I grew up in a Connecticut suburb and had a very small group of sheltered friends. We liked being sheltered, because it allowed us to do our homework without the distraction of boyfriends and popularity. But the lack of boyfriends, popularity, and having any kind of interesting experiences started to weigh on us by the time we were seniors in high school. That year we started seeing bands, being slightly less responsible, and occasionally (twice) having parties where more than six people showed up. It was around that time, the year was 2002, that my friends and I went to a Rusted Root concert at a nearby college. It was so awesome. They played “Send Me On My Way,” duh. There was even a 25 minute drum solo that I dubbed, at the time “transcendent.”
So after the show we were all hopped up on new experiences, and we walk back to my friend Liz’s Jeep Wrangler in the parking lot. So we get to Liz’s Jeep and under the windshield wiper is an unmarked VHS tape. What could it be?! Porn. It was probably porn. Intrigued, my friends and I took the tape back to my mom’s house and popped it in the VCR because what else were we going to do? AND THIS IS WHAT WE SAW.
Needless to say we all FREAKED OUT. Let me remind you that it was 2002 so the internet existed but nobody had ever heard of “viral marketing” and I don’t even think YouTube was a thing yet. So, we screamed and covered our heads with pillows and screamed more. Did you watch it?! The part with the dead cow on the beach?! AHHH! Why do people like having these feelings! It’s a living nightmare. I just watched it again and I’m literally shaking. Why do I keep watching it? So many people enjoy things like this and it just makes me want to die to stop the scary. Do you crazy people love your own nightmares? Do you?!
Now, of course, we did not understand why somebody would put this tape on our car. We really thought it was going to be a porn. That would have been scary in its own right, but nothing like this. We came to learn that the video is from the movie The Ring. IT’S THE TAPE THEY WATCH AND THEN THEY DIE. WERE WE GOING TO DIE?! There was no way to know. We assumed that we would all be dying and nobody slept for the rest of their lives.
But lo and behold, many years later, we are all still alive and viral marketing is a thing that marketing managers and PR representatives talk about around conference tables. In 2002 it was very effective, in an age before the internet made cynics of us all. If you think about it, it was sort of a genius move. Put a bunch of unmarked tapes on the windshields of kids at a Rusted Root concert and you’re hitting your target audience smack dab in the middle of their bored, adolescent faces. And my friends and I all went to see The Ring when it came out, so I guess it worked!
But upon further reflection, the really great thing about this was that it happened at all. Before my friends and I watched the video from The Ring in my mom’s living room the most exciting thing that happened to me was I got to give a speech at eighth grade commencement. So thank you, DreamWorks marketing team circa early-2000’s. Thank you.
Emily Kaye Lazzaro is a playwright and actor from Boston. She thinks that antiquated technology is very spooky.
This movie (both versions!) is to this day the scariest thing I have ever seen, for reasons that are completely beyond me. I cried in the theatre and slept on my couch with all the lights and the TV on the 24-hour news channel after I saw it.
@antarcticastartshere Nooooo, get away from the TV!
@laurel if it never goes to static I will always be safe! *rocks back and forth*
@antarcticastartshere The Japanese version totally kicked off a really long and retrospectively obnoxious Japanese/Korean horror phase in my teenage years which was only stopped when a friend bought me Oldboy for my birthday. It was the best/worst thing she ever did for me.
@antarcticastartshere OH MY GOD KOREAN HORROR YES. I have so many nightmares about movies I can't even remember the names of. I still love "Thirst" and talk about it more than I should.
@annepersand I love that movie!!!! That is the hilarious part of my Ring-terror, I LOVE SCARY MOVIES.
@Ironic Hipster Meme Have you seen A Tale of Two Sisters? So good.
@antarcticastartshere Once I knew what was coming and watched it again, I suddenly found it amazing. It's now one of two movies that comprise my potential boy/ladyfriend screening battery. (The other one is Delicatessen).
@antarcticastartshere I haven't yet. It's on the "Korean madness" section of my Netflix queue. There's one movie where the girl gets plastic surgery and then the guy gets plastic surgery and they don't know they know eachother...or something. I need someone to tell me the name of that movie because the sculpture park in it is awesome.
@annepersand : Delicatessen, yes! I applaud your taste in relationship filter movies. (Relatedly, any girl who gives Audition two thumbs up is a keeper.)
