Later that evening, we walked the stairs rather slowly, and carefully flipped on the lights before entering the bathroom. When we slipped under the covers and closed our eyes, we opened our imaginations wide to the movie’s lingering influence. Nightmares ensued for my wife, and a number of disconcerting pictures flickered in my mind’s eye for days. The same thing happened last week when I finally pulled our own copy of the DVD off the shelf and began a second viewing, determined to figure out what had scared me so thoroughly the first time. When I took a shower soon thereafter, I again had difficulty ridding my mind of certain decaying features, iridescent limbs, and creepy sunsets.

Which makes sense, given the story’s premise that viewing a couple minutes of disturbing images on an old, battered videotape will unhinge your mind before, after seven days, ending your life. The movie produces in a receptive viewer the same kind of uneasiness experienced by the VHS tape’s victims. And it accomplishes this largely through mood, with virtually no blood or violence—the movie even lacks the imperiled, scantily clad teenagers that populate most American films in this genre. I suppose this explains how this extremely frightening film could receive a ridiculously innocuous PG-13 rating.

The Ring scares so successfully because it taps into so many different kinds of fear. Like many a horror flick, it relies on the audience’s apprehension concerning death, fear of losing a loved one, discomfort with decay, and a more generalized anxiety about our physical vulnerability in a capricious world. It also plays to our apprehension about encroaching technologies and growing media influence, specifically the fear that hours in front of various screens preempt creativity and drain vitality, leaving behind mere shells of ourselves. Like Poltergeist (1982) before it, the movie suggests the flickering screen might be little more than a highly permeable barrier linking our lives with all kinds of untoward influences.

Like some of the most effective horror movies of the last few decades—Ã la Hitchcock’s Psycho and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)—The Ring also frightens less through sudden shocks (though it has a couple) than through gradually building unease. It slowly sears its disturbing imagery onto the mind’s eye, gently flits over gruesome snapshots of death, lingers for five instead of the requisite two seconds over certain atmospheric set pieces, and, in the movie’s penultimate and most horrific scene, painfully protracts the non-violent but extremely eerie death of one of its heroes.

Another staple of horror employed by the The Ring, and one which this film spins in a very peculiar direction, is the spectre of twisted innocence. If one’s portrayal of an evil child can avoid being comical (Chucky, anyone?), this kind of thing can be really disturbing. And no, my putting extra locks on our bedroom door and keeping all our cutlery and matches locked in a titanium safe doesn’t mean I distrust my own, cute little kids . . . really. (Whew, that adolescent experience with Pet Semetary just won’t go away, will it?) Seriously, though, this movie does a bit with that disconcertingly liminal position inhabited by the prepubescent female, the girl young enough to stand well outside the range of male desire, yet aggressive enough (usually with loads of alarmingly long hair) to disqualify her from complete sexual innocence. Whether sitting absolutely still under psychiatric observation in a sterile lab, or creeping towards the screen with water dripping from her oddly phosphorescent limbs, this femme fatale cannot be easily categorized or explained away as either innocent child or sexy temptress.

Still more troubling, this time to my moral sensibilities and disability-attuned antennae, are the film’s two, very different endings. The first ending occurs about fifteen minutes before the film’s end. This pseudo-ending implies that the frightening murderess, who burns disturbing images into people’s heads and then kills them with her Medusa-like gaze, is actually a victim of abuse. At this point in the story, we’ve been briefly introduced to the Morgans’ psychiatrist, who explains that whereas her own family loved her developmentally disabled grandson despite his difference, not every family can find the patience to care for a child with special needs. As the psychiatrist puts it, such a situation “takes work, you know. Some people have limits.” This exchange leads directly to a neatly formulaic, faux finale replete with successful sleuthing, cathartic vision, and a “rescue.” According to this misleading formula, Samara is a misunderstood girl whose parents failed to give their increasingly strange, adopted daughter the love and patience she deserved. All the odd things that happened before and after Samara’s unfortunate death can be chalked up to delayed vengeance enacted upon a cruel world.

The movie’s second, true ending suggests that, no, Samara is wicked, and that her strange powers and inexplicable malevolence signal a fundamentally degenerate character.

So here’s what bothers me. The close proximity of these two, quite different equations concerning the parenting of special children begins to meld them a bit, narrowing the gap between the belief that “special children require lots of patient attention” and the idea that “strange children may be fundamentally, dangerously flawed.” The Ring not only suggests that which kind of child you get is a matter of chance, but that you may not be able to tell which you have in hand till it’s too late.

Now, I recognize the film’s obviously supernatural/fantastic texture, and I’ll admit up front a possible counter-argument that the psychiatrist’s love for her grandson can be read as a stark foil for the fatal animosity between the Morgans and Samara. I’m just not sure that the film isn’t also whispering that we should fear the unusual and unique in our children.

And that’s what really scares me.