‘Ringu’ Author Koji Suzuki Dead at 68; His Work Changed Horror Forever

The horror world is mourning the reported loss of legendary Japanese author Koji Suzuki, whose work forever changed supernatural horror and helped ignite the global J-horror boom. He was 68.

Without Suzuki, there’s probably no Bloody Disgusting, no Dread Central, no V/H/S, no Southbound, and honestly, who knows what the modern horror landscape even looks like without the ripple effect his work created. One of the single biggest influences on my entire life in horror started with him and the wave of Japanese horror that exploded globally because of his writing. It completely changed genre filmmaking and introduced mainstream audiences to a style of horror built around atmosphere, psychological terror, cursed mythology, and existential dread. The importance of Suzuki’s impact on horror culture really cannot be overstated.

Reports began circulating online this week that the legendary Japanese horror author has died at the age of 68. Best known as the creator of the Ringu franchise, Suzuki is widely regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the modern era and a foundational figure in the global rise of J-horror throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Suzuki launched his literary career with the novel Paradise in 1990 before breaking through internationally with Ring (Ringu) in 1991. The novel introduced readers to Sadako and the now-iconic cursed videotape concept that has reshaped the entire horror genre.

When I launched my website back in 2001, one of the biggest horror movies in the world was Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, the American remake of Ringu based on Suzuki’s work. But before Hollywood fully discovered Japanese horror, I had already gone down that rabbit hole myself, hunting down a bootleg VHS copy of Ringu just to experience the movie everyone online was whispering about. That film opened an entirely new world to me. One of the earliest articles I ever wrote for the website was about Japanese horror cinema because I became completely obsessed with it. Watching those films felt like an out-of-body experience. There was something surreal and deeply unsettling about discovering horror from another culture that operated on entirely different rules than American genre films. It felt like a hidden gateway had suddenly opened, and I was accessing something I shouldn’t be seeing.