The Samara Problem

Samara Morgan, the ghostly girl from The Ring that makes you worried evil children can climb through your TV screen and stain your carpet with dirty water, is misunderstood. Don’t get me wrong, she can’t be understood or misunderstood as a person, for obvious reasons. I mean that she’s misunderstood as a character trope.

The events of the story are as follows: Samara is adopted, turns out to have paranormal abilities, then is treated poorly by her adoptive mother, starts acting weird, eventually gets killed by her adoptive mother, magically “burns” her memory onto video-cassette tapes before she dies, then wreaks havoc on blond women and their BF’s. It’s the common consensus that the true moral of the story is to treat people well, no matter who or what they are, and don’t kill children. Right? Not really.

If you think back from the thick of the plot far beyond its origins and mythos, you start to see it’s cut from the same disturbing cloth as the many perennial creepy-evil-child flicks, like “The Grudge” starring Sarah Michelle Gellar; “The Omen” starring Gregory Peck; “The Littlest Rebel” starring Shirley Temple; etc. Each plot had to come from somewhere, and they’re certainly not based on true stories as they actually happened, meaning they are the brain children of filmmakers, threaded together by superstition. And, each plot is centered on the demonization of innocence. That’s what I would like to coin as the “Samara problem.”

The true evil within the Samara problem is what is overlooked in exchange for cheap jump-scares and manufactured paranoia. The true evil is the actions of the character, or characters, who robbed the evil icon of his/her innocence. All that specific plot point usually gets from the audience is, “Oh, that’s a horrible thing to do to an innocent child.” Granted, justice is served quite a lot of the time, but, to me, the overall message is tainted, by the time justice is served.

Filmmakers run the risk of feeding the audience so much evidence that the icon is the true evil that when the actual evil is revealed, the fear of the icon is what stays in the audience’s schema. With the specific case of The Ring, the filmmakers cement Samara’s villainy by making her kill more and more people after the protagonist’s efforts to placate her with justice and redemption, especially because the killings are suddenly without reason.

Again, because of this, my concern is that the audience of films like this is trained to fear the result of evil in place of its cause, and, therefore, might start unconsciously transposing that pattern into their actual lives. In reality, when so much attention is drawn to the result of evil actions, even though the result is dangerous and can’t be ignored, it’s a boon the initial criminals, making the result of their guilt an effective red-herring to deserved punishment.

Samara isn’t a real person, I know. But, her story can be readily compared to some very real personal histories, and the atrocities of some of these figures are so great that their story is forever tainted by their actions. My problem is that, though Samara isn’t real, these people are or were, and, just like Samara’s fictional offenders, the real offenders of real incubated monsters can lean back in their rickety chairs and caskets with their feet up and relax, knowing the consequences of their actions cast a dark enough shadow that they’ll forever go unnoticed by history.

It’s simply unjustified that the poisonous flower is never the fault of the seed, nor the hand that buried it in fertile ground.