“There is a videotape...if you watch it, seven days later, you die.”

That devilishly simple premise went a long way toward making the Japanese horror film “Ringu” an international hit in 1998. Hideo Nikata’s headline-making supernatural chiller – based on a popular series of novels by Suzuki Koji – quickly emerged in Japan as a kind of home-grown “Exorcist”; the modestly-budgeted thriller precipitated blockbuster grosses, a pair of feature sequels and two different TV series.

“Ringu” tells the tale of a videocassette – its VHS spools jammed full of grainy, disturbing and surreal imagery – that somehow, exactly seven days later, brings a ghastly death to anyone who watches it. The minute someone finishes watching the tape, the nearest phone rings, delivering a cryptic, unearthly message.

The plot thickens when a skeptical young journalist impulsively watches the tape. As the subsequent hours and days tick by, she becomes increasingly convinced that the video’s seven-day curse is real – and finds herself racing against time to understand its terrifying purpose.
DreamWorks – inspired perhaps as much by “Ringu’s” sturdy cult status on American shores as by the millions of yen it reaped overseas – acquired the rights and set about putting together an English-language remake titled “The Ring.” Gore Verbinksi (“The Mexican”) was hired to direct, Naomi Watts (“Mulholland Dr.”) to star – and Ehren Kruger to script.

Kruger knows the mechanics of dread. The 29-year-old screenwriter broke into moviemaking in 1996, when he won the “Nicholl Fellowship” – via an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screenwriting contest – for his screenplay to “Arlington Road.” Kruger’s paranoid, pull-no-punches script centered around a terrorism expert/academic who finds himself framed by a network of evildoers – smiling, white-militia types with plans to blow up a federal building. “Arlington Road” made it to movie screens, its remorseless ending miraculously intact, three years later.

Though it wasn’t an unqualified hit, “Arlington” clearly impressed the folks at Miramax, who commissioned Kruger to script no fewer than three subsequent projects – including “Reindeer Games” (which turned out to be director John Frankenheimer’s final theatrical), the futuristic Philip K. Dick-inspired thriller “Impostor,” and the smash horror-comedy sequel “Scream 3” (for which Kruger stepped in at the last minute for an over-committed Kevin Williamson).

Kruger says he was a “Ringu” fan before the studio called him about it. His first encounter with the project was, appropriately enough, on the alt-video circuit.

The original, he points out, was “kind of a phenomenon in Japan – it was quite a mainstream success. It got sort of a cult reputation over here, kind of among the sci-fi and horror underground circuit – and so there are bootlegs of the Japanese film that would be sort of passed around, or could be seen at some of these cult video stores.

“I got a call from DreamWorks early on,” he remembers. “I’d seen the [original Japanese] film about a month before and thought it was terrific, and thought it could make a terrific American version.”

In Focus snagged a few minutes with Kruger as “The Ring” – due for release Oct. 18 – was undergoing its obligatory battery of test-screenings.

Did you read Suzuki Koji’s original series of “Ringu” novels in preparing for this?
I did not, actually. I watched the original film and its sequels – I saw the original film about three times, and then put it down and didn’t go back to it.

When you’re adapting a Japanese film to American audiences, are there any cultural chasms you have to cross?
Well…. I would say that some of the mythology in “Ringu” was very specific to Japan – for example, volcanoes play a big part in unraveling the mystery of the videotape in the Japanese version, and active volcanoes are few and far between on the American mainland. That’s an example of something specific where we had to come up with an alternate mythology, and just had to think in terms of landscapes and things that were more iconically “American.”

One of the nice things about the Japanese [version] is that it plays it very close to the vest in terms of interactions between characters, and understanding relationships between characters, until later on in the story. We sort of have a tradition in American, Hollywood film to tell you more or less everything you need to know about your protagonist where you meet them, or soon thereafter. The Japanese, in the formality of their dialogue with one another, are kind of prone to dispensing information more slowly – especially personal information.

We wanted to keep that tone – without the interaction between those characters seeming so foreign and full of omission in the American version.