For those above, I always recommend Pulse (the original Japanese one, obvs.) as the go-to creepy J-horror movie. It's the best kind of scary : the slow, crawling kind of creeping scary. And holy God does it stick with you. Brrr, awesome.
@antarcticastartshere I totally agree. I am a horror movie afionada and have seen literally dozens of movies that are supposed to be scarier, but to date, The Ring (the first one) is the only movie that has ever resulted in me having to sleep with the lights on as an adult. For three days.
@Gef the Talking Mongoose The remake of Pulse is drab... but the cast/crew commentary (the one with like twelve people) is hilarious. I suspect they started out with a drink or two, and things just got out of hand.
A group of my friends and I watched The Ring one night in high school. Halfway through the movie, the phone rang and we all screamed. My dad came into my room and said, "it's for you." At that point, I started screaming, "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!" And all of my friends were shrieking. After all of that excitement, as my friends were leaving, one of them stopped in the foyer and began brushing her hair while looking in the mirror and we all hysterically demanded that she stop. I hate that stupid movie.
@ginalouise I like this hair brushing friend of yours.
@JoanTition I still hold it against her.
@ginalouise My friend is a slight, short girl with long dark hair. Our bf's at the time were roommates and we got home from a girls night one night to them watching The Ring in the living room.
We threw her hair over her face and sent her in there. My boyfriend hit her. It remains our worst/best idea ever. :)
D'awww.
DO NOT WATCH THIS
I don't know why I thought it would be a good idea to watch this in the library. Everyone around me resents me for my terrified thrashing now.
"the ring" was THE movie i watched during my formative teenage years that scared the everloving shit out of me. you know, the movie or book you encounter when you're 13, 14, and for some reason it affects you so strongly that you have nightmares every night for weeks, months even, and go back to sleeping with the light on? ughhhhh THIS MOVIE. just thinking about it gives me the heebie jeebies.
@yeah-elle Oh God, for me for some reason it was these horrible books about pets that can sense DANGER. And I read this awful gory story about a woman who rents a cabin on the beach that no one has rented for years, and it turns out it's haunted by some disgusting ghost of a man who drowned, and now whenever a lady stays in his cabin, he CRAWLS OUT OF THE SEA and TRIES TO RAPE HER. And this woman discovers a stray cat, and feeds him, and the stray cat keeps her safe from the horrible raping sea monster ghost man, and the curse is broken. I thought this story was TRUFAX FOR REALZ and I had to sleep with the lights on for weeks in fear that the thing would come and get me...in Illinois.
@yeah-elle ME TOO. I have finally, after ten years or whatever, managed to get to a place where I can think about it without completely freaking out ... and now I have this sick urge to watch it again. WHY WOULD I DO THAT TO MYSELF WHY.
And I'm definitely never ever watching the sequel or the Japanese original. Ever. Probably ever.
@LittleMousling: That's good, because The Ring did a great job taking something ridiculous (a VHS tape you die after watching) and made it work, and part of what makes horror work is not spelling out the 'rules' of the universe very clearly. The sequels, and there's a whole gaggle, basically delve into the lore of what and why it's all happening, and it's terrible because explaining or exploring the theme just makes it fall apart.
Cliff notes: Do not watch Ring (Risen) sequels, they are bad
@yeah-elle I think this is kinda Gore Verbinski's thing: Making movies that make NO goddamned sense amazing. See also the first Pirates of the Caribbean. I actually like the American version of The Ring better than the Japanese (heresy, I know, but I think it's a tighter bit of storytelling in the US version.)
@angermonkey : I agree -- the American remake is a better movie. There, I said it!
We've met before.
@atipofthehat I hate you because I know I am going to go home and watch every single one of these.
@atipofthehat Lynchian k-hole - initiated.
I grew up in a Connecticut suburb and had a very small group of sheltered friends.
my first instinct was: OMG were you in the babysitters club!?
@blahstudent would the babysitters go to a Rusted Root show though?
@blahstudent Stacey and the Strange Video : BSC Mystery #28
@blahstudent Stacey and Claudia would totally go to a Rusted Root concert and also my friends and I desperately wished we were in the Babysitters Club, which is... embarrassing?
@blahstudent Being that I was one of the girls Emily is talking about, I can attest that yes, we did want to be the babysitters club. Since Emily has already embarrassed us we might as well have full honesty here!
@ArgosMama When Stacey got kicked out, she and her friends went to that one concert but got kicked out because her friends were DRINKING, remember? And Stacey got out of it because she was all, "I am DIABETIC, if I DRINK I will DIIIIEEE."
