10 Everyday Objects Horror Movies RUINED For You

4. CRT TV - Ringu (1998)

The image of the girl crawling out of the screen has become so ingrained in horror culture that many young people who have never watched a CRT TV know it only as an object of fear and malevolence. The rest of us almost certainly watched Hideo Nakata’s Ringu on one of these TVs when it was released.

Ringu is the story of a videotape that damns its viewers to death seven days after viewing, which finds its way into Reiko Asakawa’s (Nanako Matsushima) life, and sends her on a quest to try and thwart the curse before she bites it. Far from waiting until the end to show exactly what the tape is packing, we get to bask in the horror from the first scene, witnessing the TV turn on by itself, then later viewing the tape’s haunting depiction of a cursed well, and then of course being faced with the sight of long-haired, white-nightied Sadako Yamamura (Rie Inō) – who died in said well – crawling straight out of the screen to kill.

For those not in the know, CRT stands for cathode ray tube – the technology that uses electrons and a vacuum tube to put images on the screen – and is basically any TV which weighs a ton and has a large back. This was the dominant technology of the 1990s, and so when Ringu showed us Sadako crawling out of one, it was hard not to imagine it happening in our own living rooms.