Editing Ring (film) (section)

==Plot==
During a sleepover, high schoolers Tomoko and Masami discuss an urban legend about a [[VHS|video tape]] that curses its viewers to die in seven days after a foreboding phone call. Tomoko then confesses that last week, she and her friends watched a strange videotape and received an inexplicable phone call. They receive a false alarm phone call, then Masami goes to the toilet. Tomoko witnesses the TV turn on by itself and is killed by an unseen presence or figure.

[[Reiko Asakawa]], Tomoko's aunt and a journalist investigating this urban legend, attends her funeral and learns that three of Tomoko's friends, who watched the tape with her, all died at the same time and (presumably) the same way she did. Reiko finds an unmarked videotape in the resort cabin where the four stayed. It contains brief, seemingly unrelated scenes accompanied by screeching sounds, and ends with a shot of an eerie scene of a water well. After watching, Reiko sees an apparition and receives a phone call emitting the screeching sounds from the tape. Convinced she has been cursed, Reiko takes the tape and leaves the cabin.

Reiko enlists the help of her psychic ex-husband [[List of Ring characters#Ryuji Takayama|Ryūji Takayama]]. Examining a copy of the tape that Reiko made, the pair find a cryptic message spoken in an [[Izu Ōshima|Ōshima]] dialect and prepare to go to Ōshima. Before departing, Reiko catches [[Yoichi Asakawa|Yōichi]], her son, with Ryūji, watching the tape after being peer pressured by "Tomoko."

In Ōshima, Reiko and Ryūji learn about Shizuko Yamamura, the woman in the tape. Before her suicide, Shizuko gained notoriety following a public demonstration of her psychic ability organized by [[Extrasensory perception|ESP]] researcher Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma, with whom she had an affair. When confronting Shizuko's cousin Takashi, the pair learn through a vision that during the demonstration, Shizuko's young daughter [[Sadako Yamamura|Sadako]], whose name is hinted at in the tape, psychically killed a journalist who decried Shizuko's abilities. After failing to track down Sadako, Reiko realizes that Ryūji never received a phone call after watching the tape as she did at the cabin in Izu. They rush back to the cabin.

Reiko and Ryūji find a sealed well in the cabin's crawlspace. Through another vision, they learn that Dr. Ikuma trapped Sadako inside the well. They conclude that Sadako remained alive and that the curse was born when a videotape "recorded" [[Thoughtography|the rage she had projected]]. When draining the water, they find Sadako's remains. Reiko's seven-day deadline passes, and she remains alive, leading them to believe the curse is broken.

The next day, Ryūji's TV turns on itself, showing the well at the end of the tape. Sadako's [[Onryō|vengeful spirit]] staggers from the well and out of the TV, advancing toward Ryūji and killing him. Reiko, who has been trying to call Ryūji, hears his last moments over the phone. Guided by an apparition, Reiko realizes she has unwittingly found how to survive the curse: copying the tape and showing it to someone else within seven days. Desperate to save Yōichi, Reiko drives to her father's home to show him the tape.