As I previously wrote, many of our younger readers may have not seen the J-horror classic Ringu, and our longstanding fans probably watched a crappy bootleg years ago. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Hideo Nakata‘s film has been restored by Arrow Video and those in the UK are finally going to be able to see it in its full way-it-was-meant-to-be-seen glory.

Arrow shared with Bloody a little backstory on the restoration process from James White, head of restoration for the UK-based distributor. What makes this particularly exciting was that they enlisted the help of the film’s original Director of Photography, Jun’ichirō Hayashi!

“Fortunately, we had access to the original camera negative, which we had newly scanned in 4K at Imagica Labs in Tokyo,” writes White. “Having access to the negative was extremely important as so many presentations of Japanese films have suffered in the west from not being sourced from the original elements.

“The other critical factor was having the film’s Director of Photography Jun’ichirō Hayashi involved. The overall look of Ring – from its muted colour scheme and its sharp details to its deep contrast levels – is one of the most essential things that make the film so suspenseful and unsettling. Once we received the new scans at R3Store Studios in London the team restored the images of any dirt, debris and light scratches (fortunately the negative was in very good condition overall) and applied a basic first-template grade to send to Mr Hayashi, using old references from the previous DVD releases as a guide.

“Mr Hayashi was happy with the quality of the work but was very clear in his instructions – that the film was too warm, and needed to be cooler – as well as darker. We adjusted the grading shot by shot and again, sent the film back to Mr Hayashi. As before, he was complimentary of the work but stressed that we simply hadn’t gone dark enough. As I worried that we might push things too far, we began sending him individually regraded scenes to make sure that we were on the right track. We had some reservations that pushing the film’s colours any cooler would result in greenish skin tones and corrupted white and black areas, but by working this way, scene by scene, over a number of weeks, we were able to arrive at exactly the look Nakata and Hayashi intended, and serving the story in the best possible way. As such, this restoration presents Ring in a way that vastly improves upon the brownish flat look it had previously exhibited on video.

Proof is in the exquisite new photos below from the film getting a March 1 theatrical release, while the exclusive Blu-ray set arrives on March 18th. It’s time to get a new region-free Blu-ray player…