So: no, they wouldn't. There might be DRINKING.
@Pixley Stacey And the Bad Girls! They wore flannel on the cover.
@blahstudent Dawn would totally go to a Rusted Root concert. And Mary Anne would come along for some step-sisterly bonding but spend the entire show adjusting the buttons on her Talbot's cardigan, checking her watch, and then accidentally eat a pot brownie.
i consented to letting my friends rent The Ring during a sleepover at my house. and then we sat on my couch and watched it. and it was the worst decision ever. shit like that is best left to wikipedia plot synopses.
I thought The Ring was SO scary when it came out! It's still one of the top creepiest movies I've ever seen. What I hate is all the people who were like "it's not scary, it's sooo dumb! I even thought it was kind of funny! Haha." I mean, they have to be lying, right?
My friend and I decided the reason it's so scary because it's the most frightening thing (ghost corpse child that will kill you) coming out of our most beloved thing (TV!).
Also, the Japanese version where the mom goes in the well and is like, hugging and cuddling the rotting corpse. WHAT. (I took Japanese in high school and we had to watch that as part of a project ahhhh)
@emilylouise I saw it in theaters and there are apparently these flaps (?) the theatre is supposed to put down so the movie has the proper aspect ratio? I don't know much about this, but we could see all sorts of boom mics following people around, and it just kinda ruined the effect. Maybe I should watch it again.
@emilylouise - I saw the Blair Witch Project in the theatre and right after the screams subsided from seeing the ending, some dude in the back said "MAAAAAAN. THAT IS SOME BULLSHIT."
@Ham Snadwich Seeing BWP in theatres is a defining memory of my early teens. I remember thinking it was SO. BRILLIANT.
I even put it as my favorite movie on my AOL profile (!) and was certain that anyone who didn't think it was scary just "didn't get it" ...I don't think I've seen that movie since I was like 14, but I'm suuuure it stands the test of time.
@emilylouise Laughed so hard at "most beloved thing". Because yes but also hahaha. Thanks for that.
@HamSnadwich I saw BWP in theaters with a guy friend who called me that night TERRIFIED because when he had taken a shower, and the shower sounded like the noises on the outside of the tent in the movie.
@Layla - Yeah, it scared the crap out of me too. I went to school not too far from Burkittsville and they marketed the hell out of that movie on campus. Lots of pretty well-crafted marketing that made a lot of people believe there was some truth to the story. Right we finally saw it, there were some "Haw haw, let's go camping up in Burkittsville, wouldn't that be hilarious?!" but then everyone agreed that it wouldn't, and we should not.
@Ham Snadwich Oh, that marketing was my favorite thing -- the website with the creaky-cracky sounds and that faux documentary! I love it. I still love the movie but I don't watch it too often so as not to wear out the scary. And, annoying personalities or not, I loved how those characters were so... "every college student" types.
My friend is friends with a guy who worked on BWP. He lives somewhere in NJ with a big, huge woodsy yard, and he has a bonfire kind of party every year in October and shows the movie against the trees in the middle of the night. I was planning to go this year but it never happened -- probably a residual effect of that damnable hurricane.
Ahhhh I watched The Ring by myself in the house when I was like, 14 and I forgot to turn the TV off and it switched to static while I was in the next room and I. Lost. My. Shit.
@annepersand I had the same exact experience... only I was 24.
@annepersand Just reading that comment scared the fuck out of me. Is it HBO series on dvd that have a sudden static thing in the credits? I tense up every time. The Ring, oh my god.
I also still get majorly creeped out when someone's face is blurry in a photo.
What the fuck is a VHS tape?
@boyofdestiny It's like a crappier version of a laserdisc.
@MrComment - It's the latest obsolete data format the hipsters are all into. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/movies/horror-film-goes-back-to-vhs-tape.html
@Ham Snadwich The art of pan and scan has really been lost in the digital age. Myself, I only watch films in PixelVision these days. There's something about the warmth and texture that new technology hasn't been able to reproduce.
@MrComment - and knowing that the playback on your DVD is going to be exactly the same forever? Where's the fun in that? With a VHS (or Betamax!) the machine might eat the tape. Adventure!
@Ham Snadwich This was how our beloved family Betamax died when I was probably 12 or so, which means this was 2000, aka way past the time anybody should have a Betamax. No more watching A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for me!
