The Ring (2002) - 39 questions

Question: What exactly did Samara do so wrong in the first place that they had to put her in the barn? I know she made the horses die later because she was annoyed with them, but that really isn't a reason to kill a child. They just say that she wasn't right, but what wasn't right about her?

Answer: Samara (Daveigh Chase) has a number of supernatural abilities, but her signature ability is nensha. Samara sees and takes various images in her mind and projects or burns them onto objects and minds. After the Morgans brought their adopted daughter home, tragedy befell the Morgan ranch. Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran) soon complained about gruesome visions that only happened when Samara was around, so both were sent to a mental institution. When they returned, Richard Morgan (Brian Cox), put Samara in the barn to keep her away from him and his wife because she was evil. Samara realized her parents loved the horses more than they loved her so she used her powers to drive the horses to insanity. This caused Anna to become depressed, kill Samara because she caused bad things and thought that killing her would stop the bad things from happening, and then commit suicide.

Question: Why not just try every way possible (physically or spiritually, for example, pour holy water on them) destroy all of the tapes. Thus ending the cruse forever? Will that just make things worst?

Answer: Destroying the only copy of the tape would prevent the curse from spreading, but the last person to see it who didn't make another would still die seven days out.

Question: If you were on your seventh day and there was no TV in sight, would Samara still be able to kill you?

Answer: Most likely. We have no idea how far away she can be from the TV she spawns from, or if anybody who hasn't been cursed can even see her. Chances are, she would come out of the nearest TV, and stalk you over a great distance. As we see when she kills Naomi Watson's boyfriend, she can practically teleport, and who knows if her power is limited only to TVs.

Question: What did the hair covering Samara's face actually mean?

Answer: I think partly the hair was used to add to Samara's overall creepiness and conceal her 'scary' face until the close-up just before Noah dies. But also the Sadako/Samara characters of the Ringu/Ring story seem to be based on a kind of Japanese ghost called yurei. Yurei were said to be the restless ghosts of wronged females who died tragic or untimely deaths, and traditionally they are thought to appear as figurs in white dresses with their dark hair worn covering their face.

Question: It is understood that before you die, you see the ring. Noah's coffee cup makes a ring, and Rachel sees the lid of the well before she's supposed to die. But does Katie see anything ring-shaped in the beginning?

Answer: The television activates itself just as Katie is putting the glass to her lips - from her point of view, the rim of the glass would form a ring that filled her entire vision.

Question: Exactly how does Katie die? In the scene where Katie gets attacked, in the last second her face turns rotten like someone dying in water, which means she already starts dying. But in the flashback as her mother finds her, Katie is dead in the closet, as if she tried to hide from Samara there. Why would Samara move the dead body to the closet? Or if Katie hid there when being chased by Samara, did she already have the rotten face while still alive?

Answer: They never explain how anyone really dies. But it can be guessed that what happens to you physically is similar to what happened to Samara as she died. The fact that the body was in the closet isn't really significant. Samara's spirit simply placed the body there to be found. It may have to do with it being a dark, closed space, like the well where Samara died.

Question: Rachael made a copy of the videotape that kills people and gives it to Noah to watch. That means there are now two killer videotapes. Even though at the end of the film when she destroys the original, why didn't she destroy the copy that she made? With both tapes destroyed there would be no way for Samara to come back and kill more people. Granted Rachael still would have been killed, but she would also be saving a lot of lives.

Answer: Rachael is safe, since she has passed the tape on, but Noah now needs to pass it on. If Rachael destroyed both copies, Noah would have no way to do this, and would die. Also, based on background material, doing this wouldn't stop Samara: she can regenerate the video, either the same way the original one was created, OR at any point when somebody who has previously passed the tape on appears on a video camera.

Question: I'm sorry if I'm too vague on locating the scene, but when we see Samara sitting with her hands on her knees in the chair in the blank room, why is there a plug right by her feet?

Answer: They're monitoring her vitals.

Question: How much of the cursed tape do you have to watch to become cursed with the "seven days" threat? All of it? Or would even seeing two seconds of it effect you???

Answer: Since the girl in the second movie lived because she covered her eyes, you'd have to watch the whole thing.

