Ringu Ring sadako eye — The demonic gaze of Sadako, villain of Ring (Ringu). Photograph: Allstar/Omega

Ring: the film that frightened me most

This article is more than 9 years old

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My Uncle Vince will tell you that the scariest film I’ve ever seen is Return to Oz. This is purely because, when he took me to see it in 1985, I immediately embarked upon such a sustained series of full-volume terror-fits that we were forced to leave halfway though. I was four years old. Who takes a four-year-old to see a film with decapitated heads in it, though? An idiot, that’s who.

I can’t tell you the name of the film that caused me the most psychological distress, either, because I don’t actually know it. I know it was broadcast on TV in the late 1980s. I know that I only saw the ending, in which a woman has a breakdown, chops off all her hair, smears her face with lipstick, goes to a theatre and murders a man onstage with a machine-gun while screaming and cackling. I know it singlehandedly prevented me from getting a proper amount of sleep for about six months. But I have no idea what it was called. If you know, please tell me. It’s been 25 years, and I’m desperate for closure.

sadako ringu ring japanese horror — Baddie hair day Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Omega

Which leaves Hideo Nakata’s Ring (Ringu). Again, I first saw this on television a couple of years after its theatrical release, with my university housemates. It was heavily trailed, both by Channel 4 and everyone who’d seen it, as one of the scariest films ever made. But we were obnoxious, ironic students, and the main reason we watched it was to prove the consensus wrong. This, in retrospect, was stupid.

The film’s first couple of scares were unsettling, but schlocky enough for us to laugh off. Then, as the plot became more unsettlingly obtuse, the laughter began to die down. And then the phone rang. And then Sadako crawled out of the well. And then she didn’t stop crawling, and we all found ourselves involuntarily pushing against the back of the sofa in a doomed bid to somehow get to the other side where everything was safe. Then came the close-up. We all yelped.

As the film ended, we all just sat there, numb. We turned the television off. Thankfully, it stayed off. Nobody spoke for ages. Eventually, someone – I forget who – quietly piped up and said that they wanted to go to bed, but they didn’t want to go upstairs alone. So we all traipsed upstairs together like bloody Mystery Incorporated, all just because we’d just seen a film about a spooky VHS.

Enough time has passed now for me to realise that Ring is less a film and more packaging for a single scene. And that scene is just a slightly updated version of the old unstoppable baddie trope. Really, there’s nothing really to separate Sadako from Count Orlok or Jack Torrance or Freddy Krueger or The Terminator.

But in the moment, watching it for the very first time, it was like living through a nightmare. The only way I could console myself after watching Ring was to remember that the television in my bedroom was on top of a wardrobe, and that Sadako would topple out and break her neck if she ever tried any of that crap with me. Genuinely, that was a comfort.