I finally caught The Ring this weekend, on DVD, late at night, which is arguably the best way of seeing it. It's the sort of horror film I've dreamed about finding for years; it has the requisite shocks and heart-in-mouth moments, and a good double handful of images that are almost as scary as this, but more impressively, it manages to sustain a feeling of dread for almost two hours, and it gets into your dreams. Like the book House of Leaves, it's one of those works whose very existence is somehow unsettling. I don't know how much of this achievement should be credited to the Japanese original, which I haven't seen, but The Ring is one of the few recent movies that seem to have been conceived from the retina outwards; the look and feel seem to have come before the story, and as a result, it's full of spooky, unnerving images, not abrupt, craftless shocks of the Scream variety. It's a bit empty, sure, and it probably wouldn't stand up to repeat viewings, but it's definitely worth checking out.

I'd also like to make an off-the-wall prediction that I expect, eventually, will come true: Gore Verbinski, the director of The Ring and the Budwiser frog commercials, will someday win an Oscar for Best Director. Not because he's necessarily very good or very visionary; The Ring is an impressive piece of work, but something of an anomaly for a director whose past movies include Mouse Hunt, part of The Time Machine, The Mexican, and the upcoming Pirates of the Carribean (whose trailer looks great, by the way, if only because of Johnny Depp's smile near the end). No, Verbinski seems like one of those stolid, dependable directors who can be entrusted by the studio with big-budget, marketable properties, and who has enough skill to make the product look good, if nothing else. Faint praise, sure, but these are the sorts of directors who tend to win Oscars if they stick around long enough and are assigned the right property: guys like Ron Howard and William Wyler come to mind, or even Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca. Mark my words; if he doesn't drop out of the game too soon, Verbinski will have an Oscar by 2020.