@figwiggin - I was thinking that Betamax would have the ultimate hipster cache, because not only is it more obscure, but you can also (correctly) argue that it was the superior technology.
since this comment thread is clearly a series of "I remember where I was when I first watched 'The Ring'"
I'll add that I was at my ex-boyfriend's high school graduation party and someone had just bought the DVD so we put it on in the background while we did our grad party things. We didn't even WATCH it, really, but I remember being DELICIOUSLY TERRIFIED while driving home in the fog that I was going to see Samara standing there with her hair down in her face like cousin it.
To this day, there's a weird well thing at this campground I go to, and I always picture someone crawling out of it.
None of this bothers me though, I LOVE SCARY MOVIES! The adrenaline of being scared but in the safety of my own home or a movie theatre is THE BEST. THE BEST I TELL YOU!
@supergirlieque except that you're never REALLY safe...
@supergirlieque I think The Ring is what ruined enjoying horror movies for me, because I used to have that 'in the safety of my own home' thing, because I could always just say to myself, "it's a movie, there's no reason watching this movie would make anything bad happen to me," But THAT'S exactly what happens in The Ring! AAHHH!
Many years ago, when people still had VCRs, my friends found a VHS tape in the street and took it home to watch it. OF COURSE.
It was a recording of an 80s Miss America Pageant, and it was SOLID GOLD hilarity. The highlight was a contestant singing and dancing to Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody." It's still a recurring joke.
@punkahontas: The good people at Everything is Terrible are doing the Lord's work by archiving stuff like that.
@Too Much Internet I should find out who has it. I'm sure it's around somewhere!
Yeah, The Ring. My TV is still the scariest thing in my house. To. This. Day.
If you all like sleeping with the lights/24 hours news channel/all of your stuffed animals on/in the vicinity,
I suggest you watch Insidious.
But only in a very dark and quiet house with good speakers.
@fareby_galore
NO. I will not stand for this. I am a huge baby when it comes to scary movies but every time this movie went to scare me I got distracted by how awful it was. Not even awful in a good way. I mean it should have been 2 different movies really, the pretty good and creepy first half, and the predictable, terrible and cheap costumed second half.
Was it supposed to be bad? I don't get it.
@fareby_galore Such a good movie! So scary!
@nogreeneggs I was so excited to see this. And then... I saw it. I blame Barbara Hershey, only because I was excited to see Black Swan too, and... same thing.
Feeling significantly older here, but I had a similar experience with a bootleg copy of The Blair Witch. I hadn't seen/heard anything about the movie, one night my brother's buddy brought over an unmarked VHS and we watched it in my room. Scared shitless!!!
@babysister: That's actually really cool... if you think about it, it's really hard to 'go in cold' like that anymore, with the shared information of the internet. You really thought you were watching found footage - can't duplicate that experience.
I got 27 seconds in and had to turn it off.
@hairspin: Just turn the sound off, and start up Nine Inch Nails 'Closer' as the video begins. Totally different vibe.
i worked at a college at that time. dreamworks mailed hundreds of promo copies of that video tape to distribute at schools. you probably weren't the only car to get one on their windshield.
I kind of forgot the plot. Was the girl put in there because she started making avant-garde films or did she start making the films because she was put away?
@MrComment She made them...WITH HER MIND.
@antarcticastartshere Say one more positive thing about Maya Deren and you're living in the barn, young lady!
@MrComment: Putting girls into wells is the number one cause of NIИ videos.
I'm feeling old here, because the reason TVs are scary is not because of The Ring, but because of Poltergeist.
@misskaz
They're HERE !
@misskaz Poltergeist was my first "scared of the TV" episode. Back when I was 8 or 9. The Ring scared me even worse, however, and usurped Poltergeist as my Television Terror.
@misskaz The scariest part of Poltergeist (which my parents let me watch when I was a super little kid, good choice guys) was the swimming pool scene during the climax. So disgusting. I harbored this intense fear that places I loved were built on top of haunted burial grounds throughout my childhood.
"You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you?! You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! Youonlymovedtheheadstones!!! Why? WHHYY?!"
@misskaz Word! Run to the fucking light, Carol Anne.
@misskaz yes - I remember that I refused to watch tv for a week or so after I saw that movie. And I actually only watched it up until the first scene with the tv after which I turned it off and basically ran outside.
@misskaz YES!
@atipofthehat Thanks SO much for that. If I have nightmares tonight, I'm blaming you.
