If you remember anything about Gore Verbinski’s cursed-videotape chiller, "The Ring,” released 20 years ago in the United States on Tuesday, it’s probably the whispered threat: seven days.

Or maybe it’s the eyes of a creepy little girl, peering out from behind a curtain of stringy black hair; or the uncanny images — a flaming-red tree, dead horses scattered along a seashore, a finger pushed through a rusty nail — that made up the film-within-the-film. In "The Ring,” any unlucky soul who watches this bizarre videotape receives a menacing phone call as soon as it cuts to static, and in a week they’re kaput at the hands of a soggy ghoul who crawls out of a TV.

"The Ring,” based on the wildly successful Japanese novel by Koji Suzuki as well as the 1998 film adaptation by Hideo Nakata, doesn’t rely on a high body count, or much in the form of blood and guts, for scares. Yet for a generation of horror-lovers, it taps into a familiar feeling of ambient anxiety and inexplicable unease that remains omnipresent to this day.