Question: After carefully reading all the mistakes and corrections written here, there's still something that bothers me: The Morgans lived on an island and yet Samara was killed in the shelter inn. So far so good. The question is: how did The Morgans find a lid for the well during this vacation (since the lid was nowhere to be seen during the shoving scene) and if so, how can they cover up a well in somebody else's property, and after solving that, there still remains a question of how come nobody noticed the little girl was missing (the inn keeper, the other people on vacation etc.) and how come a cabin was built around the well so conveniently. All the explanations don't fit. Something's still missing.

Answer: There's no reason to believe the inn was there before they dumped her in the well. In fact, all shots of the well at the time show no cabins or buildings anywhere. Most likely the inn was built on top of the area, probably even by the Morgans, in order to cover up the fact that they'd dumped a little girl in that well.

Question: How come Becca (Katie's friend) knew how many days were left to Rachel's death?

Answer: People who have seen Samara are infected by her - one of the side effects is that she can recognise people who are cursed, and how long they have left.] [People who have seen Samara are infected by her - one of the side effects is that she can recognise people who are cursed, and how long they have left.

Question: Why is Samara evil?

Answer: We're not sure yet-most people believe it is because Anna Morgan made a deal with the devil to have a child. She shouldn't have been able to have children.

Question: Hypothetically, what would happen if everyone in the world, or at least those with the means to watch the tape, saw it, copied it and passed it on to someone else? Would the curse, in a sense, die?

Answer: Hypothetically, it could be assumed that the curse would die. But it would be nearly impossible for someone to not drop the ball on it and inadvertently let the curse continue.

Question: Did Becca see Samara too?

Answer: Yes. She saw Samara come out of the TV and kill Katie. That is why she was in a mental institute, and TVs had to be wheeled by her behind a curtain so she wouldn't see them and freak out.

Question: Samara just wanted to be heard and killed everyone who didn't make a copy to show to someone else. But say that someone showed another person the same copy they had seen. Would she still kill that person?

Answer: Yes because Becca watched the same copy as Katie, (her niece) and she recieved a phone call just like the others. She wasn't killed because she cracked the puzzle before her 7 days were up. I don't think it makes any difference, as long as you see the tape. And if you recall, Noah made a copy of the one Becca saw, and he still died.

Question: All Samara wanted was to be heard and she killed anyone who didn't make a copy and show to someone else. Obviously she was very capable of killing before Rachel and Noah found her body and found out what had happened to her. So why does Aidan say that it's bad that they found her? How does it matter since she could kill before too?

Answer: Aidan said to Rachel that they weren't supposed to *help* Samara. When she told him they had, he assumed that worse things were going to happen. He wasn't entirely wrong; the problem didn't go away, but Rachel finding Samara's body and learning the rest of her story didn't make things any worse. If anything it enabled her to understand why she escaped death.

Question: Throughout the movie Samara is about ten, but she comes out Noah's television as someone who is about twenty. Why the difference?

Answer: She is still in her 10's - the reason why she looks older is because her corpse is rotten

Question: What is the meaning of all of the images that Samara made in the hospital? The rocking horse, the hardware, the weird people, etc; and what is the significance of the spinning up-side-down chair in the video? I know she had a chair in her loft, but why is it spinning upside down?

Answer: Every image that Samara created was made with her mind and was relevant to everything that happened with her time with the Morgans. All of the objects are odd and disfigured thus the spinning chair. The hardware was there because of Mr. Morgans constant use of hammers etc. in and around the farmhouse.

Question: In the tape, we see some fingers in a box and something white running down a black screen (a comb through the hair maybe?), but what is the relevance of this to Samara?

Answer: Seven fingers in the box represents the seven days she was alive in the well. The hair combing represents Samara's view of the world, since her hair always covered her face.

Question: If Rachel is already safe because she copied the tape, why does she still get all the symptoms that the other doomed victims do?

Answer: The main point to remember is, Samara wants to tell her story. Yes, by copying the tape, Rachel's s letting other people know of Samara's story, but the symptoms are probably still there as an extra mean for Samara to show her what she went through. I think this shows that the curse is in full effect for the whole time, and that the copying only prevents the final outcome.