The Best Time I Couldn't Sleep For Days Because of the Ring:
After watching The Ring with a friend of mine in theaters, drove home to my house in the middle of the (big, dark, terrifying) woods. Went to my bedroom, opened the blinds to discover that my father had been working on our septic system, and so the access cover was lifted off the tank and the floodlights were still on in the yard. So, to sum: gaping hole in the ground resembling a well, eerily spotlit with crazy dark woods surrounding it. Needless to say, spent the entire night rocking back and forth quietly crying with all of the lights on. Never. Ever. Again.
Everyone ready for the 'Pinup?
@atipofthehat YES! if you leave your scary links at home.
Oh I have a good one. I had a friend who worked at a movie theater, and she had to PREVIEW THE MOVIES THE NIGHT BEFORE THEY WERE RELEASED! So a bunch of us snuck in and it was like "Damn! No one else has seen this yet...we MIGHT DIE!" Two of us lived on campus at The Evergreen State College (read: trees), and we wouldn't go back, spent the night in the livingroom of our friends' apartment.
I've never seen this movie, never will, since all scary movies ruin my life. HOWEVER, just reading these comments has freaked me out. Taking a break from the scary comments, I was just in our office's bathroom in a stall, & one of the automatic faucets turned on without anyone else in the room, which happens sometimes, but COME ON, FAUCET, DON'T DO THAT RIGHT NOW! Scared the eff out of me.
@one cow.: But it's so good! You really should watch it. There's hardly any scenes with millipedes!
i have one of these scary tapes! my older brother made me watch it before we watched the ring.
What do you get if you do too much naked swimming?
@atipofthehat Liver flukes?
The Ring terrified me for years! Literally years! The only thing that made it better was watching "Scary Movie 3"'s spoof of The Ring - watching Samara climb out of a well in someone's basement and then get pummeled around by Regina Hall took the scary out of it for me.
I get freaked by scary films and avoid watching them, but somehow my friends convinced me to go see The Ring in a theater when it came out. Afterwards they were like, "enh, it wasn't that scary but at least it had Naomi Watts in her underwear," whereas I was saucer-eyed with fear and made them walk me to my car.
Worst part: WHEN I GOT HOME I HAD A NOSEBLEED. Naturally I stayed up all night with all the lights on...
@nowwhat "saucer-eyed with fear" - very nice.
@hairspin Thanks!
IF THAT HAPPENED TO ME I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT I WOULD OF DONE!!! I didn't sleep for like 6 months after I saw that movie. I actually freaked out just looking at the first frame of the you tube clip you posted. Did that happen to anyone else?
@isnapmyfingers Yes! It totally brought back the adrenaline of staying up all night wondering whether I was going to cough up some string next.
Thank you all for reassuring me that I've made the right decision all along to never watch the Ring or the Sarah Michelle Gellar one or any of the Paranormal Activities. I'll probably try to find The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Hocus Pocus on TV tonight.
@MeghanElizabeth Hocus Pocus is the shit and is always the right decision.
@MeghanElizabeth Amen sister. I have flat out refused to watch any of those movies, but The Ring especially. Every single person I've ever met who said they had seen it had the same reactions as everyone in this thread. Why? Why do people want to feel this way? I like feeling good, generally.
Whoa. I can't bring myself to watch it, and I never will. My heart's about to crawl out of my throat just reading about this, because I would've cried and never stopped if I had been you and watched it.
Oooooooh, I hate scary things!
Oh The Ring. I lived in the same apartment building as my boyfriend of the time, and one morning I was leaving for work and he hissed out of his open window "SEVEN DAYS!" and I threw myself against the wall of the neighboring building and started flinging my purse around in front of me. Because that was going to stop the ghost girl? I don't even know!
My A plan in a Ring situation is to give my tape copies to really old people who are imminently dying in hospice and won't make it the seven days and will just die peacefully before Samara comes for them.
@Gnatalby I wish I could give this two thumbs up, one for the story and one for the solution to the Ring problem.
@Gnatalby - I was dating a girl at the time whose much younger sister was a ringer for the non-ghost version of the Ring girl. She thought it would be hi-larious for her little sister to put her hair in front of her face and stagger towards me. Girl learned some new words that day.
okay, okay, you GUYS. so i saw this my senior year of high school during some late showing on a school night. 'cause it's senior year, i guess. so my best friend and i are driving home at like one in the morning through the horrifying monster fog, and we're trying to decide if we should spend the night because obviously it's easier for evil ghost girls to kill you one at a time, right? we decide to go to our own houses, because we're WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING, and I get to my room and then i remember that my bed IS LITERALLY FIVE FEET FROM MY TELEVISION. the one from which the evil ghost girl is going to crawl and devour me! so then i called my now-husband, at college on the east coast where it was four am, and made him talk to me until i feel asleep.
ps: can we also talk about how i wake up like five times a night to pee and since watching paranormal activity that ritual has become much more harrowing?
