The Ring is the most successful movie franchise you've never heard of. While unsuspecting Americans gleefully anticipate the upcoming release of the second installment of that other ring project (as in Lord of the), the low-key English-language remake of a Japanese-book-turned-blockbuster-turned-sequel-turned-prequel-turned-television series-turned-Korean-remake has stealthily snuck into theatres between liberal doses of Hannibal Lecter and Harry Potter.

It's also the best fright flick since The Blair Witch Project, which, like The Ring, is steeped in urban legend.  Instead of a vindictive woodland witch, the antagonist here is a VHS tape (no doubt exacting revenge against the consumers who have abandoned that format in favor of DVD) that somehow manages to kill everyone who watches it (not the actual tape – I’m not ruining that surprise).  The tape itself isn't too menacing, but the images contained thereon – think Salvador Dali meets Trent Reznor – are enough to give Wes Craven nightmares for months.

The Ring opens with two teenage girls (Amber Tamblyn and Rachael Bella) in a Scream-type scene (The Ring screenwriter Ehren Krueger also wrote Scream 3) where the tape is initially discussed before one of the girls meets a rather frightening fate.  She's the niece of Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive), who, at the girl's funeral, overhears some teens discussing the tape, which apparently has also claimed the lives of the three other people who dared to watch its creepy contents.

After a brief search of her niece's room, Rachel becomes infatuated with the tape and heads to the rural cabin pictured in a roll of undeveloped film where the villainous video was seen by the clueless youngsters.  She finds and watches the same tape, receiving the complimentary call immediately afterwards informing her she'll be dead in seven days.  Rachel turns to her ex-boyfriend, the very Ed Burns-ish Noah (Martin Henderson, Windtalkers), who doesn't believe any of her crazy story until he watches the tape and starts to experience all kinds of wacky stuff.  The rest is a road-trip race against the clock to find and thwart the killer, complete with a special guest appearance by the Six Feet Under tree.

Belief does need to be suspended to buy into The Ring's story, but once you've done that, you're in for a great ride.  People too often toss around adjectives like "chilling" and "spine-tingling" when referring to a horror film, but I've never actually gotten a chill from watching a movie until I saw The Ring.  Like Blair Witch, this movie is devoid of the typical fright devices found in American horror films.  We're very scared, but we don't know what we're scared of until the very end.  Director Gore Verbinski (The Mexican) must have been studying Robert Zemeckis and M. Night Shyamalan films, because The Ring feels akin to both What Lies Beneath and Signs, right down to the ominous camera movement and placement. Watts, in her first big starring role, does a great job of looking intermittently beautiful and terrified, which is all we really want from a horror-film heroine.

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for thematic elements, disturbing images, language and some drug references