Hideo Nakata, the Ring Director Who Says Horror Isn’t What He Wants to Shoot

Hideo Nakata

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	July 19, 1961 Konkō, Okayama, Japan
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Ring, The Ring Two, Dark Water
Awards	Art Encouragement Prize

The most frightening image Japanese cinema exported in its era belongs to a man who would rather be making melodramas. In Ring, a girl with a curtain of black hair climbs out of a well on a cursed videotape, then out of the television set itself, and that scene travelled further than almost any Japanese film image of its generation: to Hong Kong and Seoul, into a Hollywood remake, into a sequel its director ended up shooting in Los Angeles. Hideo Nakata has spent the decades since being introduced as a horror specialist, and he has said in public that horror is not what he really wants to shoot. His career is the long negotiation between those two facts.

He grew up in Konkō, a small town in Okayama Prefecture in western Japan. He entered the University of Tokyo on the science track, with a place lined up in applied physics, and changed course, graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences in Asian studies. What marked him there was the film seminar of the critic Shigehiko Hasumi. An acquaintance met at a bar he frequented as a student got him his first set job, as an assistant director to Masahiro Shinoda.

In 1985 he joined the Nikkatsu studio, and his apprenticeship was anything but genteel. He worked as an assistant on the first three Be-Bop High School delinquent comedies and on Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno productions, where he trained under Masaru Konuma, a director he had admired as a fan. Konuma’s sets were brutal; Nakata later joked that he had felt murderous towards his mentor. He made his directing debut in 1992 with episodes of a television horror anthology, and the same year a Japanese government grant for artists sent him to Britain. There he began Joseph Losey: The Man with Four Names, a documentary on the blacklisted American director who rebuilt his career in England. It took until 1998 to finish.

The door opened with Don’t Look Up, a ghost story set inside a film studio, released in 1996. It made little money, but it convinced producers to give him Ring. Adapted by Hiroshi Takahashi from Koji Suzuki’s novel, with Nanako Matsushima and Hiroyuki Sanada, the film opened in Japan in January 1998 and became the most successful horror release the country had seen, the trigger for an Asian horror boom. Ring 2 followed in 1999, and Dark Water, another Suzuki story, arrived in 2002, with Hitomi Kuroki as a divorced mother and her small daughter in an apartment block where water keeps seeping through the ceiling. Alongside Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Shimizu, he is counted among the defining names of what came to be called J-horror.

Then the story turned on him. Gore Verbinski‘s American remake, The Ring, opened in Japan in late 2002 and out-earned the original on its home turf: about one billion yen by mid-November, against roughly 800 million for Nakata’s film. DreamWorks offered him The Ring Two, with Naomi Watts returning, and he accepted. After withdrawing from an earlier American project, his English-language debut became the 2005 sequel to a remake of his own film.

The heroic version, the J-horror master conquering Hollywood, does not survive contact with what he has said himself. In 2008 he told The Hollywood Reporter that his American experience had left him frustrated. He had already turned that frustration into a film: Foreign Filmmakers’ Guide to Hollywood, a self-financed documentary he shot in Los Angeles in the autumn of 2005 with a small digital camera bought for the purpose, organised around green lights, coverage and test screenings, the practices he saw as separating Hollywood from every other industry. Back home, he told ScreenAnarchy, “with Japanese filmmaking I can act like a king.” The films closest to his own taste were the ones that travelled least. Sleeping Bride, a 2000 adaptation of Osamu Tezuka, was a melodrama he had wanted to make for years. Kaidan, a 2007 period piece, he described as “half romance and half ghost story”, adding that young audiences who wanted pure fright may have felt cheated, and that neither Cannes nor Venice selected it.

The following decade kept pulling him in different directions. Chatroom, shot in Britain with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Imogen Poots from a script by Enda Walsh, screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2010. In 2016 he went back to the studio where he started, directing White Lily for Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno Reboot Project, his first film in the genre as a director almost three decades after working on it as an assistant. He had already paid his debt to Konuma with the documentary Sadistic and Masochistic in 2000. In 2019 he returned to the franchise that made him with Sadako, starring Elaiza Ikeda.

His biggest commercial success came late, and in the genre he says is not his first love. Stigmatized Properties, released in 2020, cast Kazuya Kamenashi as a struggling comedian who takes apartments where people have died; it grossed 2.34 billion yen and is described in Japan as the biggest domestic horror hit of the century. Around it he built the Stolen Identity thrillers, three films between 2018 and 2024 that spin out from a lost smartphone, and co-directed The Days, the 2023 Netflix series on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, with Masaki Nishiura. Stigmatized Properties: Possession, with Shota Watanabe, opened in July 2025.

His most recent credit is television. In June 2026 the Japanese broadcaster WOWOW premiered The Consultant, a drama adapted from a Korean novel, which he co-directed with Yoshinori Kobayashi; Kentaro Ito plays an aspiring novelist who realises that people are dying exactly as the stories he is commissioned to write. Nakata, born in Konkō on July 19, 1961, is now 65, and no new feature has been announced. The question he raised with Kaidan remains open: whether the audience that learned to fear a television set because of him would follow the director of Ring into a film designed to make it cry.

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Tags: Naomi Watts, Ring, Hideo Nakata, The Ring Two, Dark Water, Koji Suzuki

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