I saw this shit as a straight-up adult with a motherfucking desk job and health insurance and shit and it STILL scared me so bad I couldn't be alone in the house for like a week. The television set! THE TELEVISION SET I KNOW IT'S GOING TO TURN ON OF ITS OWN ACCORD
the video is somehow super frightening. I love how it manages to be so frightening and yet so nonsensical. What a cool editing project.
In conclusion, if this had happened to me the urine would still be coursing down my legs.
Oh sweet mother of the jeebus child, I saw this at my projectionist job, when it was first released. The soundbooth is soundproof, you know? Well, this movie jumpstarted the fine tradition of me HOWLING IN TERROR at the screen, during scary films. But never, EVER have I howled so loud as when Samarna crrrrrraawwwwwled out of the TV and killed the Boyfriend. AIEEEEE!
(nb the horse jumping off the boat also freaked me the f' out. Dunno why. I liked horsies, even when I was 21 @ this job.)
@Logos I love horses, always have and always will, and that scene scared the bejesus out of me. In fact, that was the point at which I walked out of the room and said, "I'm done. I'm out." And then in the middle of the night, when I couldn't sleep, I got up and had to carry the tv in my room away, into the guest room, and then put it in the back of the closet, facing the wall, and cover it with blankets. And then I didn't sleep for three months.
I think it's because when horses are a source of comfort for you and then you see one go cray-cray and commit suicide, that's some scary shit.
The scariest part about the Ring, to me, was that the protagonist did everything right, and it didn't matter. There was no solution to the evil and she was forced to give in to it.
Also, the person's face when they opened the closet door.
@Xora: It's a good horror film when it actually instills a sense of dread in you.
I loooove that edit! Was just thinking about that. Bad horror films lean on cliche jump scares (something opens/closes and they just amp the volume way up); The Ring did a wonderful job at integrated unexpected stuff in an organic way. The cinematography was just fantastic. That scene, man yeah. Was caught off guard!
@Xora Ugggghh... And when the little boy is like "you weren't supposed to HELP her..." TERROR! Okay, I need to watch this movie again.
Ha! I was at that same Rusted Root show at Fairfield U. Knowing the area (lived there 6 years) what interesting marketing leaving the tape there for you to find...
@Valerie Cerreta@facebook Whoa crazy!!
@Emily Kaye Lazzaro For me it was "Scream" late at night in Easton in a room just full of French doors... (I was also a senior in 2002 in Fairfield)
@Emily Kaye Lazzaro I was also at that Rusted Root concert at FU! (I'm from Redding) No funtimes vhs tape for me though :(
So I have two stories about finding awful things on tape! One of my friends found a VHS tape at a gas station, in the basin where you put the squeegee. The tape itself was broken but we fixed it with some scotch tape and it turned out to be really weird porn involving ears of corn. Yeah. Another time I was at a junkyard looking for a part for my car and there was this smashed up Porsche with the trunk ajar. I peeked in and there was a DVD in there, so I took it home and watched it. THIS IS SO SCARY YOU GUYS--I put the DVD in and pressed play, and after a lot of loud buzzing, an eyeball appears on the screen. Just a huge eyeball looking around. Then some clamps came down and held the eyeball into place and it stopped moving. Then some other mechanical arm came down and removed the lens from the eyeball, just peeled it back like it was a banana or something. I was completely horrified but then I realized that it was eye surgery and that the smashed up Porsche had probably belonged to a doctor, like somebody who did laser eye surgery. Still, the moment when the eyeball came on the screen, and the moment when I realized they were going to start cutting the eyeball--scariest moment of my life.
@oopsydaisy: Wow, talk about non sequitur... inadvertent horror.
@oopsydaisy This is not encouraging me to ever watch found VHS tapes. Into the garbage disposal they go!
