Ghosts and Ringu

Last year for me, my first in the MFA program, was a time of new beginnings - returning to school mid-career to try to shift from reality television to writing and directing for scripted tv - and loss. A month before I started at USC, one of my closest friends, Marquette, lost her battle with cancer. We met as directors and filmmakers, so that was a core component of our friendship. She had an MFA from NYU, as well as a law degree from UC Berkeley, and was a professor of film. We encouraged each other in applying for fellowships and grants, and had brainstorming calls to go over all of our various projects and encourage each other on our way. I tried to help her get her feature script off the ground, and in the year before she died, we wrote a pilot together. I wrote her recommendation letters as she was applying for teaching positions; she had a front row seat to my decision to apply to go back to school.

 She is on my mind, and over my shoulder watching my progress almost every day.

And then in October of last year, during my first semester, my sister was killed in a random hiking accident. We were opposites in almost every way - she was tall and loud, larger than life, while I am small and quiet. She had an excellent sense of direction and organization, exemplified by the crisp array of bills organized by denomination that filled her wallet; I get lost getting home from the grocery store if you spin me around three times, and have crumpled wads of ones floating around in every purse and falling out of every pocket. We rubbed each other wrong through well-meaning misunderstandings again and again, and I still am riddled with regrets, wishes of things I had done differently or ways I wish I had been a better sister. I remember being hurt by her very short and minimal response to one of the student film projects I sent out to my family. After her death, I found out that she had forwarded that video and others to a bunch of her friends, proudly showing it off. No matter what got stuck in our craws about each other, she was invested in my path here, and her ghost walks with me through this journey, alongside Marquette.

I had to drop a class this week that I thought would fulfill a certain requirement but didn't, and I ended up registering for a Genre Studies class focusing on Asian Horror.

What? You? Horror? you might be saying to yourself, as I also did, but hear me out. The professors of my other three classes are white men in their 70s and 80s, which was also pretty much the complete makeup of my professorial array last semester (apologies to the two dudes who were in their 60s, your youth hereby acknowledged). This class is taught by a woman of color, something I've been dying for. And, I was regaled at lunch the other day by one of my young friends about how funny she is, and excited to teach. On top of that, I do feel like I've missed a lot of great commentary on the world by my complete avoidance of horror; the genre seems similar to scifi in that it lends itself to metaphorical scenarios.

Yes, I spent almost a year of high school afraid to go to sleep after watching Nightmare on Elm Street, convinced that it was possible that I could bring forth some monstrosity from my subconscious, and have on several occasions when driving alone on a big highway late at night, have seen skeletons driving the cars to the side of me in my peripheral vision. I have avoided all psychotropic drugs because I can hallucinate enough to freak myself out completely sober. Perhaps watching (or hiding from) these films in class will allow me to tolerate the terror while benefitting from the art.

I missed the first class, so rented Ringu on Amazon to make up the screening.  I never watched the original, or the US-remake, The Ring, when they were popular, because it sounded like exactly the kind of psychological horror, with a touch of the supernatural, that would terrorize me.

I found myself drawn immediately in, and watching carefully to try to dissect how the director crafted the movie to be so compelling, even though the opening relies on a static wide shot of someone telling a long story to someone else, things I've always been told to avoid at all costs. Additionally, the story twists and the directorial choices kept me on the edge of my seat, most of the time without using any music. I'm still impressed by the skill it took to pull this off.

Parts of Ringu definitely feel a little dated today - the use of a black & white x-ray effect on each victim as they are about to be killed was definitely kind of a comforting relief for me, in that it bordered on cheesy instead of scary. But the story of a woman facing the loss of her niece and trying to get some answers, some reason for her death, rings true for me, in a more universal way, as does the haunting that's at the core of the movie.

I hope that my ghosts are kinder and gentler than Ringu's ghost, rooting for me and helping me along, but this movie confirmed my suspicion that horror can be more than just surface-level jump scares. It also reminded me of the ghosts who trail me, not only Kristin and Marquette, but the fears that I carry froward from past experiences.