The Ring (2002)
Cursed Videotape/Japanese Horror Remake
This is the English-language version of the Japanese horror Ring and actually a much better and far spookier film, where the new script gives the story more depth
Curses
A curse is an invocation that calls upon a supernatural power to inflict ill will against a person or persons. The curse is usually invoked by speaking words of power such as a ritual or invocation.
In the horror genre, curses are often placed on individuals, their families, their descendants, even entire towns. These can often occur on a particular occasion such as a birthday or an anniversary of some crime in the past. This may often be because of the persecution of a wronged innocent such as a Witch who was burned at the stake. Voodoo also offers a variety of curses.
In fantasy, curses are enacted by wizards and witches. Curses can often be responsible for afflicting a person with bodily transformation of some type (notedly The Beast in various versions of Beauty and the Beast). It can also afflict people with Immortality, leaving them unaging as punishment or until they seek restitution for their crimes.
Places can also be regarded as cursed where those that intrude bring death and retribution on themselves. This has even extended into real-life such as the tabloid belief that those who opened Tutankhamun’s tomb were cursed for doing so. See also Cursed Objects for artefacts that exude evil influence.
Ring 2 (1999)
Cursed Videotape/Haunting/Japanese Ghost Story
The second of the Japanese Ring/Ringu films where director Hideo Nakata improves over the original with a series of eerie scares if a frequently incomprehensible mishmash of story ideas
Rings (2017)
Cursed Videotape/Haunting
The question you ask going in is after seven Japanese films and a tv series, a Korean film and two previous English-language films, what is left for filmmakers to wring out a third American The Ring film? The answer seems to be not much – just a rehash of the basics for the 18-25 crowd
Rockula (1990)
Vampire Rock Star Comedy
Painfully unfunny vampire comedy from Cannon Films about a vampire teenager who becomes a rock star. This has one of the least credible premises I’ve ever seen in a film. Mostly it seems to have been conceived around placing various musicians of the day in acting roles with bizarre results
Row 19 (2021)
Haunted Plane Flight
Spooky Russian film about a haunted plane flight, this recalls something of The Twilight Zone’s famous Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode
Sadako 3D (2012)
Ring Sequel/Japanese Ghost Story
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects
Sadako vs Kayako (2016)
Ring/Grudge Series Crossover
The two most popular Japanese horror franchises come together to fight it out. Both series work on the provision of intensely uncanny effect but brought together the result is diluted at best
Satanic Hispanics (2022)
Horror Anthology
A multi-director horror anthology where all the directors are Latin American
Saturday the 14th (1981)
Genre Parody
Friday the 13th so changed the horror genre that within two years it produced two four parodies of its title. From Roger Corman, this is more of an occasionally amusing parody of classic monster movies than the slasher film
Scared Stiff (1987)
Haunting
An incredibly bad film from the heyday of the VHS era. The incoherent plot involves hauntings and a voodoo curse before arriving at a totally surreal ending
Scary Movie 3 (2003)
Genre Spoof
David Zucker takes over the reins of the franchise from the Wayans Brothers. With a lack of big scary movies in 2002 to parody, the film takes a scattershot approach, parodying any film at all
Season of the Witch (2011)
Mediaeval Action Fantasy/Escorting a Witch
Medieavel fantasy action film with Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman assigned to escort a witch who may be able to deliver the land from the Black Plague. The wider moral issues of the film are buried under action and CGI
The Secret of Moonacre (2008)
Victorian Children's Fantasy Film
Beautifully filmed Victorian-set fantasy in which orphan Dakota Blue Richards moves to her uncle’s estate and discovers the magical secrets it holds
Selfie from Hell (2018)
Cursed Selfie/Internet Stalkers
The selfie is such a concept of the moment that I suppose someone had to make the first selfie horror film. The film suffers conceptual confusions and what starts out akin to something like Ring slides into more of a variant on The Den with sinister strangers stalking the heroine online
The 7th Dwarf (2014)
Animation/Adventures of the Seven Dwarves
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
Shadow of Chikara (1977)
Western Quest/Cursed Mountain
This is nominally a Western – one of the harsh and realistic ones made at the end of the 1970s – and quite a good one too. It comes with a real surprise ending that takes it over into fantasy
She Starts the Fire (1992)
Hong Kong Pyrokinesis Comedy
Madcap Hong Kong comedy variant on Firestarter where Chingmy Yau has a curse that she starts fires when aroused
Sister Death (2023)
Sinister Convent
Paco Plaza, co-director of the [Rec] films, shows James Wan how to do a nun horror film properly. This is a prequel to Plaza’s earlier Veronica, telling an origin story for Sister Death
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Disney Animation/Fairy-Tale
One of the finest of all Disney animated films, an adaptation of the fairytale made with the full artistic resources that studio could bring to bear
Sleeping Beauty (1987)
Fairytale
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations made by Cannon Films in the 1980s. A dreary impoverished run through by the numbers with Morgan Fairchild as the Wicked Stepmother and Tahnee Welch in the title role
The Sleeping Beauty (2010)
Fairytale
Catherine Breillat, a director usually known for tackling issues of female sexuality, adapts the classic fairytale in a muddled effort that singularly fails to fly either as fairytale or deconstruction
Sleeping Beauty (2014)
Fairytale Adventure/The Asylum Mockbuster
