Plot:

Rachel is a reporter for the Seattle paper. Her niece Katie dies suddenly and strangely one night. While attending her niece's funeral, Keller's mom feels that her daughter's death is strange and asks Rachel to use her reporter's connections and tactics to find out the true cause of Katie's death.

After the funeral, Rachel hears about a mysterious videotape from Katie's friends. It is said that all those who have seen the tape will die after seven days. Katie and her three best friends died at the same time 7 days after watching the tape.

Rachel then set out to investigate and she went to the Asylum Hill Inn where Katie and her friends had stayed. There Rachel found the videotape that Katie and the others had watched.

In order to get to the bottom of the matter, Rachel watched the videotape as well, and just as she did so, the phone rang. The only thing that came from the other end of the phone were two blurry and eerie words: "Seven days ......"

Rachel realized that after taking a picture of herself, her image in the picture was surprisingly blurry, and she instantly felt that things were really as they were said to be. Afterwards, Rachel called in her ex-boyfriend Noah, who is an expert in photography and video technology.

After studying that videotape several times over, the two found a small clue which led them to the island of Mossgoo. At the same time, they found out the identity of the woman who appeared in the videotape.

The woman's name was Anna Morgan, a horse breeder who was later hospitalized in the Yola County Psychiatric Hospital for insanity. Rachel went to the island alone, while Noah was tasked with finding information about Anna Morgan.

Rachel soon found Morgan's place, and she gradually discovered the whole story. One night, she sneaks into Mr. Morgan's home and discovers a disk of images of Semra, the woman the Morgans adopted.

But Rachel was soon discovered by Mr. Morgan, who also committed suicide that night. Rachel and Noah rushed back to the Asylum Hill Inn, and in the clues they got, they discovered that there was a well underneath the floor of the inn, and that Semra had died inside the well.

Rachel accidentally falls into the well, but gains a lot of information about Semra. She learned that Semra was pushed down the well by her own mother, among other information.

Bit by bit, seven days passed between the time Rachel watched the videotape and the time she fell into the well, and Rachel managed to lift the curse.

But Noah was scared to death by Semra the next day.

It turns out that Rachel was showing Noah a ripped videotape. And the real way to lift the curse is to rip the videotape and show it to someone else within 7 days of having seen it, after the whole show.

Comparison with the Japanese version:

Plot-wise, there's almost no difference between the two versions, both are about a female reporter who sees a mysterious videotape, and everyone who's seen it before dies strangely within 7 days, and ultimately the reporter cracks the secret with the help of a friend.

But perhaps it is the difference between Eastern and Western cultures, in Western horror films, the excitement often comes from what the audience's eyes see, while in Eastern horror films, the excitement often comes from the audience's mind's imagination;

This kind of excitement, even after leaving the movie theater for a long time, can not be dispersed, which is the biggest mystery of the success of Japan's "The Midnight Murderer," which is to create

This is the biggest secret of the success of the Japanese movie "Midnight Bell", which is to create a kind of horror that originates from vision but is beyond vision, rooted in everyone's consciousness.

After the film's premiere, some critics criticized the film for not having enough horror, and for a Western director to grasp the essence of the original film was a huge challenge, not because of lack of strength, but because of the differences between the two cultures.