Bleeding Through, or We Are Living in a Digital World and I Am an Analog Girl

This paper contends that in a culture increasingly shifting toward the dichotomous binary structure of the digital paradigm, the 2002 American horror film The Ring becomes a striking manifestation of analog noise, the inevitable mingling and contamination of autonomous wholes. This paper aligns the film with relevant primary texts such as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and eXistenZ, Andy Warhol’s artwork, and the video game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem to locate it thematically, and it uses the works of media theorists Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze to position antagonist Samara as a consummate virus, seeping and propagating her way across hermetic distinctions.