Sadako Yamamura

Sadako Yamamura (山村 貞子, Yamamura Sadako) is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Koji Suzuki's Ring novel series and its eponymous film series. Her backstory varies between continuities, but all depict her as the vengeful ghost of a young psychic who was murdered and thrown into a well. As a ghost, she is dressed in a simple white dress with long black hair hiding her face, and uses nensha, her most distinctive power, to create a cursed videotape; whoever watches the tape will be haunted by Sadako and die exactly one week later unless the tape is copied and shown to another person, who must then repeat the same process. The titular "ring" from the novels and films refers to a ring-like visual that appears on the cursed videotape, which depicts the top of the well as seen by Sadako from its bottom. Korean and American films reimagine the character as Park Eun-seo (Korean: 박은서) and Samara Morgan, respectively, with similar backgrounds and features.

Sadako has been played by several actresses in films, including Rie Inō, who premiered the role in Ring (1998) and Ring 2 (1999), Bae Doona in The Ring Virus (1999), and Daveigh Chase in the first American film (2002). Two film adaptations largely differ from her traditional depictions: Ring 0: Birthday (2000), in which she is portrayed by Yukie Nakama, follows the events leading to her death and features her as main protagonist rather than as an antagonist, while Sadako vs. Kayako (2016), in which is portrayed by Elly Nanami, is a crossover pitching her against Ju-On and The Grudge antagonist Kayako Saeki.

Sadako and her American version, Samara, are both regarded as popular horror characters, notably spreading the appearance of ghosts with Yūrei-like looks of pale girls with long dark hair in popular culture.

Sadako was born in 1947 to Shizuko Yamamura and Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma in Oshima Island. The year before, Shizuko gained psychic powers after retrieving an ancient statuette of En no Ozuno from the ocean. Shizuko also gave birth to a baby boy, but he died four months later due to an illness. Planning to move to Tokyo with Ikuma, she entrusted her mother to take care of baby Sadako. At Ikuma's encouragement, Shizuko displayed her psychic powers during a publicized demonstration. However, Shizuko bowed out of the demonstration due to migraines brought on by her powers. The press denounced Shizuko as a fraud because of this. Depressed, Shizuko eventually returned to Oshima Island and committed suicide by jumping into Mount Mihara. Meanwhile, Ikuma attempted to unlock the psychic powers of his own by meditating beneath a waterfall, which ended up causing him to contract tuberculosis, requiring him to recuperate in a sanatorium in the Izu Peninsula, leaving Sadako to be raised by Shizuko's relatives. Like her mother, Sadako was a powerful psychic; whereas Shizuko could only burn images onto paper, Sadako could also project images into electronic media, such as TV.

At the age of nineteen, Sadako joins a Tokyo-based acting troupe. As revealed in the short story Lemon Heart, she falls in love with the sound operator, Hiroshi Toyama. He learns of her powers, but he accepts them. However, an early form of the curse is created in the form of a sound recording that kills four people, including the troupe's director, resulting in a heartbroken Sadako leaving Toyama. Eventually, Sadako visits Ikuma in the Izu sanatorium, only to be raped by a doctor named Jotaro Nagao, who is unknowingly infected with smallpox. During the assault, he discovers that Sadako has testicular feminization syndrome, and has the genitalia of both sexes. Sadako bites him on the shoulder, causing her to be infected with the smallpox virus that Nagao contracted. Finally, Nagao throws her down a nearby well and seals her within. Foreseeing herself being reborn years later, Sadako vows revenge on the world before she dies. Her psychic powers mutate the smallpox virus into a new strain of virus, called the "ring virus", one that causes anyone who contracts it to die, seemingly of fright, within a week.

By Ring, in 1991, the Izu sanatorium, including the well that Sadako was thrown into, was rebuilt into a mountain resort. The well is located right below a TV screen of one of the resort's cabins. When a vacationing family forgets to bring home their videotape after one night, Sadako projects the new virus onto the TV screen, taking the form of a video, and the VCR records it onto the tape. The next visitor at the cabin, 17-year-old Tomoko Oishi, inadvertently discovers and watches the tape, leading Sadako to kill her. Tomoko's uncle, journalist Kazuyuki Asakawa, begins investigating her death and watches the tape, leading to him being cursed by Sadako. He learns about Sadako's origin and writes a journal detailing his investigation.

As revealed in Spiral, the ring virus originally had an escape clause that allowed it to propagate itself, but Tomoko and her friends, not believing any of it, mischievously overwrote the part where the tape gave the solution as a prank. As a result, the virus had no means to inform its viewers on how to multiply itself, so it mutated when the next viewer of the tape, Kazuyuki, watched it and copied it for his friend, Ryuji Takayama. Two strains then emerged: a ring-shaped one, which would invariably kill its viewers within a week, and a spermatozoon-shaped one, which would lay dormant within the viewers unless they were ovulating women, whose ovum would be infected by the virus and transformed into a Sadako clone. This was because Sadako wanted to be reborn, something she could not biologically do because she was intersex. Finally, though the original tape and its copies had been disposed of by the events of Spiral, the virus found its way into a new medium: Kazuyuki's journal, which his brother published after he died in a car accident. Kazuyuki's survival was actually not because he copied the tape for Ryuji, but rather because he unwittingly helped the virus propagate. This was why Kazuyuki survived, while his wife and daughter, who also copied the tape per his instruction, did not.

The dormant virus infects the ovulating Mai Takano when she watches the tape, causing her to give birth to a Sadako clone who assumes the name Masako. She is described as a "complete hermaphrodite" as she has fully functional male and female reproductive organs. After her identity is revealed, Sadako tells Mitsuo Ando that she made a deal with Ryuji: in exchange for his resurrection, he would help her be reborn, something he did when he attracted Ando into the case. She then blackmails Ando: in exchange for not activating the dormant ring virus that he contracted when he read Kazuyuki's journal, he would refrain from stopping it from being published. As an incentive, Sadako, who can clone a person by implanting their genes into her, will bring his deceased son, Takanori, back to life. Realizing that Sadako would win no matter what he does, Ando reluctantly cooperates.