The Ring Movie: How A VHS Went Viral
The Year Was 2002
The year was 2002. Social media as we know it did not exist yet. Friendster was just emerging. It would be another year before MySpace launched, and another year after that before Facebook arrived.
For most of us, “going viral” still sounded more like something involving a contagious illness than an internet strategy.
Information still traveled quickly, of course. There was word of mouth, email, message boards, and conversations between friends. But those conversations could turn into rumors remarkably easily, and there wasn’t always an obvious way to check whether what everyone was saying was true.
And Then Came The Ring
The 2002 American horror movie The Ring was adapted from the 1998 Japanese film Ringu, itself based on Koji Suzuki’s novel. At the center of the story was a wonderfully simple nightmare: watch a mysterious videotape, receive a phone call, and seven days later, you die.
And somehow, this movie was rated PG-13. For me, R-rated movies were off-limits until I was 17. But when The Ring came out, I was 14 years old. Old enough to see a PG-13 movie!
Everyone around my age seemed to be talking about it. From what I had heard, this was supposed to be one of the scariest movies ever made, and somehow we were allowed to buy tickets. It felt like we were getting away with something.
So while kids like me were being dropped off at theaters by our parents to watch a movie about a cursed VHS tape, something much stranger was happening outside.
Scary Good VHS Stunt
To promote the movie, mysterious VHS tapes containing the disturbing video from The Ring were left on people’s cars outside theaters.
Imagine leaving a scary movie about a cursed videotape and finding an unidentified VHS sitting on your windshield. Then you take it home, put it in the VCR, and realize it contains the same creepy footage from the movie you just watched. And there's no real social media buzz.where you can see if other people have experienced this or if you were just chosen.
At my high school, the story mutated even further. The rumor I remember was that simply seeing The Ring could give you the actual curse. I remember being scared before seeing it and wondering, with some tiny part of my 14-year-old brain, “Wait, am I going to die seven days after I watch this?”
Obviously, we did not. Whether those promotional tapes helped create that rumor, amplified something already circulating, or had nothing to do with how it reached my school, I have no way of knowing now.
In 2002, a few people could experience something strange, tell a few more people, and suddenly everyone had heard some version of the story.
The VHS Legend Lives On
And people did keep talking. A November 2002 Los Angeles Times story described The Ring as a surprise hit, and the movie eventually earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. More than 20 years later, people still talk about the mysterious promotional tapes online.
Some say they still own the copies they found on their windshields, but I haven’t been able to find a photo taken in 2002 of one actually sitting on a car. Most people didn’t have a camera in their pocket yet, and finding a mysterious VHS after seeing The Ring probably didn’t inspire the same instinct to document everything that we have today.
The movie was about a videotape that spread from person to person. Its promotion did the same thing.
Comments sourced from Reddit Thread about The Ring VHS tape promotion