Question: When does Rachel realise if she shows the film to someone else she won't die? And if she knew, is that why she showed it to Noah, to kill him on purpose?
Answer: No, it's wrong. Just making a copy won't save you; you need to show it to someone else, and then this someone else is cursed instead of you. The Japanese movie explains it well. Plus, in the official second movie, a man dies from Samara after making the copy because nobody watched it. Also, at the end of the 1st movie, Aiden asks from the copy, "What will happen to the one who will watch it?"
Question: I know that the images in the tape represent things that happened to or around Samara, but what is the point of the nail going through someone's finger? I know they can't show every second of Samara's life so we might not see a connection, but that part of the tape really grossed me out and so I want to know if someone knows why it was put there, or was it just the gross-out factor?
Chosen answer: Samara broke her finger nail clawing at the walls of the well... I guess that's why it's on the tape also.
Answer: In the movie Rings, the main girl gets her finger nail stabbed by a nail.
Question: It is understood that before you die, you see the ring. Noah's coffee cup makes a ring, and Rachel sees the lid of the well before she's supposed to die. But does Katie see anything ring-shaped in the beginning?
Answer: The television activates itself just as Katie is putting the glass to her lips - from her point of view, the rim of the glass would form a ring that filled her entire vision.
Question: Exactly how does Katie die? In the scene where Katie gets attacked, in the last second her face turns rotten like someone dying in water, which means she already starts dying. But in the flashback as her mother finds her, Katie is dead in the closet, as if she tried to hide from Samara there. Why would Samara move the dead body to the closet? Or if Katie hid there when being chased by Samara, did she already have the rotten face while still alive?
Answer: Samara's kills her victims by engendering them to fall into sheer hopelessness, ultimately, very literally, scaring them to death. The process is called psychosomatic death and results when someone's sympathetic system produces too overwhelming of a response to an emotional stress (fight or flight) and the body falls into cardiac arrhythmias and vascular collapse (heart attack). Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_death.
Answer: A possible explanation is that when you see Katie's face start to rotten, we are looking at her from Samara's point of view. Let's remember that it was already 10:00 PM by the time the phone rings, so most likely, Samara had already come out of the TV in Katie's room and was only scaring her into going upstairs. Also, the doorknob and the floor were soaking wet which indicated that Samara was extremely near. As for the location of her body, it seems like Samara likes to place her victims elsewhere as Noah died on the floor but Rachel found him on the chair.
Answer: They never explain how anyone really dies. But it can be guessed that what happens to you physically is similar to what happened to Samara as she died. The fact that the body was in the closet isn't really significant. Samara's spirit simply placed the body there to be found. It may have to do with it being a dark, closed space, like the well where Samara died.
Question: All Samara wanted was to be heard and she killed anyone who didn't make a copy and show to someone else. Obviously she was very capable of killing before Rachel and Noah found her body and found out what had happened to her. So why does Aidan say that it's bad that they found her? How does it matter since she could kill before too?
Answer: Aidan said to Rachel that they weren't supposed to *help* Samara. When she told him they had, he assumed that worse things were going to happen. He wasn't entirely wrong; the problem didn't go away, but Rachel finding Samara's body and learning the rest of her story didn't make things any worse. If anything it enabled her to understand why she escaped death.
Answer: Correct. If anything, it made things worse for them since Samara mistook Rachel's quest to find out about her story (in order to save their lives) with genuine concern and care. That's the big reason why she takes over Aidan's body in The Ring 2 and becomes obsessed with Rachel being her new "mommy."
Question: Why can't the video just be passed to inmates on death row?
Answer: Who says it can't?
Answer: There was a deleted subplot from the film involving Chris Cooper as a child murderer. Originally Rachel would show the copy of the tape that she had Aiden make to this character, in order to end the cycle started by her on someone deserving of death.
Answer: Maybe because we have something called a "humane death" which caused all the death sentences that involved pain to be banned, leaving only the lethal injection to be a humane death. I think being assaulted by a child ghost who will literally scare you to death isn't considerd a "humane death."
This presents a paradox. Whether or not it is "cruel and unusual" to force a condemned inmate would be a matter for the Supreme Court. but in order for them to rule, they themselves would all have to view the tape (and perhaps the lawyer for the condemned and the Solicitor General as well), so at least 11+ "death surrogates" would have to be found just for a decision to ever be rendered. But, if it's true that the person has to watch the entirety of the tape for it to be lethal, perhaps they could divvy it up, so that every part of the tape could be watched by at least one justice.
Question: If Rachel is already safe because she copied the tape, why does she still get all the symptoms that the other doomed victims do?
Answer: The main point to remember is, Samara wants to tell her story. Yes, by copying the tape, Rachel's s letting other people know of Samara's story, but the symptoms are probably still there as an extra mean for Samara to show her what she went through. I think this shows that the curse is in full effect for the whole time, and that the copying only prevents the final outcome.
Question: What exactly did Samara do so wrong in the first place that they had to put her in the barn? I know she made the horses die later because she was annoyed with them, but that really isn't a reason to kill a child. They just say that she wasn't right, but what wasn't right about her?
