“That’s how scary it was”: the 1998 horror movie that left Cate Blanchett “shitting her pants”
Scary films are often described as ‘pant-soiling’, but is that actually a thing?
Has anyone been so terrified by a horror movie that they’ve inadvertently lost control of their bowels and had a trouser accident? Well, cover your ears, Lord of the Rings fans, because apparently Cate Blanchett might have done.
Alright, let’s be sensible for a moment, because she probably didn’t physically do that, but she certainly referenced the act thanks to the effect that one pretty seminal terror flick had on her and her mates back in the late 1990s, a movie that has since been parodied endless times, but that you still would absolutely never watch on your own late at night unless you’re an idiot or a psycho.
And not unless you had a complete death wish, because we are talking about The Ring, AKA Ringu, the infamous 1998 Japanese supernatural horror that had the fairly simple premise of ‘people who watch this video tape end up dead within a week’. That was enough to get the tabloids and the early internet in a tizzy and made 20 times its budget back at the box office, despite a small production spend and subtitles.
Directed by Hideo Nakata, the film became famous for its now iconic image of a lank-haired, weird-limbed demonic girl crawling out of a static-filled TV, and Hollywood naturally paid attention, releasing a remake in 2002 starring Naomi Watts that was actually much better than these things tend to be, and with a Hans Zimmer soundtrack and direction from Gore Verbinksi it brought in almost $300million in ticket sales.
That success was partly due to some very effective marketing tricks employed by the makers of the movie, who went onto college campuses and hid unmarked VHS tapes in theatres and on car windscreens, which contained the ‘cursed’ clip from the film, without any context whatsoever. Which is a mental thing to do, let’s face it.
Blanchett certainly remembers what happened the first time she sat and watched the Japanese version, telling the ‘let’s eat chicken until we cry’ podcast Hot Ones: “One of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen is the original version of The Ring. We got so scared, we’re in the house by ourselves, we got so scared back in the days of VHS that we had to, we turned the sound down, and then we watched it fast-forwarded, and we were still shitting our pants. But that’s how scary it was.”
Which is saying something, because Blanchett is no stranger to spooky stuff herself. She made Sam Raimi’s underrated scarefest The Gift back in 2000, plus 2024’s Rumours, although that was admittedly a comedy horror. She also reinforced her ties with upsetting stuff from East Asia when she made a surprise cameo in the third season of Netflix’s Squid Game last year.
Going forward, Blanchett will be doing much less underwear-threatening films like the sequel to the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, plus a sci-fi movie with Riley Keogh called Alpha Gang. She’s also made a film called Sweetsick, in which she plays a woman who has a unique ability to see what it is that other people intrinsically need, like, for instance, a new pair of pants if they’ve watched the original Japanese version of The Ring.
