For moviegoing, late October is always a mixed bag. It is invariably the arrival point for any number of supernaturally-themed releases, hoping to cash in on the one time out of the year audiences are in the mood for something spooky. This practice has led to the release of basic cable classics like "House on Haunted Hill" and "The Rage: Carrie 2".

Fright films released around Halloween have a bad track record, but at least "The Ring" has something of a pedigree to it. A remake of a highly successful 1998 Japanese film, the Americanized version of "The Ring," as synthesized by director Gore Verbinski and "Scream 3" screenwriter Ehren Kruger, is part post-industrial fable, part ghost story, and is mostly successful at both.

Naomi Watts (of "Mulholland Drive") stars as Rachel Keller, an ambitious journalist for a Seattle newspaper. When her young son's cousin and frequent babysitter dies under mysterious circumstances, Rachel traces the last days of the girl's death to a popular urban myth: a particular videotape, when watched, leaves the viewer only seven days left to live.

Rachel indeed finds a copy of the legendary tape -- a black and white montage of images that looks more like a Nine Inch Nails video than a death sentence -- in a backwoods hotel. Immediately after watching the video, Rachel's phone rings, and the low, female voice on the other end of the line says only one thing: "Seven days."

The hunt to unravel the secrets of the videotape begins. Enlisting old flame and techie Noah (Martin Henderson) to aid her, Rachel spends what could be her last week on Earth playing detective, trying to stop her own death and salvage her relationship with precocious, strangely gifted son, Aidan (David Dorfman), before it's too late.

To explain anything further would spoil the surprise; like all mysteries, the strength of "The Ring" lies in what's left unexplained, and also like all mysteries, "The Ring" grows less intriguing as more and more pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together.

Though the film offers a perfunctory, half-hearted attempt at a more modern explanation for the videotape phenomenon, casting the tape and its deadly outcome as a symptom of all-consuming technology, it more forcefully returns to the supernatural forces behind the tape's creation.

Kruger's script, likely heavily doctored, displays a subtlety in its horror that isn't applied to things like the clunky portrayal of Rachel's distant relationship with her son. To its credit, though, the script rarely overstates its own creepiness (when it does it winds up more comical than scary).

Aiming for "Sixth Sense"- and "Blair Witch"-style slow dread, "The Ring" lets its mystery unfold languidly, even as Rachel's days are very much numbered, and though it goes a bit too far in looking for a non-traditional ending (in the process changing audience preception of the main characters), "The Ring" stands out as a cut above the normal Halloween movie fare.

"The Ring" is now showing.