Is the DreamWorks version of “The Ring” driven by character, atmospheres or plot?
I’d say it’s more driven by character and atmosphere. There is the spine of a mystery plot, which is “What are the origins of this videotape?” … But it’s really about dread and doom, and that sense permeates every scene. It’s about what that sense – of believing there’s a deadline on your life and possibly your loved ones’ – does to those relationships.

Does Naomi Watts deliver on the promise of “Mulholland Dr.”?
Yes. She’s very, very good in the part. And she’s not afraid to play the character as a flawed person. She can be intense and vulnerable and likable and unlikable, depending on the scene. It’s a difficult performance, because, for the most part, she’s playing “fear,” but within that there’s a lot of nuance. I think people are going to be really impressed with her work.

I’ve read some test-screening reviews, and one reviewer joked that he’s been afraid to watch a VHS tape since he saw the film. Is DreamWorks trying to force people into the DVD format?
[laughs] I don’t know; we never really had that discussion. There’s just something much more cinematic about a record player with a needle spinning than there is a laser reading a videodisc. And there’s something about the notion that you can just pull out this videotape.

It sounds like “Ringu” was a “Blair Witch”-like phenomenon in Japan.
Well, you know, the movie on one level has a very simple premise, or hook – it sort of plays into the notion of a 500-channel universe where anything you can possibly imagine has been videotaped or filmed, and can be watched from the comfort of your own home, and the way that there’s this constant, almost debilitating, need on the part of this society that’s over-entertained to find “The Next New Thing.” “Show me something that I haven’t seen before.”

More and more people feel like they’ve seen everything. So the notion of a tape that would be so disturbing or so frightening or so something that it would lead to someone’s death? I have a feeling that, if it were real, there are a number of people out there who are so bored with everything on that they might just check it out anyway.

It’s the next step up from a snuff film, where it snuffs you.
That’s one way of looking at it. I think that’s one of the notions that makes “The Ring” topical, in any event. And it is a film that is genuinely scary – it’s at no point wink-winking at the audience. You know, usually the most effective scary movies are the ones that really take their time, with a sense of foreboding and doom and unease and discomfort – and this film very much does that. It’s not going for the cheap scares.

There are two kinds of horror. There’s the unsettling kind of horror, and then there’s the cheeky, slasher-film, shock-based “horror.”
Right.

And you actually have worked in both fields now – because one of your bigger splashes after your writing debut, “Arlington Road,” was “Scream 3” – which is sort of the magnum opus of cheeky horror.
It’s funny, because I always approached the “Scream” sequel as working on a comedy, not so much a horror picture. It’s kind of funny to me when they file the “Scream” movies in the “horror” genre. I’m not sure it’s on the proper shelf.

And at the time you got involved in “Scream 3,” the series was already plumbing these new levels of self-reference. It was actually re-creating scenes from its own first film on a Hollywood soundstage.
Well, that seemed like the only moderately new place you could go with it, just because it’s such a rigid formula. I mean, the film was spoofing it. You could either spiral it inward or simply run in place.

What movies scare you?
Well, [“Ring” director] Gore Verbinski and I talked a lot about the movies of Roman Polanski – “Rosemary’s Baby.” One of my favorite horror movies is “Don’t Look Now.” Those are films that really play on unease and discomfort, and things being “off” in an otherwise normal world. I think that’s the most effective kind of horror movie – the movie that’s really very much like a campfire ghost story, that sort of strings you along in a delicious, atmospheric way, and hopefully leads you to a worthwhile payoff.

Verbinski’s previously worked on such decidedly non-horror fare as “The Mexican” and “Mouse Hunt.”
He’s quite brilliant – very talented in terms of creating an atmosphere and eliciting performances from actors, and very smart about story and script. He could do any genre with ease, I would think.

You also had the privilege of being one of the last people to work with the late John Frankenheimer, on “Reindeer Games.”
He was as legendary as all the tales. He’d seen and done as much as a director could, I’d imagine – just a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous person, John was. Frankenheimer had more energy at 70 than I had at 16. [laughs] He was ready to keep making movies for another 30 years. He was not ready to call it a career, definitely.

