Like F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu," John Carpenter's Michael "Halloween" Myers and so many other fright-film Grim Reapers, Samara has mastered The Walk: stiff and serenely unhurried, as if her biorhythms were still calibrated to the grave. And like so many of her movie-monster kin, Verbinski's Samara exemplifies the value of withholding, of less is more, the incipient terror of an averted face. But unlike any ghoul in recent memory, with the possible exception of the Blair Witch, Samara seems both satisfyingly omnipotent and horrifyingly omnipresent.

How does Samara get to Moesko Island in the first place? The circumstances are vague: illegal adoption? Virgin birth? Like the images on her video, she isn't made, she just is. Like a god or a demon, she is inconceivably mobile; no matter where you are, or how far you roam after viewing the tape, she'll always get you, right on time (even if she has several other conflicting appointments; four teen victims all die at 10 p.m.).

Scoffers familiar with the late-'80s flop "Shocker," or for that matter with the Spielberg-produced "Poltergeist," might wonder what Samara's powers would amount to without the luxuries of the video age. She's the first supernatural killer who's willing to leave a voice-mail message, but the film never flinches at the specter of parody that waits somewhere off-screen. Just the opposite. Samara isn't limited to the vehicle of television; she's capable of telepathic communication with Rebecca Kotler (in the psych ward) and Richard Morgan, as well as dream visitations to Rachel. Judging from the messages Aidan channels, simply to hear about the tape's death sentence is to be infected by it. In addition, the rules that Samara appears to establish -- you watch the tape, receive a confirmation phone call (a second "ring") and you die seven days later -- become increasingly less reliable as the film progresses. For example, it doesn't matter whether you answer the phone, and by film's end the seven days themselves seem arbitrarily chosen, calling to mind another seven-day span in which universes were brought into being (or in this case razed).

Here, in crude form, we begin to glimpse the profundity lurking in and around the edges of "The Ring."

Finessing the Genre

Horror films often work best when they target pervasive societal preoccupations, local or global bugaboos that set the populace on edge. Vampire legends often emerged in communities afflicted by tuberculosis, plagues or other nasty wasting diseases. "The Ring" samples several small portions from the contemporary smorgasbord of paranoia: The taboo of premarital sex, the evils of infanticide, and even the anti-tobacco crusade periodically appear as surrogate explanations for the narrative we're witnessing. But these are largely false leads, distractions, gestures in the direction of social relevance.

The film's primary target is of course technology. Television is literally a weapon in the film, perhaps most pointedly knocking Rachel off her feet when she should really be holding her ground. Richard Morgan dies by electrocution, after wiring himself up and plunging into a brimming bathtub. The idea is extended to include the media in general when Morgan compares the reporter's task to the transmission of "sickness" (another kind of vampirism). But such an ideological agenda, if sanctimoniously pursued, might result in a much sillier film: a cheap attempt to exploit the latest hysteria.

Instead, "The Ring" generates the most energy through its handling of one last genre staple. Much has been made about the ways in which horror films violate the boundaries of civilized existence: boundaries between rational and irrational, between natural and supernatural, between life and death. Frequently, this breaking down of borders is explained as a metaphor for similar tensions within the human psyche, at least according to Freud's model of ego and id, conscious and unconscious. While "The Ring" does take this well-traveled path, it does so without giving Freudians much ammunition. Rather, "The Ring" presents a much more compelling kind of border crossing, and does so with maximum subtlety, which further exacerbates the sense of terror.

When Samara comes calling for Noah seven days after he watches the tape, we see her first climbing out of the well, and then out of the television set itself. It would be tough to imagine a more literal instance of border dissolution, an image grading, with awful consequences, into reality. Most viewers will intuitively recognize that the same pattern exists throughout the film, Samara's dread approach being only the finale to the cycle. The images on the cursed video -- of the ladder that leads nowhere, of the Morgan house and the Moesko Island horses, and most notably of the fly (whose wings still twitch when the tape is paused, as if it is just pretending to be paused) -- regularly bleed into Rachel's reality, culminating with her sojourn to the bottom of Samara's well. Verbinski is expressly violating the reassuring boundaries that presumably separate us from the events in a movie. Rachel says, "I think that before we die, we see the Ring." Did you notice those little black discs that flicker periodically on the margins of the screen?

Tales and Details

What else in "The Ring" makes so many of us squirm until seven post-viewing days have elapsed? By way of an answer, we should note that this film is smarter and more cagily constructed than most horror films. It's of the involuted school of "Sixth Sense" creator M. Night Shyamalan, meaning that the linear action of the plot (Rachel's search) is subsumed by a nonlinear order of recurrence (the images from the tape). As in the evil tape itself, every scene in "The Ring" is a composition and almost every detail counts. At the Shelter Mountain inn, before Rachel locates the video, the desk attendant subjects her to a lame card trick, claiming to guess the card she's drawn. After several wrong guesses, by which time Rachel gets her hands on the tape, he holds up the seven of spades, which Rachel disingenuously confirms is the card she drew. A death-suit seven, fancy that. In the barn-loft chamber where Samara was imprisoned by the Morgans, the wallpaper has a horse-head motif, reflecting not merely her fatal effect on the equine species but also the terrifying episode with the runaway horse aboard the car ferry.

An even better example occurs when Rachel steps out on the balcony of her apartment, while Noah is inside watching the fatal tape. This scene of Seattle apartment towers with their sweeping geometric precision (a compound of apparently self-replicating lines) is visually striking, beautiful in a way but cracked, surreal and charged with menace. As Rachel scans the neighboring buildings from her balcony, she's allowed voyeuristic glimpses of her fellow city dwellers: each place she looks, there's a TV set on and the residents are talking on phones or obliviously working out on their exercise equipment. One woman steps out on her balcony to smoke; when she spots Rachel, the two exchange a sinister glance. Here in microcosm is the film's broader agenda: The open windows are themselves transparent and eerily traversable screens, providing a foretaste of Samara's climactic entry into Noah's bachelor digs.

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