When a cursed videotape or an unstoppable grin turns everyday viewing into a death sentence, horror transforms into something that feels dangerously close to real life. This article examines how Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) and Parker Finn’s Smile (2022) build their terror around the idea of curses that spread like infections, comparing their storytelling, visuals, sound, and cultural impact while tracing how each film reflects the anxieties of its time.

The Cursed Videotape: Origins of The Ring’s Plague

Released amid the J-horror invasion of the early 2000s, The Ring transplants the viral curse from Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) into American suburbia. Journalist Rachel Keller, portrayed by Naomi Watts, investigates a tape that kills viewers seven days later unless copied and shared. The film’s opening hooks with two teenagers mocking the urban legend, only for maggots to erupt from their mouths in a grotesque payoff. This setup establishes the curse’s rules: inescapable, mechanical, demanding propagation. The approach matters because it turns passive watching into active participation, forcing viewers to confront their own role in spreading fear.

Director Verbinski layers the narrative with investigative procedural beats, Rachel uncovering Samara Morgan’s tragic backstory at a horse ranch where psychic visions tormented her adoptive parents. The tape itself, a collage of well imagery, ladders, and flies, defies linear interpretation, embodying primal unease. Key scenes, like Rachel’s underwater descent into the well, blend claustrophobia with maternal drive, her son Aidan copying the tape in a feverish act of survival that closes the loop. These moments connect personal loss to larger cycles of trauma, showing why the curse persists across generations.

Production drew from Koji Suzuki’s novel, with screenplay by Ehren Kruger amplifying sensory assault. Hans Zimmer’s score, sparse and droning, underscores the tape’s atonal screeches. The film’s realism stems from practical effects: real maggots, a meticulously built well set, and Daveigh Chase’s uncanny portrayal of Samara, her wet hair veiling a gaze that pierces screens metaphorically and literally. Practical choices like these ground the supernatural in tangible dread, making the horror linger long after the credits roll.

The Ring grossed over $249 million worldwide on a $48 million budget, spawning sequels and a Samara-centric spin-off. Its success lay in making home video a vector for death, prefiguring YouTube-era panics. As explored on Dyerbolical, this shift marked a turning point in how horror used everyday technology to unsettle audiences.

The Smiling Epidemic: Smile’s Psychological Chain

Parker Finn’s Smile updates the formula for post-pandemic viewers, centring on therapist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) who witnesses a patient suicide amid manic laughter and unnatural grins. The curse transfers via sight of the act, compelling victims to smile through escalating hallucinations before self-destruction. Finn’s feature debut crafts a slow-burn siege on Rose’s sanity, blending therapy sessions with domestic unravelled. The timing resonates because it taps into collective experiences of isolation and unspoken mental strain that defined recent years.

The plot escalates as Rose experiences flickering lights, partygoers grinning savagely, and her mother’s ghostly return demanding vengeance. Unlike The Ring’s copy-to-survive mechanic, Smile enforces passivity: the victim must die smiling, passing the entity to a witness. Climactic reveals tie Rose’s trauma to a frat house hazing gone wrong, the demon feeding on unprocessed grief. This structure highlights how unaddressed pain can become contagious, turning private suffering into public spectacle.

Shot on a modest $17 million budget, Smile earned $217 million, its Paramount+ sequel greenlit swiftly. Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score pulses with dissonant strings, mimicking heartbeat acceleration. Practical makeup for grinning corpses and a towering, elongated entity in shadows deliver visceral punches without CGI excess. The restraint in effects keeps the focus on emotional unraveling rather than spectacle.

Finn’s script, from his short Laura Hasn’t Slept, emphasises gaslighting: Rose’s colleagues dismiss her as hysterical, echoing gendered dismissals in horror history. Such details add layers because they connect the supernatural curse to very real patterns of disbelief that many face when expressing distress.

Transmission Tactics: How Curses Infect

Both films weaponise media consumption, but diverge in delivery. The Ring’s VHS tape evokes analogue obsolescence, its degradation mirroring bodily decay. Viewers insert it knowingly, the seven-day countdown a ticking analogue clock. Smile shifts to interpersonal witnessing, no tape required; the suicide’s grin imprints like a meme, spreading via proximity in a hyper-connected world. This evolution reflects societal shifts: from isolated video rentals to omnipresent social feeds.

In The Ring, propagation demands agency—copying saves you but dooms another—instilling guilt. Smile strips choice, the curse a STD of the soul, forcing spectacle on bystanders. Both exploit schadenfreude turned horror, where curiosity kills. Narratively, countdowns build dread: Rachel’s nail-pulling race against time parallels Rose’s futile therapy quests. Symbolism abounds—rings of light in wells, circular grins—evoking inescapable cycles that make the threat feel inevitable.

Gazes That Kill: Antagonists Unveiled

Samara and the Smile Entity embody faceless dread. Samara’s emergence from the TV, crawling with jerky limbs, traumatised audiences, her “dead eyes” defying CGI smoothness for puppetry authenticity. The Smile demon shapeshifts, donning victim skins in a grotesque masquerade, its elongated form nodding to Japanese yokai. Both prey on vulnerability: Samara on parental failure, the entity on suppressed trauma. Their silence amplifies menace, broken only by shrieks or laughs, forcing viewers to project fears onto the unknown.

