I’ve written before about my possibly unearned affection for Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, still one of the most viscerally affecting horror movies I’ve ever seen. (Sixteen years later, I continue to get legitimately nervous if I see series villain Samara lurking on a paused TV or computer screen.) As it happens, The Ring actually has two pretty good kid actor performances in its quiver: Daveigh Chase—who also played Lilo in Lilo & Stitch—as the young Samara, and David Dorfman as Naomi Watts’ preternaturally creepy kid Aidan. I’m going to give the win here to Dorfman (who apparently went on to employ his wise-beyond-his-years persona as an actual child prodigy in the legal field), if only because his delivery of the film’s twist line—a worried, exasperated “You weren’t supposed to help her!”—so effectively punctures its fake feel-good ending, and sends it tumbling down toward a horror climax that still makes me look askance at static-filled screens. [William Hughes]
