The first trailer for Rings, the second sequel to The Ring, has arrived and it will have you wondering what we ever thought was scary about this concept in the first place. This trailer is terrible. Rings looks like someone just copied a data dump of r/NoSleep instead of writing a script.
Rings looks so terrible it makes me question whether The Ring was ever good in the first place. Sure, I remember thinking the first movie was frightening when I saw it in a suburban cinema with a room full of my fellow screaming high schoolers, but jesus crow how could anything to do with this embarrassing little TV girl have ever been scary?
Sheesh. I mean, my god:
One of the few compensations provided by the internet (not that it should prevent us from burning this networked monstrosity down and salting the earth where it fell) is creepypasta, a multimedia scary story catch-all that has laid bare just how formulaic our fear reflex can be. Is Jeff the Killer creepy because it’s a well-crafted yarn, or is it merely that our senses are easily scrambled and manipulable? Creepypasta has laid bare the jump scare, exposed the campfire story as a cheap trick and still manages to occasionally get our goat despite bad grammar, bad writing and dumb ideas.
Mainstream horror better step up its game. Stop recycling old ideas that the 14-year-olds have already so thoroughly pillaged, Ring series.