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
Slit Mouth Woman in L.A. (2014)
Japanese Horror Anthology
Another version of the popular figure from Japanese urban legend, which has appeared in a number of films. This is an anthology where four Japanese directors have come to L.A. to shoot a series of strictly average short horror tales, not all of which feature the Slit Mouth Woman
Smile 2 (2024)
Viral Curse
Smile was a sleeper hit about a viral curse and created a reasonable spooky atmosphere. The surprise is that this sequel manages to still deliver the goods too
Smile (2022)
Viral Curse
Horror film about a viral curse that bends the victim’s sense of reality and illusion, this settles in with some undeniably creepy effect
Snakes on a Train (2006)
Snake Vomiting Curse/Snakes Amok
The first of The Asylum’s mockbusters intended as a soundalike copy of Snakes on a Plane, this ends up defeated by low-budget and one of the most absurd premises of any film in recent memory
Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror (2006)
Ghetto Horror Anthology
Rapper Snoog Dogg fails badly at branding himself as a horror anthology host, while the stories prove nothing to write home about either
Solitaire for 2 (1995)
Romantic Comedy/Telepathic Woman
A romantic comedy in which Amanda Pays has a curse that gives her the ability to read thoughts
Suzume (2022)
Anime/Quest to Close Portals
Beautifully made anime from Makoto Shinkai about a young girl and a three-legged chair on a quest to close a series of portals across Japan and prevent unimaginable chaos emerging
The Swan Princess (1994)
Animated Fairy-Tale
Nicely animated film from Richard Rich that tells the story of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in which a princess is turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer
Tales That Witness Madness (1973)
Horror Anthology
Director Freddie Francis had had great success making several of the Amicus horror anthologies then went independent to made another Amicus-styled anthology here with mixed results
Tarot (2024)
Cursed Tarot Cards
A horror film based around the phenomenon of tarot cards, a surprise that nobody has done so before
The Tattooist (2007)
Cursed Tattoos
Incredibly tepid New Zealand horror film about an American tattooist who unleashes evil forces after he appropriates Samoan cultural tattoos
The 10th Kingdom (2000)
Fairytale Parody Mini-Series
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Arabian Nights Adventure
An Arabian Nights adventure that offers up one of the purest blends of fantasy and romance of its era. Filled with stunning directorial set-pieces and magnificent sets and all shot in colour.
Thinner (1996)
Weight Loss Curse/Stephen King Adaptation
Adaptation of one of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman novels about an obese lawyer afflicted with a thinning curse. There are some great effects but the film’s moral messages come off as wrong
The 3rd Floor (2007)
Haunted Apartment Building
A low-budget ingenue effort by three friends about a tenant who discovers that the third floor of his apartment building contains the ghosts of dead asylum inmates
A Thousand Words (2012)
Man Has a Thousand Words Before He Dies Comedy
Eddie Murphy’s presence is not enough to lift the lame premise of this comedy where he is given a curse where he has a thousand words to say before he dies … a film that has a soggy marshmallow heart rather than one that lets Murphy loose to do what he does best
The Time of Their Lives (1946)
Ghost Comedy
An Abbott and Costello comedy. Not one of their monster bashes but a variant on the light comedy that had been popular in the last decade with Lou as an 18th Century ghost haunting Bud Abbott in the present. Can’t say I am a big fan of their humour, most of the slapstick that seems dated today
A Troll in Central Park (1994)
Animation/Troll's Adventures in Human Civilisation
Incredibly insipid animated film from Don Bluth about a kind-hearted troll that relocates to Central Park. This feels like a wannabe Disney film that is merely going through the moves.
Troy: The Odyssey (2017)
Greek Myth
The Asylum takes on Homer. One is tempted to say Homer loses to The Asylum but this freely rearranges the basics and The Asylum deliver a solid effort that rises above the mediocrity they usually aim for
Truth or Dare (2018)
Deadly Game/Demonic Curse
Jeff Wadlow made the smart Cry Wolf, a slasher film about a campus game turned deadly. In this Blumhouse production, he has simply remade that with a different game where the killer is now a demonic curse
Twice-Told Tales (1963)
Horror Anthology
With the success of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, this was a copycat attempt that cast Price in a trio of tales adapted from another writer of American horror stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Vicious (2025)
Cursed Box
Bryan Bertino has become a Must Watch director ever since The Strangers. Here he makes a film where Dakota Fanning receives a cursed box and will die unless she places several requested items inside
The Vulture (1967)
Human-Vulture Hybrid/Teleporter Accident
Possibly the most conceptually demented film to come out of the 1960s-70s Anglo-horror cycle – one part The Fly, one part a witch’s retribution film about a man who transforms into a vulture creature after teleporting into his ancestor’s grave whereupon he is driven to enact a centuries old curse
When the Whales Came (1989)
Period Drama/Preventing a Whale Curse
This is what might result if Greenpeace were allowed to take over the BBC arts division. Nicely made but not necessarily a great period drama about a whale curse
Woman on Top (2000)
Magical Realism
Frothy work of Magical Realism with Penelope Cruz as a woman whose cooking weaves a magical spell
Zombie Town (2023)
R.L. Stine Adaptation/Zombies Emerge Out of a Film
An adaptation of an R.L. Stine book, a work of safe anodyne horror about zombies trapped inside a film made by director Dan Aykroyd getting loose and overrunning a town