Is Sadako Truly Evil? Or Is She Just the Most Misunderstood Horror Character Ever?

*This article is still a draft, but you're welcome to read it, and share your thoughts! I'll be updating this regularly!*

On the surface, it might seem like Sadako's evil. She crawls out of a well. She lays her hair down. The TV is static, and she invades your own home—your private space. And she kills with a mere look of her eye. Her tape spreads only through copying and sharing—infectiously, without pause or mercy. It feels like a force that exists to multiply, to overwhelm, to seep into the cracks of safety and stability. In fact, some people argue she's not just out for vengeance—she's sadistic. That the "7 days" thing is because she's sadistic—she wants victims of the curse to experience as much pain as they can before they die.

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This is what horror villains have always been. Psychopathic, vengeful, sadistic killing machines with no will except to perpetually take lives.

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Yet, deep down, many of us feel like there's something uniquely captivating about Sadako in particular. What is it about her that's different? What's different about her that makes us feel this way? How can this be despite the fact that she appears so evil, terrifying, and monstrous on screen? What makes her, Sadako, a particular kind of horror character?

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The thing is, appearances are often deceitful. We've got to be careful about judging. We have to go deeper than just how things appear to us. We've got to dive deeper into their minds and hearts. We have to know the whole person before we give either way. What are her intentions? More importantly, who is Sadako? How we answer this question will determine the entire fate of Ringu. It will shape the course of the story. It will change how we see Sadako forever.

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When we read more deeply, however, we find that it's not so simple. Sadako's backstory reveals a series of traumas: a childhood marked by isolation, misunderstood psychic abilities, and violent betrayal. Her father saw her as an experiment, her mother was torn away from her, and the world never embraced her for who she was. These aren’t just footnotes—they are the foundations of her becoming.

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But still, that leaves so many questions. Is she just another villain with a tragic backstory? Or is she genuinely different from the rest? What makes her different than just a villain? Because plenty of villains have tragic backstories, and plenty of them we can shed tears for. But they don't always leave a mark on our soul. We shed our tears, and then move on. But something sticks with us about Sadako in a way that merely "tragic villains" don't often do. There's something about Sadako that resonates with us. Something that feels unresolved, like tension building somewhere deep down within us. And that's quite remarkable.

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Could it be that she, even if deeply wounded and broken, is more honorable than the rest? That there's goodness within her that we haven't understood? So here's the key thing we must answer to understand whether she is evil or misunderstood. And it's vital. We can't just look at her actions. We have to search for her heart.

And this question is key for the Sadako redemption arc I'm working on.

So, let's dive into this. Let's dive into the ambiguous waters and ask the most difficult questions. Let us become forensic masters. We will put on our Sherlockian helmets, descend into the deep ocean, and excavate every layer of truth there is to be found. And when we emerge from the depths of Ringu, we will emerge with an unambiguous answer—we will have clarity.

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For matters like this, what if...it's instead a cry for help? What if it's an accident? What if it's unintentional—a deeply distorted version of the effect of being in a locked, supernatural state?

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And that's a deep question.

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There are plausible reasons for both sides of the question. It’s not a matter of excusing evil, but of understanding its roots. And in understanding, perhaps we can separate the curse from the soul, the trauma from the true person.

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It's hard to say what the motivations of a supernaturally entrenched person are, after all. Are they even able to think in the same way they once did? Or are they operating from instinct, from reflex, from a pain that never had language?

So, with all of this ambiguity—pain, supernatural transformation, possible loss of self—we have to pause and look for concrete evidence of her underlying heart. Is it possible that, beneath the terrifying curse, there remains something deeply human, even gentle? What if the actions we now fear most are not the product of inherent malice, but the residue of trauma, misdirected yearning, or even the broken echoes of her former attempts to reach for connection?

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Consider this: Ringu 2 reveals that Sadako spent 30 years in the well alive, and all that time, she tried to climb out. For three decades she struggled upward, not passively resigned, but persevering—holding onto the possibility of reconciliation with the outside world. Despite her immense psychic powers—powers that, as a child, once accidentally lashed out—she does not harm anyone during those long years in the well. In fact, not a single unexplained death is attributed to her, not a single supernatural event of the magnitude we later see. Her rage, if it was present, did not consume her or the world around her. Even when betrayed by her father, injected and cast into darkness, she does not kill him in retaliation. This sustained restraint, this hope, points toward something profoundly un-monstrous at Sadako’s core—a deep well of humanity, desperately preserved, even as her world collapsed around her.

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If her only motivation was to survive or to seek vengeance, she would likely have waited for escape, plotting retribution or nursing hatred. But to climb, day after day, year after year, speaks to a fundamentally different longing: a desire to re-enter the world of the living, to be known, to be seen, to recover the wholeness and belonging she was denied. The act of climbing out is an act of hope—a persistent belief that reunion, acceptance, or even forgiveness might still be possible. Crawling out is not the gesture of a mere monster—it is the universal human reaching for life, for relationship, for restoration, even when all odds are against her.

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However, despite her pure intentions at the time, it's possible that her desires became distorted over time. Being there, thirty years, supernaturally sustained, could twist anyone. We can definitely say something had to be sustaining her. For her to keep trying to get back up and crawl out of the well, even after being injured. Nothing could do this. She must have been drawing strength from somewhere. Just as her body was supernaturally sustained, her mind and heart also had to be. And it was likely a kind of supernatural gift that kept her... but this gift may have itself been distorted. Perhaps it eventually got so distorted that it was unsustainable, so she passed at one point, and in that passing, the rage overtook her.

