For today’s Friday Feature, we pop a strange, unlabeled tape in the VCR for kicks. Published October 17, 2025.

Ring (1998)

Joe Bob Briggs calls Sadako, the girl in the well, a ghost witch haunting a VHS tape. Though he is a VHS hater, he paints a good phrase. Many of us who remember the specific materiality of the videocassette take all of this personally: the haunting and the nostalgia. In 1998, that was everyone watching the film, even as DVD was taking over as the home viewing format of choice. Soon VHS tapes would pile up in Goodwill stores and semi-curated stoop freebie boxes, years before they became collector’s items (and an emoji). Anyone who saw Ring at an impressionable age pauses at the unlabelled tape on the shelf. If we dare to touch it, we might flip it over to look for a COPY sticker. Just as we watch Reiko watch the tape in the film, facsimiles of the tape have entered our world, and Sadako’s curse proliferates with all the hair-draping waifs duplicated therein. This is the essential function of the haunted media object: it’s a nesting doll of mediation that can always add another layer to loop us in. It’s also fundamentally cross-format. Ring has the curse radiating from the tape to photographs, surveillance video, and children’s drawings. The notoriously degrading condition of the VHS image smears immediately across those formats. Once we have been touched by the tape, our images are ruined. Sadako’s late-revealed ability to cross the media threshold and crawl into the world is also already there in the many ways that the film and its embedded mythology pre-empt any viewing. The curse itself is a technology, and the curse of technology is tautological. So it is with any film, a narrative form that is metalinear, or that vividly records the experience of metalinearity that any durable material storyform relies upon. The dated scrap bookmark—receipt or movie ticket—and the time signature marginalia leave their mark on the narrative while also embellishing the format. As technology advances and new formats emerge, the older forms that linger take on a new resonance. Their compromised functionality becomes eerie. They are mimetic plastic or pulp ghosts that carry (if not contain) ghosts, and they hold us as well. 5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson