The director has equal praise for Daveigh Chase, the young actress who plays Samara, the girl who holds the key to the mystery of "The Ring." "Daveigh is great. We were so lucky to find such talented young actors with whom you could talk openly about not only the internal mechanisms of their characters, but what we were trying to achieve with them in the context of the story."

Rachel and Noah's desperate search for the answers that might save their lives and the life of Aidan eventually leads them to Samara's last living connection to the world: her father, Richard Morgan, played by veteran, award-winning actor Brian Cox. "From the very start, I had Brian Cox in mind for the role. I couldn't imagine the part being played by anyone else," Verbinski states.

Like his fellow actors, Brian Cox was captivated by the screenplay. "I thought it was a great yarn, a real page turner," he remarks. "I was intrigued by it, by where it was going·the twists and turns in the story. That's basically what makes a good script in my opinion."

Although Richard Morgan parts with little information, Cox felt he understood what had brought his character to the point at which Rachel and Noah find him. "He is a tragic character. He's a man who has lost everything in life. Now, he seems to be rattling around on his ranch, which was once a horse ranch, but is no longer for reasons you'll come to understand. He lives in a sort of half-dead world, a man who has been left behind by terrible events."

Clues to those terrible events are buried in the haunting images burned into the mysterious videotape that leads those who view them to their own horrifying end. Rachel Keller comes to know all too well that the video brought her niece Katie, played by Amber Tamblyn, to her death. And while she never watched the tape, being a witness to Katie's unspeakable final moments drives her best friend Becca, played by Rachael Bella, to a mental ward.

For Gore Verbinski, one of the first and most daunting challenges was to create the ominous videotape that is at the center of "The Ring." "The tape had to serve two functions," he notes. "It had to contain clues to its origin and to understanding why it was created. As abstract as it appears at first viewing, as you progress, those images have to have a reason to be. The video also had to be bizarre, to shock you without seeming to have been designed to do so. That's a tricky thing to do. I started with some of the key images from the Japanese film, because when you remake a movie, you want to keep the great moments from the original. Then, for me personally, I drew on what scared me, my own kind of horrors, and tried to include them in a way that was compelling, but could also make sense from the perspective of the person who made the video."