5 Awesome Performances...
5. Rachel Keller - The Ring
It's difficult to make an adaptation work, especially when the tone is so ingrained to another culture and utterly unlike most things to ever grace the Western box-office. Yet The Ring smashed that particular challenge out of the park, transporting the acclaimed Japanese horror Ringu into Seattle and inspiring the J-horror boom which now influences most Hollywood horror films. Put simply, it was chilling like little else you'd seen before, and made you scared of something you'd taken for granted the TV. If a horror film can do this, then it's done its job. But the premise is nothing without actors, and anchoring the whole thing down was Naomi Watts' Rachel Keller. Oftentimes, actors in horror movies don't get the credit they deserve it takes a lot to engage the utter histronics that comes part and parcel of any good chiller, and keeping up that level of intensity without falling into Shatner-ism is a tricky balancing act. Yet Watts nails it perfectly here, bringing maternal instinct to the party to make the whole thing all the more believable. Her Rachel is a potent combination of skin-jumping fear (she's being pursued by a supernatural monster, after all), righteous anger over what happened to Samara and sheer drive, giving us that rarest thing in a horror film a protagonist to actually root for, rather than count the seconds until they meet their maker.