It has been more than 25 years since the release of Ring, Hideo Nakata’s wildly successful 1998 horror film. It still casts a huge shadow over Japanese horror cinema, and its influence on American cinema was unusually potent for a foreign-made film. It was not the first feature film in Japan’s 1990s “J-horror” revival, but it certainly made the greatest impact. It is still great to watch as well, providing a strong combination of traditional horror, urban myth, and media technology. Of course it essentially operates as a period piece now, with its central artefacts – a cursed videotape and landline telephones – now well out of use. No doubt there are adults watching Ring today for the first time who may never have even see VHS players before.

Nakata’s film follows journalist Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) investigates the unexplained death of her niece, which leads to an urban myth among local teenagers about a cursed videotape. Watch the strange images recorded on it, and you will die in exactly seven days. When Asakawa finds the actual tape and watches it, she has a week to unravel the mystery of its origins and find a way to avoid the curse.

The film is based on a novel by Koji Suzuki, although many viewers of Ring do not realise how many liberties Nakata and screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi took with Suzuki’s original work. In fact it is arguably those liberties taken are what guaranteed Ring‘s success. Nakata revisualises Sadako, the murdered girl whose spirit is central to the novel, not simply as a malevolent presence but as a traditional onryo. The long bedraggled black hair, the creepy eye staring through the strands, and the tortured, unearthly gait are all as familiar to its original audience as they were striking and original for those overseas. The literary RIng hews close to science fiction, with a story about a smallpox-like virus transmitted via telepathy and tape. Nakata’s version embraces not just traditional monsters and the supernatural, but also unexpectedly Lovecraftian elements and background detail.

Character genders are swapped around: the male lead becomes a woman, her daughter becomes a son, and a trusted former colleague becomes an ex-husband. Nakata aims for a largely direct, contemporary approach to the action. It may be a horror film, but 90 per cent of the time it resembles any number of late 1990s Japanese dramas. The performances are delivered to suit: Matsushima and co-stars Hiroyuki Sanada (now famous for his recent turn in Shogun) and Miki Nakatani keeps things bottled-up and reserved. It is a clever approach, because when the supernatural breaks into the everyday environs of modern-day Japan it positively punctures them. When the much-discussed Sadako makes her arrival, it is one of the most iconic and memorable entrances in the history of horror movies.

Ring was preceded by a made-for-television adaptation in 1995, but the sheer impact of Nakata’s film led to it being remade twice, once in the USA and once in South Korea, as well as further adaptations for television, radio, and manga. Seven Japanese and two American sequels followed in cinemas. None of them equal the power and inventiveness of the original. Decades on, it remains one of the great works of horror cinema.