Oh dear lord. So, I am NOT a scary movie person AT ALL. My friends in high school tried to get me to watch The Exorcist in broad daylight and I ran right out of that room. I'm also not very good at following popular culture. So one day my freshman year of college, a friend asked if I wanted to come to the movies with her & her sister. I asked her what movie and she said, "Some movie called The Ring?" And I thought maybe it was some kind of romantic comedy. IT WAS NOT. I spent the last ten minutes of the movie hiding under my jacket because I knew it couldn't end with the mom & little boy all happily ever after. And then I stayed in the lounge on the boys' floor until 4am when the last guy was like, "Dude, I need to sleep." So I went back to my room and then at like 6am my door flew open and my friend jumped on my bed demanding to know if I'd just called her (which I hadn't). One of the guys from the boys' floor thought it would be funny to scare her. After we both calmed down, she left. And then my phone rang. I answered it and THERE WAS NO ONE THERE. So I threw the phone. Like, literally threw it. After a few minutes of petrified terror, I hung up the phone and it RANG AGAIN! I totally freaked out and didn't answer it and then my cell phone started ringing and I saw it was my sister, so I answered it.
"Before my friends and I watched the video from The Ring in my mom’s living room the most exciting thing that happened to me was I got to give a speech at eighth grade commencement. So thank you, DreamWorks marketing team circa early-2000’s. Thank you."
Uhhh You're Welcome! Awesome!. I did this. Well, I was one of the people on the team that did it. My first job out of college was working at this tiny marketing firm where we did projects like this for movies and records and video games and so on. So strictly speaking it wasn't the DreamWorks marketing team, it was like three or four 22-year-olds in a small office in lower Manhattan. Man, nothing has made me feel this old since I realized that I actually like and recognize most of the music they play between segments on NPR. Sadly, that was yesterday.
Working at this job totally ruined my brain, because it made me think every single thing was some type of marketing, but I did think this project was pretty cool. After a while though, you suspect every piece of street art is marketing. Every blog post. Even when a stranger comes up to you in a bar, you're like, "who is paying this person to talk to me and why?"
The video got to be on top of Liz's car thanks to our network of street teams (read: a list of email addresses of kids who would occasionally respond to offers to do odd jobs for twenty bucks, and then occasionally actually do them). Although, strictly speaking, this person fucked up because the videos were supposed to be nonchalantly left around on chairs in cafes or places where they would seem plausibly mislaid, not stuffed under windshield wipers. The "street teams" were supposed to do whatever the thing was and then send us pictures of it so we could send the proof back to Dreamworks, but they always slacked off. At least you actually saw the video. I just found the old spreadsheet of the street team in my email for this. There were two street team members marked 'paid' on this project in Connecticut. One at Yale, one at Fairfield. Which 'local college' did you see this show at?
There were a whole lot of other parts to this campaign besides just the videos. I can't remember all the details, but I remember we made these "LOST VIDEO PROJECT - REWARD" flyers, with a mysterious still on them, and we had the street team kids put those up on telephone poles and stuff, and we were hoping people would both find the video, and connect it with the flyers, and post one or the other on different websites and stuff. There was also some sort of slow reveal of the whole plan, like there was a cryptic URL at the end of the video or something and the page was just a teaser that eventually got updated with a trailer or something. There was also some kind of a contest, and possibly a bunch of interlocking websites or fake conspiracy sites about the videos. We did a lot of fake websites, generally, like we'd make shitty geocities pages with people speculating about some mystery or another and linking to one another and quoting each other, arguing, etc. except it was all fake. It was actually really confusing to keep it all straight.
It was pretty funny though, after we sent all the videos out, to monitor forums and stuff at people's schools that had people speculating about the video and so on. It wasn't like I LOVE BEES or anything, everyone pretty much figured it out right away, but they at least posted the questions on their school's forums. I think there may have been different phases, where the videos either did or did not have a Dreamworks logo at the end that pretty much told you exactly what was happening, or maybe that was just something we argued about (like we argued about whether or not kids could be expected to have VCRs). Maybe you got one of the later-phase videos and that's why it was just plopped onto Liz's windshield.
There was a lot of other hilarious stuff we had to do. One thing we did was write fan updates and street team "missions" for various bands' fans, on contract to the record labels, but we had to do it in the voice of the band. So, you know, imagine if you had to say...write a weekly email to the Juggalos about the Dark Carnival and how they could help bring it to the masses. Then, on top of that, you had to get it approved by the people at the label before you could send it out, to make sure it was "on message", so you'd get editorial notes, on your stupid fake Juggalo email, from somebody at the label. (Note: I did not actually do this specifically for Insane Clown Posse, but my friend from high school who was working in-house at a label did). I spent a lot of time doing this.
