She Is Here
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
She Is Here is a website dedicated to the Ringu / The Ring franchise of films and novels, concentrating on the American remakes. The site presents the franchise's universe as real, making the site the central point of a limited Alternate Reality Game. This site is generally considered to be the most popular of all of DreamWorks' viral marketing sites dedicated to the franchise.
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[edit] History
[edit] DreamWorks viral marketing
On November 28, 2004, DreamWorks registered the domain "she-is-here.com" in anticipation of their then-upcoming film The Ring Two.
DreamWorks advertised the site using blank-labeled videotapes which contained a trailer of the film presented as another cursed video created by Samara Morgan. The images on the video were scenes from the second film altered to retain the look and feel of the original Samara video, with the website address shown at the end of the images, then a snowy footer with unintelligible snippets of audio from the film.
When the tape-watcher got to the website advertised in the video, he or she would see a multitude of information about the video presented from the point of view of webmistress "Erika" (her last name was never revealed), out to reassure the tape-watching public that they were not alone. It contained shared experiences sent by email on each of the successive days, with the link to "Day 7" saying simply "Are you dead yet?"
What truly propelled the website's popularity were the site's forums, in which anyone could register and post comments about their own experiences day by day. Initially the forums were moderated lightly by day (in which everyone's post would appear and the bad ones would be deleted later) and heavily by night (in which all posts would be screened first with the bad posts deleted before anyone else saw them).
Although the majority of people posting to the forum simply grabbed a homemade character and played along, the lack of any kind of disclaimer on the site meant that many people registered in an effort to convince the characters (who they thought were real people) that the movie was just a movie. The characters playing along would invent reasons as to why the movie exists and why there is a Japanese book series and franchise chronicling the "real" events. This led to several shouting wars which in turn led to the forums shifting to full-time heavy moderation.
The site also had accounts from "Jake", the central character of the Rings short film originally released with a re-release of the The Ring on home video. Initially there were only accounts from Jake listed on the site, as if he had e-mailed his experiences to Erika, but on February 3, 2005, Erika had supposedly received an email confirming Jake's tape death, and the site was changed to reflect Jake's obituary, and a warning on the "Day 7" page that not all people find a tail in time.
As the date drew closer to the release of The Ring Two, some characters were posting that they were doing strange things to the tape, like creating "supertapes" via deep rapport with Samara that can kill instantly, or maliciously showing the tape to groups of people for the thrill of the kill. Erika kept voicing her displeasure for such acts and on March 25, 2005, a week after the film's release, Erika announced she would no longer maintain the site, and allowed no one else to post to the forums, citing fear of what would happen if she got much deeper into events.
The site itself was removed in May 2005, the domain name pointing only to a generic start page for the service provider.
[edit] The roleplay continues
A few days before "Erika" shut down the DreamWorks site, another site sprung up calling itself RINGS Communities, and presented to be run by one of the characters, forum user "MNEmichan", from the original She Is Here roleplay, moved by the death of a relative-in-law. The new site was similar in tone to the original, though with the sections presented in a different manner, and contained a disclaimer regarding the fact that the site is just a roleplay. After Erika's forums became postblocked, the most hardcore of the original roleplayers flocked to the new forums on the new site. The presence of the disclaimer stopped most of the traffic from people who would otherwise not know that the site was just a game.
"MNEmichan" herself eventually cited fear in late 2005, but she kept the site and forums up, and the roleplay eventually involved plots featuring neo-government type agencies wanting the tape for their own means. She has since returned to the roleplay.
In the fall of 2005, another site with forums sprung up calling itself RINGUSU Communities concentrating mostly on the Japanese series, presented as being run by one of the European roleplay characters ("OBrasilero") who claimed to know Ryuji Takayama before that character's supposed death in 1989. This site also introduced the existence of a fan-created European spirit with a cursed video. The HTML code from the site was borrowed from "MNEmichan"'s site with permission.
[edit] The original site returns
On November 28, 2005, DreamWorks' registry for she-is-here.com lapsed, and VeriSign put the domain up for auction, where it was then bought by another fan of the franchise with the intent on putting up a new fansite for The Ring. The player for "MNEmichan", who had archived the entire DreamWorks site before it left the web, contacted the new domain owner with an offer to hand him the archive and resurrect the site. The new owner took the offer, and on May 23, 2006, She Is Here returned with only a few minor changes from the original DreamWorks site, and the ARG continues to this date.
[edit] External links
- She Is Here, the original DreamWorks site by "Erika", now fan-run.
[edit] Spinoffs
- RINGS Communities, the site run by "MNEmichan".
- RINGUSU Communities, the site run by "OBrasilero".
| The Ring Cycle |
|---|
| Novels: Ring | Spiral | Loop | Birthday |
| Japanese Films: Ring 0 | Ring | Ring 2 | Rasen |
| American Films: The Ring | Rings | The Ring Two | The Ring 3 |
| Korean Films: The Ring Virus |
| Curses: Samara Morgan | Sadako Yamamura | Eun-Suh Park | The Video | Towel-Headed Man |
| Misc: Anna Morgan | Moesko Island Lighthouse | Hideo Nakata | She Is Here | Koji Suzuki | Terror's Realm |
