From: (No Email available)

Date: 2003-02-14 06:26:52

Comment:

This movie is a really great scare.  I thought the best bits were:
1- The faces of the victims which you briefly see; Katie at the start (her mother is recounting how she "saw her face"), and Noah right at the end.  Why wasn't more made of this?  It would have been scary also to show Katie's friend Becca witnessing her death, rather than having the movie just report later that she (Becca) is in a mental hospital.
2- The way the crazy horse "trips" over the side of the ferry; this is much freakier than it simply jumping into the sea
3- Samara's face as she kills off Noah, which follows a minute or two of build-up so that you know she's going to look very nasty.

I still don't fully understand the chronology of how the Samara thing kicked off in the first place.  We know that she drove her mother mad.  This was partly because she caused the deaths of their horses.  Then we know her father imprisoned her in the barn loft, because she was "bad".  But this must have been before she killed the horses because we learn that "the horses keep me awake" (is this torment the reason why she "never sleeps"?  Or if she never sleeps anyway, how can the horses be keeping her awake?).  Anyway, we find out that Samara was sent to a psychiatrist and then to a mental institution on the mainland, after which the doctor on the Island says "things got much better".  But they can't have gotten much better for her parents, since her mother evidently retrieves her from the institution to take her up to Shelter Mountain and puch her into a well (do you get wells in the mountains??). Then her mother dives off a cliff; presumably back on the island.  The her father manages to cope with all of this for the next 24 years despite newspaper reporters digging into shy their horses died, and he only kills himself when Rachel arrives.  Why then?