Japanese Movies and their Equivalent Books: Part 3

Hello again! :)

This is Part 3, to my blog post named: Japanese Movies and their Equivalent Books! Here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2, be sure to check them out! :)

Okay! So to jazz things up a little, I have decided that the final book and Japanese movie pair will be from a genre that I have (almost!) never posted about before on this blog... and that is, horror.

This time, the book-movie pair is: BREATHE (A GHOST STORY) and The Ring (2002)

Movie: The Ring (1998)

 That's a tall glass of nope.nope.nope.

Plot:
In this psychological horror story from Japan, a legend circulates among teenagers that if one watches a certain video at a certain time of the night, the telephone will ring right afterward, and one week later, you will die. When Masami tells her friend Imako this story, she scoffs -- but a week later, Imako dies.

Imako's aunt, a television journalist named Reiko, hears that not long before she died, Imako was watching a strange video with her friends -- all of whom have turned up dead. Reiko tracks down a copy of the video, and as she watches its strange, spectral images, the telephone begins to ring....The next morning, Reiko begins a desperate search to solve the mystery of the video, convinced she has only seven days to live; assisting her is Ryuji, a mathematics expert and her former husband.

And here's the trailer... if you dare >< I could only find the American version (2002), but the plot is roughly the same as the original Japanese movie,

Book: BREATHE (A GHOST STORY) by Neal Shusterman

Looks a lot like the movie poster for the
Woman in Black (2012), don't you think?

Plot:
Jack and his mom Sarah move to a new house after his father's death. Jack starts seeing ghosts that only he can hear or talk to. There is mother ghost and four child ghosts. The children warn him about mother ghost and he starts to worry....

Similarities

OKAY. The most obvious similarity is the fact that both the movie and the book involve hauntings and unrest spirits.

In the case of the Ring, the ghostly main antagonist, Samara, is a spirit with a complicated human past involving demon possessions, hermaphroditism and adoptions. As a human, she had been thrown into a well to drown  but her vengeful spirit lived on in a video tape long after her body rotted away.

Similarly, in BREATHE (A GHOST STORY), "Mother" is a vengeful ghost that also has unresolved issues and emotions that bind her spirit to the human world. Feeding off the spirit energy of the younger child-ghosts, she uses them as a form of sustenance to haunt humans.

In addition, the tense atmosphere for both The Ring and BREATHE is palpable, but admittedly the atmosphere for the movie is more intense and moving. Some parts of the movie really got me screaming desperately and shutting my eyes tightly! >.<

Well then, that's all folks! Remember to read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't and check back for Part 4!

Love,
Crystal