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Before all this, what were Sadako's morals? What did she believe?

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Evil could have crept in. Did she ever get taught true morals? We haven't learned anything about that. But we can infer her mother did, her father couldn't have taught her much because he saw her as an object to experiment on. So that would be very incomplete—she would have grown up in a relationally unhealthy household. Perhaps she had a sliver or two of genuine connection. Now the movies don't tell us too much about her childhood—so we must speculate. And if we're talking about the Sadako Redemption Arc that I'm proposing, we can even create her backstory together.

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At this formative stage of her life, Sadako would have glimpsed what a full, connected human life might be—moments of warmth, belonging, even purpose. She knew, at least dimly, the contours of joy, the meaning of home, and the desire to be loved. Yet after her mother’s death, all these possibilities became memories out of reach, never fully experienced, yet deeply yearned for. This gap between what she saw as possible and what was denied to her only intensified her ache. Her emotional world was shaped not just by pain, but by the haunting beauty of what could have been—a hunger for genuine relationship, dignity, and belonging that was never satisfied, and thus defined her sorrow as well as her hope.

So then, what did she believe?

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She may not have been a paragon of virtue yet, but she seems to have had an innate, childlike purity. And since her father failed her and no one ever raised her since, the little girl remains, longing for her mother. Her mind matured, and her stature grew, but her heart remained the little girl longing after her mother.

But to truly understand Sadako, we must wrestle honestly with the darkness as well—the anger, the pain, and the violence that ultimately overtook her. Her suffering did not simply make her a tragic figure; it opened the possibility of corruption and the unleashing of forces beyond her control. To see her as human is not to excuse her actions, but to refuse a simplistic, one-dimensional villainy. Sadako’s darkness is both a warning and a plea: a warning of what becomes of a soul abandoned and misunderstood, and a plea to seek, even in the midst of horror, the traces of the original heart now shrouded in shadow.

What did she believe about human dignity?

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In Ringu 0, there's an astonishing scene where Sadako, in a hospital, goes up to an old man. Unprompted, like something within her saw him, and immediately stirred. She doesn't even say anything—she's just drawn to him, like she's pulled by something greater than herself to heal him. And despite never having met this man before, she somehow knows. Her presence healed him. Toyama falls for her—he himself was a kind man, seeing Sadako despite everyone else, and he wouldn't have fallen for someone who didn't have any goodness in them.

If this old man ever heard about Sadako, what would he have said? Could his children and grandchildren have been better because of it? Such an act—freeing one of paralysis would have massive effects on one's life, which would ripple out to the man's wife, children, and grandchildren. Then, contrary to everything we thought we knew about her, Sadako has a positive, life-giving legacy, not merely the horrifying ones we know. They would be witnesses of who Sadako once was, and who she was meant to be.

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And yet, she continued climbing, all the time—desperate, and yet believing that if she made it out, the world would embrace her. Even though it destroyed her nails.

But perhaps the pain reached a crescendo.

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So, what changed? Why is she killing? Did she change or see something in the supernatural realm that made her see humans as worthless? What happened?

It is possible she gave up after the 30 years, and gave in. Why couldn't she immediately get out if she's so powerful? Well, perhaps she was fighting a supernatural force that was keeping her in the well. That wanted to take over. Perhaps a supernatural force powered by vengeance—the same one that took over when her child self-merged with her, was holding her back.

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Now what often happens when mother isn't there anymore is that Sadako is left emotionally unmoored. Of course, that would have made her more vulnerable. She wouldn't have been able to relationally express herself. The absence of that one stabilizing relationship created the perfect fracture for darkness to enter and hijack her gift.

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She may not have been a paragon of virtue yet, and yet despite all that she'd gone through, she seems to have had an incorruptible, childlike purity—and it persisted even when she was thrown into the well. Since her father failed her and no one ever raised her since, the little girl remains, longing for her mother. Her mind matured, and her stature grew, but her heart remained the same little girl longing after her mother.

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So, is Sadako good or evil?

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The answer is neither, yet also both. Because the key question is not whether she fell to a dark, evil force, or whether her true self has goodness and purity still inside. Clearly, both are true. The question laid before us, the one we must wrestle with hard, is whether her true self—yes, the true Sadako, the one who lived, longed, and desired love, is still there. It's whether Sadako has not been entirely corrupted by the dark, distorted force. It's whether there is still time to save her—if it is not too late. That somewhere, deep down, her real heart is there. Despite all this. If she has not wandered too far into the fog, is not too far sunken into the sea.

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If so, then she is like Aurora, unconscious, her true self lost and in need of someone who can pull her out. She's like the Beast, someone lost but who can rediscover love. She's like Cinderella exiled beneath ashes, a former radiance obscured but not gone.

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Here's the key: look at the forensic evidence. Why does everything she does during the curse seem more like broken or warped versions of a good thing humans would do, not something a malicious killer would do?

She's still human.

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The Look

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We all know the look. That's one of the most iconic scenes in horror history, and it's undeniably terrifying. The camera clips to her eye.

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A look like that isn't necessarily malicious though. It surely is a form of hatred, but not necessarily directed towards the person in the way it may look to us. It's easy to assume, but in the heat of the moment, things like this are often far more ambiguous than they may seem to be.

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#1: She doesn't even seem conscious while she's killing people.

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She walks like a zombie. Not a sign of someone who's in their right mind.

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#2: She says what to do

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#3: Sadako in Ringu 2

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Crawling out of a TV

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Could Sadako actually be a hidden protagonist after all? Let's explore that further.