The Ring goofs

Aboard the ferry, as passengers gather at the stern to peer at the horse that went overboard, a young girl standing beside Rachel lets out a shriek — yet the sound carries on even after she falls silent and breathes in.

In one sequence there is a shot of a small clock that seems to be ticking, yet its hand moves in a continuous, smooth motion. The clock’s make and model do not produce a ticking sound — it is completely silent.

While Rachel looks through the newspapers to establish the time at which all the teenagers died, she notices '10:00 p.m.' printed in one of the papers. Under Associated Press guidelines it ought to have been written as '10 p.m.'

At the psychiatric hospital, Noah attempts to pose as Richard Morgan. By this stage in the narrative, Noah should be aware that the real Richard Morgan would be roughly twice his age, and nobody would accept that he was the person he claimed to be.

While Aidan is sketching in the car alongside Noah, the clipboard he’s using shifts in colour from blue to green.

While Noah is in the supermarket buying cigarettes, he rummages in his pocket and empties a handful of bits and bobs — coins, rubbish and an old packet of cigarettes — onto the checkout counter. In the next shot the clutter has disappeared, leaving only a single coin and the old packet of cigarettes.

When Noah is walking towards the television as Samara climbs out of the well, he is barefoot. After Samara emerges from the television and he falls backwards into the shelves, he is wearing flip-flops.

During the funeral, while Aidan is in Katie's room, the wardrobe door repeatedly opens and closes between shots.

As Anna approaches Samara from behind, just before placing a rubbish bag over her head, both hands are visible at once and there is no bag in sight.

As the horse breaks free on the ferry, it pulls the rope away from the wall without the rope itself snapping. In several later shots the rope is shown torn apart.

Towards the end of the opening scene between Noah and Rachel, Noah begins to eat an apple. He is clearly chewing while she speaks, yet when he replies his mouth is suddenly free of the apple as if he had not swallowed it, and as Rachel continues talking he is seen chewing once more without any visible additional bite.

On the ferry the horse runs along the centre line and then topples over, but when we see it fall into the water this happens on the left-hand side of the ferry.

While Rachel researches Anna Morgan and Moesko Island in old newspaper archives, she unconsciously doodles on Anna's photograph. Between cuts the doodle shifts from a splayed fan to an entirely vertical mark.

When Noah has finished watching the video, Rachel's phone rings with a fairly long pause between rings. But when the phone rings for Aiden, the pause between rings is much shorter.

After breaking into the records room, Noah examines Samara's photographic negatives, holding them up to the light. In one shot his fingers partially obscure the first picture, yet in the next point-of-view shot the entire image is visible and his fingers cannot be seen.

Mr Morgan tells Rachel to leave his house; when he opens the door a bright, sunny day is revealed, but after he shuts it the outside is enveloped in mist and heavy cloud.

In the scene where the horse plunges from the ferry, the ferry's name "Quinault Seattle WA" is visible on the vessel's side. When Rachel looks down from the same spot where the horse leapt and sees it in the water, the ferry's name appears altered — the words "Seattle" and "Quinault" are now flush against one another, whereas earlier they were not.

Aidan's tie is knotted differently from shot to shot during the wake — the striped pattern shifts round the knot.

After Noah watches the video and the phone rings, the cable beneath the handset is in a different position from shot to shot, despite no one touching it.

Rachael's dark roots alternately lengthen and shorten between scenes, with no apparent chronological progression.

When Noah breaks into the psychiatric hospital's records room and searches through Anna's files, an arm in a blue sleeve appears to his right, despite him being alone.

Towards the end of the film, Rachel returns to find Aiden asleep on the floor. She picks him up and, as she turns, by the front door a shadowy outline of a man is visible — a crew member.

After viewing the Samara medical recording at the Morgan household, Rachel pursues Richard Morgan up the stairwell; the lighthouse casts a crew member’s shadow across the wall, and Richard is visible at the top of the stairs.

The counter numbers are corrupted on both the original cassette and the duplicate. That cannot happen with a VHS cassette — no such timecode is recorded on the control track, despite Noah, who is a video expert, saying otherwise. Noah is also wrong to suggest the control track can reveal which device made the recording. In fact, the control track only instructs the VCR about tape speed and when to advance by one second; it is also used to set the correct tracking for the video heads. If the control track were faulty the tape would play at the wrong speed and the picture would break up into static, or the VCR would continually hunt for a good control track when the cassette was first loaded.

As Rachel holds the videotape at dusk, just before she plays it, the red light and shadows sweep downwards across her and the room; but shadows cast by a setting sun would move upwards, not downwards.

Although Mr. Morgan's suicide by electrocution ought to have tripped the household circuit breakers and cut the power to the whole property, electricity is nonetheless still present in the house and its outbuildings immediately after his death.

Contrary to what the A/V lab clerk asserts, there is no recognised term "tracking window" in videotape jargon. The word "tracking" denotes adjusting the timing relationship between control‑track pulses and the start of a video track (video tracks are recorded diagonally by a rotating drum, which Noah and Rachel interfere with in the previous scene). It's essentially a phase adjustment; the correct phase selected by the VCR is just an angle, and all VCRs — even the most basic domestic machines — can read a tape when the control‑track‑start‑of‑video‑track phase falls anywhere between -180 and 180 degrees (in other words, the entire range). A larger read head would actually introduce additional noise and make the video tracks harder to read. The technician makes it sound as if videotape stores film frames and that higher‑end machines can read larger images. Moreover, the overscan area on a VHS tape (or indeed any analogue composite signal) is far too small to contain an entire separate image.

Katie's mother tells Rachael she spent four hours searching online and was unable to find a single documented instance of a 16-year-old's heart simply stopping. Sudden cardiac arrest affects roughly 2,000 people under the age of 20 in the US each year. Even with the internet search tools available in 2002, it would have been straightforward to locate numerous reports of a young person's "heart just stopping".

While driving to try to warn Noah, Rachel holds her mobile phone in her right hand. In the following shot she has both hands on the steering wheel — she has, in fact, dropped the phone to gain better control of the vehicle and avoid traffic.

Rachel engages in a rather perfunctory conversation with her sister at the wake about Katie's death, as if she'd scarcely been around her since her daughter Katie died. Yet the pair seem close enough that Rachel would probably have spent as much time with her sister as she could. It's common for screenwriters to stage awkward moments where characters relay information the viewers need to hear, but in a way that doesn’t quite mirror how they would actually speak. In this instance Rachel learns everything she needs to know from her sister and Katie's friends within a single compact scene.

When Rachel searches the internet for information, the web browser's address bar displays a path to a file located on the desktop of a Windows 98 PC: C:\WIN98\Desktop\....etc...

In the group photograph of Anna Morgan with the elderly women, the shadows on her face indicate that her image was superimposed into the picture.

When Rachel picks up Katie's photos, a monorail can be seen overhead heading south; moments later another monorail passes along the exact same track in the same direction. This would not be possible, as the first car would have had to return to the stop at the opposite end, Seattle Center, disembark and reboard passengers before making another southbound trip.

In the penultimate sequence, Naomi Watts' genuine Australian accent is audible on the line "What did I do that he didn't?"