TIME Magazine: TIME 100: Hideo Nakata


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Hideo Nakata

Artists & Entertainers
	Mark Burnett Frank Gehry John Galliano Peter Jackson Nicholas Hytner Simon Cowell OutKast Norah Jones Jerry Bruckheimer J.K. Rowling Ken Kutaragi Bruce Nauman Katie Couric Charlie Kaufman Hideo Nakata Aishwarya Rai Ferran Adrià Nicole Kidman Sean Penn Guy Laliberté
	Leaders & Revolutionaries Builders & Titans Scientists & Thinkers Heroes & Icons Introduction Essay FROM THE ARCHIVE: Artists & Entertainers from 1900-1999

The Ring Master

By RICHARD CORLISS

PHILIPP HOHNDORF/STARFACE/RETNA

FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE

	Sex, Secrets and Videotape Auto Focus tells Bob Crane's sad tale, 8 Women features fab femmes, and The Ring is awfully creepy [10/21/2002]

Most horror movies live and gruesomely die in the moment: the splattered head or severed limb gives viewers a quick thrill or a giggle, a jolt to the nervous system, that lingers no longer than a shiver. The films of Japanese director Hideo Nakata—The Ring (1998), Ring 2 (1999), Chaos (1999) and Dark Water (2002)—take a subtler route to spooking audiences. In his thrillers, Nakata concentrates less on the explosion of the time bomb than on the ticking inside it: abstract images on a videotape, an aquarium tank full of dead fish, a water stain spreading on a ceiling. His heroine-victims, often preadolescent girls, are guilty only of the original sin of being human; they may finally neither destroy nor exorcise the demons haunting them. Nakata knows dread.

The surprise about these films is not that they are artful but that they have been huge hits on screens throughout Asia and on the Western video market. Along with American hits like The Sixth Sense, they have made the coolly creepy a hot genre again. After the surprise success of a U.S. remake of The Ring in 2002, three more U.S. versions of Nakata films are on the way. Nakata will direct the American version of Ring 2, due out in November. It's a rare instance of a Japanese director making a Hollywood film—an event that may fill Nakata with the anguish and wonder his own movies engender.

June 23, 1975	July 8, 1998	Sept. 20, 1963

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