The Ring well with Two and hints about the future of the franchise> Send to a friend

That long-haired dead girl who was living at the bottom of a well for years is back and she’s still pretty pissed off as evidenced in THE RING TWO. While director Gore Verbinski is out and original Japanese RINGU director Hadeo Nakata is in, screenwriter Ehren Kruger does return to bring continuity to the franchise. "There are inevitably some common themes and imagery, but the story is very, very different," says Kruger. Naomi Watts reprises her role as the film’s heroine Rachel Keller who is still trying to save her young boy Aidan (David Dorfman) from the vengeful spirit Samara. While hiding out in Oregon, the mysterious videotape turns up at a crime scene leading Rachel to uncover even more deep dark secrets that will make it harder to survive long enough for another sequel. But don’t expect this to be a true remake of RINGU 2 according to Kruger, instead it’s a faithful sequel to the original American RING. "In RINGU 2, the ‘Rachel’ character is not really the protagonist and doesn’t have very much screen time," explains Kruger. "There is a wonderful scary bit involving Samara scaling her well in RINGU 2, though, which we pay homage to in our sequel. Hideo brought a new bag of tricks, for the most part, but I think he probably feels he’s spent enough time inside wells to last him the rest of his career. We developed the story before Hideo signed on to direct it, and once he did, there weren’t really any scenes from RINGU 2 that he asked us to incorporate. I think in RINGU 2 it’s revealed that Sadako survived in the well for years and years and lived to adulthood down there. That’s not the case with Samara, sad to say." Even though there are different directors on the two American films, Kruger does admit that there is a visual throughline that carries throughout the both of them. "To me, they feel very much of a piece," he admits. "Different directors, of course, but the world is very consistent. If anything was pushed further, it’s the dream-logic aspect – which all good nightmares have." While Kruger previously scripted SCREAM 3, he observes that writing a slasher film and a supernatural thriller are two entirely different processes. "It’s night and day," he admits. "I sort of stumbled into the SCREAM universe, but those films were essentially comedies with scary sequences. While the RING films are scary stories with a few comic moments. It’s a completely different approach to structure, tone and character." Nonetheless, Kruger has become the go-to-guy for suspense films and he says the key for a successful suspense sequence is "character." "For suspension of disbelief to work, the audience must genuinely care about a character," he says. "Otherwise it’s simply an exercise in ‘Boo!,’ which is fun on a primal level, but doesn’t really get under your skin later that night when you’re in bed thinking about the movie. If you lose a little sleep, or have a little knot in your stomach after the movie’s over, then I think a scary movie has done its job properly. But that only works when you are engaged in the story on a character level." It’s a given there will be more RING movies, but Kruger notes he didn’t lay the groundwork for a RING 3, although there is still a lot more material to explore. "Well, we haven’t explained everything, but the story is structurally self-contained," he says. "It has a proper ending. And if Rachel thought things were bad when she had seven days to live, this situation is worse." And if there is another follow-up, Kruger is still undecided if he would be involved. "There will be one if you want one, if you know what I mean – democracy in action," says Kruger. "I don’t know if I’d be involved. I suspect the story would be radically different from 1 or 2, but I suspect Samara would be in it." This summer Kruger’s name also appears on two completely different types of films – the haunting THE SKELETON KEY and the action-comedy THE BROTHERS GRIMM for Terry Gilliam. However, the one project that he’s still waiting to happen is his adaptation of the Stephen King/Peter Straub novel THE TALISMAN. "It looked like it was going to happen with a couple different directors, but creative differences intervened for the moment," says Kruger. "Hopefully, it will get back underway later this year. It was quite difficult to adapt as my mandate was to craft a two-hour movie from an 800-page book. A miniseries might be more faithful, but you’d miss the feature-film scale. So there was a constant struggle to determine what could be kept and what had to go. Some other writers have since worked on it and hopefully it’ll all get solved. There’s a wonderful story and characters at its core."

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