Heroes on the Brink: Performances That Haunt

Naomi Watts anchors The Ring with raw determination, her transformation from sceptic to desperate mother palpable in close-ups of trembling resolve. Sosie Bacon in Smile channels fraying composure, her wide-eyed terror in mirror scenes evoking Repulsion. Supporting casts shine: Martin Henderson’s supportive aid, Kal Penn’s levity undercut by doom; Jesse Moss and Robin Weigert as doomed colleagues. These portrayals humanise the abstract, grounding cosmic horror in emotional stakes that make the curses feel personal.

Sonic Assaults: Soundscapes of Madness

Sound design elevates both. The Ring’s tape audio—mewling cats, buzzing flies—invades psyche, Zimmer’s motifs swelling to panic. Smile layers diegetic whispers, cracking smiles, and de Veer’s percussive dread, smiles triggering auditory hallucinations. Negative space reigns: silences before jumps, breaths amplifying isolation. These choices matter because they turn ordinary sounds into sources of growing unease, mirroring how real anxiety builds in quiet moments.

Cinematography’s Grip: Frames of Fear

Don Burgess’s widescreen in The Ring isolates figures amid rainy Seattle, fly motifs recurring in macro shots. Smile’s Manny Perez employs Dutch angles, slow zooms on grins, desaturated palettes evoking clinical despair. Handheld urgency in chases contrasts static dread, mirrors fracturing realities. The visual language in each film reinforces the theme of transmission by making the frame itself feel unstable and invasive.

Mediums of Menace: From Analogue to Algorithm

The Ring mourns VHS extinction, tape as talisman. Smile confronts live witnessing, prefiguring TikTok challenges. Both critique voyeurism, fears of invisibility in info-overload. Post-9/11 paranoia infuses The Ring; COVID isolation echoes in Smile. Recent developments like Smile 2 in 2024 continue this thread, expanding the curse into stadium-scale spectacle while retaining the core idea of trauma passed through observation.

Enduring Ripples: Legacies Etched in Screen

The Ring birthed American J-horror remakes like Dark Water; Smile inspires viral marketing, grins memed online. Both redefine contagion horror, influencing It Follows and Barbarian. Critics praise their restraint, proving less gore yields more terror. This legacy shows why these films endure: they tap into timeless worries about what we watch and how it watches us back.

Crafting the Monstrous: Special Effects Face-Off

Practical mastery defines both. The Ring’s TV crawl used harnesses and miniatures, maggots bred on-site. Smile favours prosthetics for smiles, entity suit evoking The Thing. CGI accents subtly: tape glitches, elongated shadows. These choices prioritise tactility, ensuring horrors linger physically and connect viewers more directly to the characters’ fear.

Director in the Spotlight: Gore Verbinski

Gore Verbinski, born Gregor Justin Verbinski on March 16, 1964, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, emerged from a family of physicists and engineers, his father Victor a nuclear scientist. Raised in La Jolla, California, he honed visual storytelling through music videos and commercials for Nike and Mercedes, winning Clio Awards early. Verbinski transitioned to features with the action-comedy Mouse Hunt (1997), a family hit grossing $98 million. International acclaim followed with the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, blending swashbuckling spectacle with subversive humour. Influences include Powell and Pressburger, Kurosawa, and practical effects pioneers like Ray Harryhausen. Prior to Pirates, Verbinski helmed The Ring (2002), adapting J-horror with atmospheric mastery. Post-trilogy, Rango (2011) earned an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. A Cure for Wellness (2016) revived his horror roots, a Gothic thriller critiquing privilege. His career balances blockbusters with bold risks, his visuals defined by rain-slicked shadows and impossible geometries that heighten tension without relying on excess.

Actor in the Spotlight: Sosie Bacon

Sosie Bacon, born February 25, 1992, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, daughter of actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, grew up immersed in Hollywood yet shielded from sets until adulthood. Attending Brown University for theatre, she debuted small in Love and Other Drugs (2010). Early TV included 13 Reasons Why (2017-2018) as Lacey, navigating teen angst. Breakout came in horror with Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Netflix), her dancer role earning praise for vulnerability. Smile (2022) catapulted her, embodying Rose’s descent with visceral intensity. Follow-up House of Darkness (2022) thriller opposite Justin Long honed scream queen status. Awards include Fangoria Chainsaw nominations for Smile. Influences include maternal grit from Sedgwick and paternal intensity. Filmography spans Narcos: Mexico (2018), Charlie Says (2018), You Hurt My Feelings (2023), and Smile 2 (2024). Theatre roots shine in nuanced physicality, positioning Bacon as horror’s empathetic core who makes internal struggles visible on screen.

Bibliography

Suzuki, K. (1991). Ring. Kadokawa Shoten.

Nakata, H. (1998). Ringu. Omega Project.

Verbinski, G. (2002). The Ring. DreamWorks Pictures.

Finn, P. (2022). Smile. Paramount Pictures.

Finn, P. (2024). Smile 2. Paramount Pictures.

Newman, K. (2009). Empire’s Nightmare Movies. Titan Books.

Phillips, W. (2012). 100 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die. Cassell Illustrated.

Rockoff, A. (2011). Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986. McFarland.

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