The Ring

Samara is an ten-year old, brown-eyed girl with long dark hair that covers most of her face. She wears a white

oversized dress and black shoes. Samara appears quite pale and rarely talks. In her cursed form, Samara’s appearance resembles a Japanese onryō spirit, a spirit focused on vengeance. Her hair now appears black and is soaking wet, hiding her waterlogged and deformed face which has turned somewhat grey in colour and she has sunken, nearly colorless eyes. Her skin has become an unnatural moldy colour, although when she climbs out of a television, her skin appears a murky grey. Her white dress becomes tattered and soaked with water, turning it brownish-yellow and grey. She goes barefoot, and has no

nails on her hands from attempts to climb out of the well. Samara is shown to be a victim seeking some form of attention,

particularly after her death and the creation of the video tape, so the world can know of her pain and suffering. She is very otherworldly, hardly talking and being antisocial, and spends hours on end standing around and staring at items of interest without moving. Wanting the world to know of her suffering, Samara makes the tape to be passed on to other people so they can learn of her life, and emerges to kill people after seven days, likely under the belief that they did not care to aid her and to emphasise how her life ended, and will approach her victims in a slow and tormenting manner.

She is quite reclusive, spending a lot of time alone, although this is not helped when her adoptive father Richard Morgan forces her to live in the Morgan Horse Ranch’s barn. As a baby she was nearly drowned by her mother Evelyn, who believed that Samara told her to; she claims the infant said she needed to rid her of evil spirits. She grows up to be neglected by her adoptive parents and then killed by Anna. Samara lacked any proper parental figures and after being freed by Rachel, she saw her as her beacon of hope and ultimately decided to make Rachel her new mother, possessing Aidan Keller‘s body to get close to her. She becomes quite aggressive to anyone else aside from Rachel whilst in Aidan’s body, believing she needs no one else aside from a mother, despite being abandoned and killed by her previous two. Samara is shown to be quite needy, repeatedly making attempts to claim Rachel as her mother. Although brutal in her vendetta against the world, it seems that her ultimate goal is to be heard, found, pitied and possibly loved.

Abilities

Samara has a number of supernatural abilities, although most do not appear until she becomes a spirit. Her signature ability is Nensha, also known as thoughtography, projected thermography and psychic photography. Samara sees various images in her mind and can project or burn them onto objects like walls or paper. Sometimes they are perfectly burnt onto objects that cannot be damaged so easily. It seems that Samara has no proper control over the images, but can rather aim or focus them. She can project the images into a person’s mind, causing them great pain and torment, although it was at first an accident when around the Morgans. When her psychiatrist says that Samara doesn’t want to hurt anyone, she disagrees and says that she does, indicating a sadistic nature. Samara later used her nensha powers to drive the ranch’s horses to insanity and eventually suicide when she realised that her parents loved the horses more than herself.

She most notably created the video tape using images and memories she had experienced. As a wrath, she could use nensha on those who watched the tape to experience flashbacks into her life and even see her in dreams. She can also physically harm people by leaving burn marks on their bodies, but they can vanish over time. The curse of the video tape makes supernatural experiences happen to the victims based on Samara’s own experiences.

As a spirit she wanted to kill everyone, Samara gains more abilities. Her spiritual presence seems to terrify animals like horses or deer, causing them to panic or attack the victims of the tape or people related to Samara, although it may be an extension of her nensha ability. How she killed Katie Embry and her friends and indeed all her victims remains unknown as her method of killing is never shown. It seems she kills victims by scaring them to death by revealing her distorted face. How her victims faces become rotten and disfigured is also unknown. It is possible that making eye-contact with Samara causes the victims to die and have their face warped. After the seven day deadline, Samara can invade a television set and emerge from the well in the tape’s inner world and displays the ability to defy the laws of physics to crawl her way out of the television into the real world, but remains as a flickering, distorted figure like the video tape’s quality. In Rings, victim Jake attempts to escape Samara by breaking his television screen but she manages to escape and attempts to attack him by emerging through the screen on his video camera, hinting that she can emerge from other electrical sources.

It has been questioned by fans how did Samara kill Katie’s other friends when two of them were driving in a car and the other was on a rooftop and supposedly jumped off, although it is possible she can appear via water or maybe caused some sort of event that caused the group to die. Numerous questions have been asked how she appears if the victim is not anywhere near a television.

Despite displaying a fear of water, Samara has control over it, capable of manipulating it to her desires. She can cause a bathtub of water to empty its supply up onto the ceiling, and displays a tendency to use water to scare a person, usually in the form of growing puddles of water that creep after victims. Samara can turn on televisions and electrical appliances, usually to escape out of them or use them to display her images. She can also use telephones to contact a person after they’ve watched a video. She even leaves an answer message on Rachel’s telephone, directed at Noah.

HISTORY

Samara was born to a woman named Evelyn in 1970. Her father was a priest named Burke from a small town named Sacrament Valley, Washington. Evelyn was kept in a hidden chamber beneath a bell tower after being raped by Burke but was eventually freed and went to a hospital run by nuns eight months pregnant. She gave birth to Samara but found that her baby would not cry. Samara apparently told her that a demon was born inside her and the only way to be rid of it was to drown her in a pond outside. Whether or not this was Evelyn’s own psyche or Samara’s powers telling her to do this remains unknown. A nun spotted Evelyn attempting to drown Samara and led a group of nuns to stop her. Samara was put up for adoption whilst Evelyn was sent to an asylum.