“The Ring Two” is the sequel to the scary movie “The Ring,” starring Naomi Watts and David Dorfman. In the first movie, Watts played investigative reporter Rachel Keller, who was trying to unravel the mystery behind a deadly video tape that caused people to die seven days after viewing it. Rachel’s search led her to the tragic story of Samara Morgan, a girl who was left to die in a well by her adoptive mother and somehow lived on to murder others. The secret to escaping death at her hands was to copy the tape and pass it on. With her son Aidan’s life at stake, Rachel made a terrible choice.

Actress Naomi Watts and director Hideo Nakata worked together during filming in Astoria last June. Photo by Kim Erskine.”The Ring Two” picks up two years later in the quiet town of Astoria, a remote place where Rachel and Aidan can live with the secret and enormous guilt of having released the curse to others. But Rachel soon learns that Samara isn’t finished with them yet, and that her son is linked to Samara’s spirit in a very menacing way.

Aidan begins to exhibit mysterious symptoms that cause the doctors at Astoria Hospital to cast suspicion onto Rachel. A staff psychiatrist is deeply troubled when Aidan is brought in with a dangerous and seemingly inexplicable case of extreme hypothermia. As Aidan’s situation worsens, Rachel, who works at The Daily Astorian, knows she must get to the root of the problem and find out why Samara is bent on creating so much destruction.

As Astoria Sunday Market workers such as Kelly Bennett, right, set up their displays, grips, left, set up the equipment. Photo by Lori Assa. Principal photography on “The Ring Two” began in Los Angeles, where the newsroom of the former Los Angeles Herald Examiner building in downtown doubled for the offices of The Daily Astorian. Following three weeks in and around Los Angeles, the production moved to Astoria, where filmmakers say the often gloomy weather helped lend an ominous tone to the proceedings.

Grips assembled a camera crane in preparation for shooting a market scene at McGowan, near Chinook, Wash. Photo by Lori Assa. Director of Photography Gabriel Beristain said he used the changing weather patterns of the region to his advantage.

“Rachel is looking for normalcy, welcoming back a world that she wants to be tranquil, a world that doesn’t give her any memories of the nightmare that she lived. We welcomed sunny days, because this is a new world, a new time, a new city. But the weather of Astoria is very volatile – it might be sunny, but five minutes earlier, it was pouring.”

The film crew and others surrounded a house on the corner of 16th Street and Grand Avenue in Astoria, where a dinner scene was being filmed. Photo by Lori Assa. Beristain had a water truck wet down the streets in every shot so they would match.

“It turned out to be beautiful – you know that look when the sun comes out after the rain, and everything glistens. We made virtue of whatever weather Astoria decided to give us. We couldn’t wait for perfect weather so our perfect weather became the unpredictability of Astoria,” he said.

A rustic-looking restroom, made of faux materials, was erected at McGowan for a market scene. Photo by Lori Assa. Another portion of the filming involved the ill-omened relationship between animals and Samara’s energy. Rachel and Aidan’s disturbing confrontation with a herd of deer was filmed on the tree-lined roads of Fort Stevens State Park. No actual deer were used in the filming.

After shooting in Astoria, the company returned to Universal Studios and LA Center Studios. There they filmed a bathroom scene where water is literally repelled from the presence of Samara. Like an anti-gravity water chamber, water is forced out of the bathtub and coats the ceilings and walls before crashing down in a torrential pool of water. To accomplish the scene, the special effects coordinator used two separate bathroom sets. One was an entirely upside-down bathroom, where about 100 thin wires were utilized to hold all the towels and curtains in place. They were then able to flood the “ceiling” in a kind of small pool.

Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) struggles with Samara (Kelly Stables). Photo by Gemma La Mana. There were some bizarre happenings off-camera as well. Throughout production on “The Ring Two,” a sequence of unsettling occurrences repeatedly affected the production.

The strange events began May 20, coincidentally the “seventh day” of production. Early in the morning, the office staff arrived to discover that the production office had been flooded overnight. Though the reason turned out to be a burst water pipe in the wall, for some the pooling of water – so closely tied to a major theme of the movie – was an omen of possible things to come.

Dr. Emma Temple (Elizabeth Perkins) tries to learn why her young patient Aidan (David Dorfman) is exhibiting suspicious symptoms. Photo by Gemma La Mana. In an effort to forestall any future problems, director Hideo Nakata requested that a Japanese purification ceremony, conducted by Shinto Minister Reverend Igawa, be conducted at both the production office where the flooding occurred, and on set. Walter Parkes recalled, “I looked at the call sheet, and it said, ‘8:30 p.m. – Purification Ceremony.’ I’ve worked on more than 30 movies, and that was a first. I said, ‘I’ll be there for that,'” he laughed. “It was great. I think it bonded the cast and crew early on.”

Rachel finds herself trapped in the well where Samara met her terrible end and where she still lives to wreak havoc on the world that rejected her. Photo by Gemma La Mana. Although the production was officially blessed, nevertheless a string of strange coincidences continued:

While on location, a swarm of thousands of bees suddenly descended on the prop truck, prompting the immediate evacuation of the prop department, before the bees left just as quickly as they arrived.

One morning at the lot at Universal Studios, a set costumer stepped out of the parking garage to discover an antlered buck charging across the asphalt in her direction. Though it’s a regular occurrence for deer to descend onto the lot from the surrounding hills, the similarity to the deer attack in the film was uncanny.

Max Rourke (Simon Baker) is Rachel’s new boss, who has no idea of the evil that has followed her to his small town. Photo by Gemma La Mana. These incidents sparked many in the cast and crew to speculate that somehow Samara was making her presence known.

Nakata observed, “The idea of a threshold between reality and another world can be very frightening, and I think Samara’s presence is much closer in this movie than in the previous films. Samara is not just inside the TV; she is right beside you. That is probably the biggest fear for audiences in this movie.”

– Information courtesy “The Ring Two” production notes