The Ring

Rachel Keller is a Seattle journalist and single mother whose teenage niece Katie dies in unexplained terror alongside three friends. At Katie's funeral, Rachel hears rumors of a cursed videotape — whoever watches it receives a phone call, and seven days later, they die.

Rachel tracks the tape to a remote cabin on Moesko Island where the four teens had stayed. She finds the tape and watches it: a surreal, nightmarish montage of images — a well, a woman brushing her hair, a ladder of centipedes. The phone rings immediately after. Seven days.

Enlisting the help of her ex Noah, Rachel begins investigating the tape's origin. The images lead her to the Morgan family, horse farmers on the island. Anna Morgan, the wife, had a daughter named Samara — a deeply disturbed child with the psychic ability to burn images into the minds of those around her. The farm's horses were driven mad by her presence and hurled themselves into the sea. Samara was eventually institutionalized, and then Anna drowned her in a well on the property before taking her own life.

Rachel finds the well hidden beneath the cabin's floorboards, falls in, and discovers Samara's decomposed body. She believes she has solved it — laid the spirit to rest by finding her remains. The nightmares stop. The dread lifts. She tells Noah it's over.

It isn't. That night, Samara crawls out of Noah's television set and kills him — her face a ruin of rotting flesh and black hair. Rachel is devastated and terrified: why did she survive but not Noah?

Aidan, her young son who had watched the tape earlier, gives her the answer without meaning to: you have to pass it on. Rachel had made a copy of the tape. She had shown it to someone else. That is the only escape — to duplicate the curse and give it to another. Samara doesn't want to be found. She wants to spread.

The film ends with Rachel making a copy for Aidan to show someone, and the unbearable question hanging in the air: who?