Chosen answer: Samara (Daveigh Chase) has a number of supernatural abilities, but her signature ability is psychic photography. Samara sees and takes various images in her mind and projects or burns them onto objects and minds. After the Morgans brought their adopted daughter home, tragedy befell the Morgan ranch. Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran) soon complained about gruesome visions that only happened when Samara was around, so both were sent to a mental institution. When they returned, Richard Morgan (Brian Cox), put Samara in the barn to keep her away from him and his wife because she was evil. Samara realized her parents loved the horses more than they loved her so she used her powers to drive the horses to insanity. This caused Anna to become depressed, kill Samara because she caused bad things and thought that killing her would stop the bad things from happening, and then commit suicide.
I seen this when I was 14 and now i'm a year older, and I didn't understand it at all. I wasn't even scared but now I understand it and will when I watch it again. Thanks everyone. :-).
Question: How was Samara's tape first circulated after she had placed the images on it?
Answer: Katie and her friends stayed in the cabin and whilst there decided to go out of the cabin but didn't want to miss the game, so they put a blank tape in the VHS player and intended it to record the game whilst they were away. The TV is directly above the well which contains Samara's body/spirit which burned the curse on the tape. This is shown in the movie when burn marks are shown under the TV stand when Rachel and Noah uncover the well, in turn that is also the reason Aiden is angry at Rachel for letting Samara's body and hence spirit free from the well as it can still burn images and curse's onto object/people near to it.
Answer: A cabin was built over the well and Samara imprinted the tape when it was there. It probably stayed in that cabin for a while before someone stole it from the cabin to show other people, not realizing what power the tape had.
Question: How much of the cursed tape do you have to watch to become cursed with the "seven days" threat? All of it? Or would even seeing two seconds of it Affect you?
Chosen answer: Since the girl in the second movie lived because she covered her eyes, you'd have to watch the whole thing.
Answer: I only watched the first one but I didn't see anyone who watched the tape for two seconds die.
Question: How was Samara able to see her mother jump off of the cliff and secure that image on the tape if she was killed before her mom committed suicide?
Chosen answer: One may as well ask, how did she manage to secure any of the odd images on the tape? Her spirit lived on, up to and beyond her mother's suicide, even though she had died. It was the power of her evil/angry spirit that created the tape and all its imagery.
Question: In the tape, we see some fingers in a box and something white running down a black screen (a comb through the hair maybe?), but what is the relevance of this to Samara?
Answer: Seven fingers in the box represents the seven days she was alive in the well. The hair combing represents Samara's view of the world, since her hair always covered her face.
Question: During the scene when Naomi Watts allows her ex boyfriend to watch the video for the first time, she wanders out to her apartment balcony. She observes several neighbors in the apartments surrounding her. At this point the music becomes intense - is there a hidden message or hint that we are supposed to see here?
Chosen answer: The Samara virus is transferred through the televison. See how the televisions are on in each of the apartments? This is a bit of forshadowing to the end where Rachael realizes that the only way to avoid death is to make a copy of the tape and show it to someone else.
Question: What would happen if the people who watched the tape didn't answer the phone call and did not have an answering machine? Or if someone were to watch the video in a room or house with no phones. Would you still be killed in 7 days?
Answer: Noah never answered the call, it went to voicemail and was deleted, so you don't need to answer the call to be affected.
Chosen answer: Probably. The phone calls just make those last days more terrifying, and Samara can come out from any reflective surface. I don't think it would be possible to eliminate ALL reflective surfaces, just think about it: utensils, waxed floors, eyeglasses, anything metallic, even buttons.
Question: What did Samara's dad mean when he said, "my wife wasn't meant to have a child"?
Answer: She's infertile. She wasn't ever supposed to have children. It's hinted that she made a deal with evil forces to have Samara.
I love your answer and share your opinion. But that's also why The Ring 2 wasn't really good because they made it official: Samara has been adopted. But, if we forget the second and third movies, there is an obvious hint that the Morgans require some sort of evil forces to get a child because Anna couldn't be naturally pregnant. Also, it could be a start of an explanation about why Samara is evil and why she got supernatural abilities.
Answer: At the end of the movie, she is crying about why she wasn't killed and Noah was. She vocalizes "What did I do, that he didn't?" That's when she sees the copy she made. It wasn't that she just showed it to someone else. She made a copy and Aiden watched that copy. Aiden is why it skipped her.
Almost right. It's just the copy. Copying the video makes it skip you. That's why she has Aiden make a copy as well.
lionhead
You have to show the copy to someone else as well. That's why Aiden asks Rachel at the very end "What about the person we show it to? What happens to them?"
Phaneron ★
But doesn't he have less than a day left by then? Hardly a time to relax, they need to make a terrible decision, quickly. I always had the idea making a copy was enough because of that.
lionhead
He watched the tape the morning of either Rachel's 4th or 5th day, so he should have at least 3 days left by this point. Though it appears the film was being inconsistent with the markings that Samara leaves on the tape's viewers, since Rachel noticed Samara's hand print on Aiden's arm and then his nose started bleeding. For Rachel, she got her nosebleed before receiving the mark on her arm.
Phaneron ★
Actually, you need to do both: make a copy and show it to someone else. This is further explained in The Ring 2. At the beginning, the guy had made a copy but since the girl covered her eyes and didn't watch the whole thing, he was still killed by Samara. So making a copy is not enough in itself to be spared if no-one else watches it. The same goes for Rachel. She made a copy on the 2nd day, but Becca tells her she only has 4 days left when she visits the psych ward indicating she hadn't been spared yet. It's only after Aidan watches the copy she made that death skips her for good.