Koji Suzuki

Koji Suzuki is the Japanese horror novelist whose creation of Ring (Ringu, 1991) made him one of the most influential popular writers in postwar Japan and whose work subsequently shaped the entire global landscape of Asian horror cinema. The novel — about a videotape that kills anyone who watches it seven days later — was adapted into a film in 1998 that terrified Japan and, in an American remake in 2002, terrified the rest of the world.

Suzuki's achievement was to fuse traditional Japanese supernatural folklore with the anxieties of a technological, mediated society — fear not of ghosts in old houses but of the screens and signals that pervade modern life. His sequels Spiral and Loop expanded the mythology in increasingly ambitious directions. He is often called "the Japanese Stephen King," though his preoccupations are distinctively his own.