10 Movies That Are Actually Good Besides The Marketing Gimmick
4. Circulating Copies Of The Cursed Videotape Without Context - The Ring (2002)
The marketing for 2002's Hollywood remake of 1998 Japanese horror film Ring was genius.
Copies of the film's infamous cursed videotape were mailed out to video rental stores and even placed in random locations such as on top of people's cars, the tapes containing no explicit references to the film itself.
Even TV spots which showed clips from the tape didn't dare namedrop the movie's title until much closer to release, but combined with a number of impressively convincing fake websites about the movie's events, word-of-mouth quickly did the rounds about The Ring.
It would've surprised absolutely nobody if the remake turned out to be a soulless, cynical cashing-in on the Japanese original that used clever marketing to distract from a poor product, so a pleasant surprise it was that Gore Verbinski's The Ring is a genuinely good, even great horror film.
Beautifully filmed, superbly acted by Naomi Watts, and absolutely living up to the chilling legacy of its lower-budget predecessor, The Ring 2002 is basically the standard bearer for any English-language remake of an international horror film.