Is Rings Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

A VCR with a tape still inside it

In 2013, a passenger named Carter admits on a flight to Seattle that he has seen the cursed tape made by Samara Morgan. Kelly says she has seen it too and asks whether he made a copy, and he says no. Moments later Samara crashes the plane and everyone on board dies. Two years later Gabriel Brown, a college professor, picks up Carter's old VCR and finds the tape inside. Elsewhere, a student named Julia says goodbye to her boyfriend, Holt, as he leaves for college, and then worries when he stops answering her. A panicked girl named Skye contacts Julia because she is worried about Holt too. When Julia goes looking for him, she meets Gabriel and a group called the Sevens, who run an experiment with the tape. They film themselves watching it and then pass the footage to a person they call a tail.

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A burn mark that turns out to be a clue

Julia goes to Skye's apartment and unknowingly watches the video there. Skye tries to make her watch it, so Julia locks herself in the bathroom, and Samara kills Skye. Julia rushes out and finds Holt at the door, who tells her he has watched the tape too and has twelve hours left. Julia watches his copy and picks up the phone, and a vision of a door appears while a mark is burned into her hand by the phone. Her version of the tape cannot be copied, and it has extra images of a mysterious woman. She decides they have to cremate Samara's remains. Gabriel photocopies the mark and sends it to Sacrament Valley, where Samara was buried properly after the people of Moesko Island refused to take her. Julia and Holt find an empty tomb, get caught, and are brought before Galen Burke, a blind man. He says a local priest entombed the body, but a flood forced the priest to move her grave to a potter's field outside town.

A bell tower with an extra floor

Heading for the field, Julia and Holt pass a car crash, and Gabriel was in it. He had figured out that the mark on Julia's hand is Braille, but a falling utility pole kills him before he can warn them. After a vision of a woman named Evelyn, the pair return to town. Julia finds a hidden chamber under the church bell tower, where the priest held Evelyn captive while she was pregnant. Holt works out that Galen is the priest. Julia confronts Galen herself, and he attacks her and admits he is Samara's biological father. He blinded himself to stay out of her reach. Julia pushes him down the stairs, finds Samara's skeleton behind a wall, and he tries to strangle her to stop the cremation. He claims it will unleash an unspeakable evil. Then a swarm of cicadas arrives and Samara comes through Julia's phone, cures Galen's blindness and kills him. That night, Julia and Holt cremate the body.

A voicemail that arrives too late

The scene to brace for comes at the very end. Julia takes a shower while Holt spots a voicemail from Gabriel warning him about the Braille, and he starts translating it. In the bathroom, Julia peels off the skin where the mark was and finds grey skin beneath. She coughs up black hair, and a cicada hatches from it. Meanwhile her copy of the cursed video gets sent to her whole contact list, and it goes viral. Holt tries to disconnect the computer and fails. As the screen glitches, the Braille translation comes through as the word rebirth. Samara is reborn in Julia, who looks in the mirror and sees Samara's face.