including four with her name in the title. Another is her deep roots in Japanese culture and folklore, in which vengeful female spooks have haunted imaginations for hundreds of years. She is also something of a cliché, though, a problem Hisashi Kimura’s Sadako DX entertainingly addresses by mixing in sharp meta comedy with the scares. One reference point is Wes Craven’s 1996 classic Scream, which comically turned tired horror tropes on their heads. This has rarely been done in the J-horror genre, whose makers tend to take their material, however banal, with deadly seriousness.

From a review by Mark Schilling in The Japan Times