The Ring (2002)

The unfortunate bombast of The Haunting notwithstanding, the secret to making eerieness go cha-ching is simply to find a functional formula and repeat it. Thus we receive Gore Verbinski's nonsensical yet satisfyingly sleek and suspenseful remake of the 1998 Japanese hit Ringu, a grim tale about a disturbing videotape and the numskulls who doom themselves by watching it. (Insert Dorf on Golf joke here.) This Westernized, subtitle-free version comprises a pastiche of horror hooks (petrified teens, creepy moppet, boob-tube bogeys) and features Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) as a reporter who views the Kenneth Anger-style tape and has seven days to figure out the mystery of a wicked little girl (Daveigh Chase, lead voice in Lilo & Stitch and the English dub of Spirited Away) before death comes a-knockin'. Verbinski wisely concentrates on darkly sensuous imagery, which, apparently, was storyboarded very much in a pulpy comic vein, and in his efforts Dreamworks has given us, at last, the stuff of nightmare.