There is a specific kind of damage Ringu does to you, and it is entirely the phone call’s fault. You get through the whole movie thinking you are watching it from outside, and then Sadako’s voice comes through the receiver, and you realize you were inside it the whole time. Koji Suzuki, who wrote the 1991 novel that started all of this, died May 8 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 68.
The premise fits on a napkin. There is a cursed videotape, you watch it, a phone call tells you that you have seven days. What Suzuki actually built inside that premise is harder to shake than the premise itself. Sadako is not a slasher villain. She is not hunting you because you wronged her. She is the embodiment of a child who was dropped into a well and has been there ever since, and the curse moving out from her is not really about revenge. It is about the impossibility of forgetting that something terrible happened and nobody came. You cannot outrun a concept like that. You can only try to understand it before the seven days are up.
What He Built
Ring came out in Japan in 1991. Spiral followed in 1995 and immediately went somewhere people who thought they had the series figured out were not expecting, pushing the mythology into science fiction territory that still catches readers off guard. It won the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for New Writers. Loop completed the trilogy by becoming a meditation on simulation, biology, and what memory actually is, none of which you would expect from a book that started with a videotape.
Suzuki was not a writer who wanted to do the same thing twice. His 1996 collection Dark Water was adapted into a well-regarded Japanese horror film in 2002 and an American remake with Jennifer Connelly in 2005. The story in that collection about the water tank on the roof of the apartment building is one of the most quietly devastating things in his bibliography. The man knew how to use one small wrong detail.
What It Became
Hideo Nakata turned Ring into Ringu in 1998 and something got loose. American horror had spent the 1990s being very clever about how clever it was, doing the Scream thing, making sure you knew it knew the rules. J-Horror walked in from a completely different direction and did not know what a knowing wink was. It was slow and sincere and interested in grief and possession and the residue violence leaves in physical spaces long after the people involved are gone.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, Higuchinsky’s Uzumaki: the entire movement traces back to the ground Suzuki’s novel prepared, and Sadako crawling out of that television became one of the most recognizable images in horror’s last fifty years.
Gore Verbinski made The Ring in 2002 and ensured that anyone who had somehow missed the Japanese original was now on board. Two separate horror renaissances on two different continents inside a decade is not a record that gets broken easily.
What He Meant
Horror has a short list of writers who actually changed what the genre thought it was allowed to do. Suzuki is on that list. Every cursed-content story since, every found footage premise, every creepypasta, every haunted stream, every piece of internet horror built on the idea that something terrible is already moving through the medium you are currently inside: all of it lives downstream from what he started. He wrote a novel about a videotape and it turned out to be about something much harder to shake than a videotape.
He received the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in 2012 for Edge. The Horror Writers Association gave him the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.
Sadako is still in the well.