20 Foreign Language Movies You Must See Before You Die
9. Ring
Country: Japan.
Plot: A journalist tries to unravel the mystery of a cursed video tape that kills anyone who watches it after seven days.
Japanese horror cinema, which is a horror subgenre of its own at this point, has produced many brilliant films (though it's going through a creative drought currently) but even after all these years, it's Ring, the film which put J-Horror on the map and also got a godawful (yet inexplicably successful) American remake, that remains perhaps the crowning achievement of Japanese horror cinema.
Although many of Ring's elements are now familiar thanks to its countless imitators, it's still a bone-chilling, nightmare-inducing masterpiece of slow-burn horror that will haunt you for weeks. Every frame is absolutely laced with dread and even though the film is actually quite short on scares (in the traditional sense), it's so intensely atmospheric and creepy that it's still an absolutely terrifying ride.
Aside from some slightly underdeveloped main characters, this is a near-perfect horror movie that rises on the strength of Hideo Nakata's amazing directing, watertight pacing, great performances and a haunting, engrossing ghost story to deliver one of the finest horror films of the modern era... maybe even the finest.