It’s only the haunted VHS that doesn’t get eaten by the VCR. They’re in league.

29. Ring – Koji Suzuki

In the interest of full disclosure, despite my long term horror movie fan status, the US version of this movie scared me. I do not like the idea of some wet dead child violating my TV. So essentially when reading this I was overjoyed to find out that doesn’t happen.

It was still scary and the beginning was tense and creepy and totally made me think that truly terrifying crawling out of the TV deal was still going to be a thing, but, no. It was much better plotted (no surprise, really, since it’s the original, but I had to work backwards because I didn’t know it was a book till 2009) and I have to say I enjoyed the extra medical and research-based angles instead of being given too much opportunity to worry about the survival of the kid and his creepy little proclamations like in the US movie. Sometimes, I worry about how often children are used as pawns and shortcuts to emotions in movies…and in real life. However, I did really like the reveal of what the “child” really was in this book.

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Salem is still a bit of a skittish pig, so he would not be up for The Ring or Ringu without several protective blankets and maybe smashing the TV so no wet dead kids could climb out of it.