'Rings' Trailer: A Frightening, Familiar Terror Plagues a Young Woman

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Videotapes may be dead and gone, but the evil, cursed video of The Ring lives on in digital format in Rings, which will again pit one woman against the stringy-haired ghoul known as Samara. Watch the first trailer above.

The second sequel to director Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of the influential 1998 Japanese horror hit Ringu, the film concerns a young woman (Matilda Lutz) who watches the infamous scary-montage clip — this time via an email attachment — and immediately discovers that the legend is true and a supernatural stalker is now intent on killing her within seven days. To remedy this mortal-danger situation, she seeks the help of both her boyfriend (Alex Roe) and a blind man (Vincent D’Onofrio) who, from the looks of things, seems to conveniently be an expert on all things Samara, the young Japanese girl in the video who likes to escape the well in which she lives and travel out of TV sets in order to consume her prey.

Director F. Javier Gutiérrez’s installment in the franchise will undoubtedly expand its mythology, although this initial trailer suggests that the basic premise of its predecessors will be duplicated. There’s some pretty horrifying images in the clip, but it it almost makes us wish that the filmmakers had taken a page from their Japanese counterparts and gone all-in on an American version of this summer’s Sadako vs. Kayako, which pitted the J-horror baddies (overseas, Samara is known as Sadako) of Ringu and Ju-on (a.k.a. The Grudge) against each other in a Freddy Vs. Jason-style death match. Scary-movie fans will have to content themselves with this latest bout of techno terror when Rings debuts in theaters on Oct. 28.