My all-time favorite work thing that happened while I was there, though (I mean, I'm not counting stuff like the time we got Alizé to send us a few sample cases with all the cocktails they wanted us to get bars to serve and we got super bombed, or anything that was just purely fun like that. We had a lot of parties. Like we'd always pitch a studio "you know what would be a great way to promote this movie? Sponsor some parties with open bars in New York, L.A., etc." And then we'd do it.) was during a time when the business wasn't doing so well. We were desperately thinking of projects we could pitch to studios, because that's where we made most of our money, and our boss and one of the other guys were getting ready to fly to L.A. to meet with all of them. We were in that "brainstormed out" mode where you start saying stuff that just doesn't make any sense but you think it's so hilarious you can't even get the words out.
One of the studios was getting ready to release the Soderbergh remake of "Solaris". I suggested that we buy a bunch of those remote-control blimps and paint them silver, and then we get dudes to fly them just over head through the streets of Manhattan, slowly, just over people's heads. Maybe put lights on them or something. We're laughing. Somebody added that, a few yards behind, a dude in a spacesuit would walk up to people looking confused and ask, "Have you seen my spaceship?" and give them a flyer or something. We're in hysterics and talking about the spacesuits, the makeup, how the actors will play it as if they are honestly scared, how the remote control 'spaceships' will be toy blimps. The boss is like, "wow, that is a pretty dumb idea. There's no way I'm going to pitch that. Let's go back to serious ideas please," but everyone was pretty tapped out and we went to a bar.
So the next day, they fly out to L.A., they have an insane string of bad meetings and bad luck, finally they are meeting with one of the marketing bosses and they go through the pitches they had that they thought were gold, and the guy's like, "that's it? You scheduled this meeting with me and that's all you got?" And so the boss reaches deep into the riff bag: "Well, there is this one other concept we had," and he goes on to carefully and seriously pitch the remote control blimp/space-suited actors in Manhattan concept for "Solaris".
The studio guy puts his forehead on his tented fingers. He is silent. The boss and the other guy are wide-eyed, breath held. This could be a make-or-break deal for the company at this point. Finally the studio guy looks up. "First of all," he says, "in all my years in the film promotion business, that is the single stupidest idea I have ever heard, and a LOT of really stupid people work in this business." Our guys are waiting for the 'but'. "But the real problem," the studio guy continues, "is that that movie is at Fox. This is fucking Universal. Get the fuck out of here." I don't think things went to well with that studio from there on out, but I'm not really sure because I quit a few days later.
Anyway, congratulations on winning today's "HOLY SHIT THE INTERNET IS INSANE" contest. The prize is a vague sense of dread about what this might be doing to our society!
@RealEstateMowgli Sometimes it sucks that I'm on the other side of the world and I'm always late to the comments. However, reading all of that comment thread and THEN seeing your comment as the last one, it feels awesome that I got to read the whole thing with yours as the last. A+++
@RealEstateMowgli The Best Time I Ever Marketed The Ring? That tiny blimp thing is hilarious.
@figwiggin Yes, I think this needs to be an official follow-up so more people can see it. BTDubs, I saw The Ring as a double feature sneak with The Tuxedo (I...I know.) and it was PANTS WETTINGLY SCARY. My boyfriend (now husband) and I turned to each other at the end of that and were like "did we just get the shit scared out of us by a killer video tape? I think we did..."
@RealEstateMowgli Speaking of shitty Geocities pages, I had a shitty Geocities movie news site at the time, and I LOVED following the campaign for The Ring. The haphazardness might have made it even better, because that meant it didn't look orchestrated. And I remember all the sites--the Morgans, something about horse riding, what happened to Samara, all of that. AMAZING.
The Ring (japanese version) freaked me out for a solid 2 years. Once, I was all alone at home (very young, still in high school!), and as I was walking up the stairs to bed at 2 am, the tv FUCKING TURNED ON. JUST LIKE IN THE FUCKING MOVIE. My heart's still there on the stairs, where it popped out.
Oh, I remember watching the Ring 2 while extremely high, because somehow my friend had convinced me that it would make the movie HILARIOUS instead of scary. No. Did not work.
@RealEstateMowgli Wowwwwww. I read this comment way too late at night but also, you are the best. Thank you for clearing everything up for me! BTW, I grew up in Fairfield, so this is all for realsies.