‘Rings’ trailer gives cursed video franchise a digital upgrade

Death by viewership is back in the Rings trailer.

The long-awaited third instalment of the The Ring franchise hit the internet on Wednesday, bringing the haunted VHS tape into the digital age.

This time around, a young woman is sucked into the dark underbelly of The Ring video when her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) gets fixated on the dark subculture surrounding it.

The cursed video, which entered the global zeitgeist when the Japanese novel and film were adapted in 2002’s The Ring, kills its viewers seven days after watching it. In Rings, new director F. Javier Gutierrez’s brings back the well-dwelling ghost Samara. The ghost’s cursed video now has a digital afterlife when it’s distributed via email with a simple Watch Me directive.

Julia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) “sacrifices herself to save her boyfriend and in doing so makes a horrifying discovery: there is a ‘movie within the movie’ that no one has ever seen before,” reads the film’s synopsis. How meta.

The trailer is a weeklong tick-tock of the terrors that befall Julia after she watches the video: The eerie phone call from Samara kicks off a week of grotesquery, including peeling flesh, coughing up a rope of hair, falling power lines and an unfortunate in-flight movie that sends Holt’s aeroplane and its passengers into a fatal flight path.

Rings, which also stars Johnny Galecki, Aimee Teegarden, Bonnie Morgan and Vincent D’Onofrio, hits theatres in the US on October 28.

As far as we know, nothing should happen to you from watching the trailer. But check back in seven days ...