“Arlington Road” has become a weirdly relevant movie in the past year. And it’s one of the few Hollywood thrillers of the past several years to really embrace that merciless sort of ending you normally find in such films as the original “Vanishing.” How did you get away with that?
Well, it wasn’t made for a lot of money, which helped. And everyone who worked on the movie signed on because of the way it ended – and had anyone wanted to end it any other way, the actors would have quit and the director would have quit, so there’d be no movie. [laughs] It would just be doing a disservice to the material and the themes to paste an upbeat ending on a film about terrorism. It would just seem disingenuous and fake.

Have you watched “Arlington Road” since Sept. 11?
Since Sept. 11? No, I haven’t. But that’s not really any comment on Sept. 11 – because like most writers and directors, once they finish a project, they very rarely watch it on their own. [laughs]

I wonder if “Arlington Road” could even be made today.
Probably not. Probably not.

Sept. 11 affected the production schedule for “The Ring,” didn’t it? The shoot was moved out of Boston after the terror attacks.
There was a bit of a timing issue, where the studio had to decide where to shoot the movie during a period when there was a lot of confusion about what the travel situation in the country was going to be… The production designer, Tim Duffield, was scheduled to be on a flight from Boston, but that was changed. [The flight Duffield didn’t take ended up being hijacked during the Sept. 11 attacks – and two of the hijacked planes came from Boston’s Logan Airport.]

You received the AMPAS Nicholl Fellowship for “Arlington Road” in 1996, and that’s sort of what “broke you in” to the screenwriting trade. What were you doing before that?
I was living in Los Angeles, kicking around, working as an assistant at some production companies and just writing on the weekends and at night – and trying to learn what I could about how the “business” side works by going to NYU Film School. I was from Washington, D.C., prior to that.

I would say that unless you win some sort of meritorious fellowship or award for your writing, the way that your work will get read initially is by someone who likes you personally [laughs] – and who then knows someone who’s worthwhile, career-wise, to have reading your script. It’s easier to make friends in the movie business if you spend some time in Los Angeles.

Do you have any great unproduced projects in your drawer you really want to get onto the screen?
There’s a couple of projects kicking around in development at the studios. But most of the things that are in the file drawer should be there. [laughs] In my experience, really good scripts don’t get overlooked – because there’s a paucity of really good scripts.

I’ve been working on sort of a revisionist adventure film about the Brothers Grimm that hopefully will be in production early next year. That’s negotiating with directors; it’s at MGM. It sort of posits that these two collectors of folk tales collected them by more or less being involved with them. They’re adventurers as well as raconteurs.

Now, discussing the distasteful subject of money –
Ah.

With “The Ring,” you joined the elite club where you’re getting a million dollars to write a screenplay. How did that feel, when you busted in at that level?
Well, I’ll tell you. The first job I ever got was 10 grand to write a screenplay – and I thought that was just a ton of money at the time, and I couldn’t have been happier, because it wasn’t so much the money, it was that somebody wanted me to write a screenplay. [laughs] And that’s kind of been the case ever since.

It’s nice to be well-paid for what you do – but in most cases I would do the work for very little if it meant that people would be able to see the work. There’s no comparison between writing work that no one sees and writing work that someone sees – no matter what you’re being paid. That’s the real barrier that you remember.

And the other thing is: The money’s a Catch-22, because the more expensive a film is, the less control a screenwriter has over the material.

Were you able to keep the costs low on “The Ring”? Were you able to keep control?
The movie is the script that we all set out to make. It wasn’t a terribly expensive movie, but I think the original Japanese movie was made for a million dollars or something, and we quite out-spent them. [laughs] We’ll put it that way.

“The Ring” strikes me as being part of this Hollywood trend where Japanese pop-culture products are making their way from “cult” American audiences to mainstream American audiences. I’m thinking of the importing of Miyazaki’s animated features and the planned remake of “Akira,” among other projects.
I’ve seen quite a few Japanese horror films. There are always interesting things that are done when expectations are low. [laughs] You know – when people can take more creative risks when there’s not so much money involved.

It’s easier to take risks when you’re making a movie for a million dollars than when you’re making a movie for 30, 60, 100 million dollars. And industries like Hong Kong and Japan tend to be making more films for a million dollars. I just think there’s interesting work being done all over the globe – and the less money that’s being spent on it, the more interesting it often is.