What's Hollywood doing knocking off Japanese horror films? Isn't East Asia supposed to make tatty copies of U.S. products? Maybe handbags and CDs, but Japanese horror is getting the starlet treatment in parts of Los Angeles these days. With reason: its recent, smartly shivery movies are the best. So much so that two young Japanese directors have now gone west to show Hollywood how scary is done.

It was in 1998, a year before The Sixth Sense, that Ringu (The Ring) became an Asia-wide smash. Hideo Nakata's movie had a surefire opening (a killer videocassette) and a double climax (our heroine confronts death down a well, and then her boyfriend is murdered when the dead girl in the video crawls out of a TV set). But Nakata, like all good dread auteurs, did more. He created a mood that informed every scene and adhered to the viewer long after the film ended.

Ringu spawned a sequel and a prequel...

Source: Time Magazine [1]