Whatever Happened To The Girl From The Ring
Gore Verbinski's blue-soaked, melancholic "The Ring" incited a wave of J-horror stateside upon its release in 2002. A new century always brings new horror rules, and for the early part of this century, those rules mandated imported ghosties with tragic, complex backstories. Unlike most horror remakes, especially J-horror remakes, Verbinski's "The Ring" is arguably stronger than Hideo Nakata's original, no small feat given Nakata's status as one of this generation's premier Japanese horror auteurs. Post-millennium anxiety, digital unease, and swelling domestic discontent coalesced into more than hospitable conditions for "The Ring" to not just succeed, but succeed remarkably. $249 million worldwide isn't bad by any metric.
Beyond Verbinski's assured control of the material, the cast of new and familiar faces helped augment "The Ring's" most enduring scares. While Naomi Watts might be front and center, Daveigh Chase's contributions as chief baddie Samara Morgan cannot be overstated. With a dense, psychic mythology and perennially frightening screen presence, Samara is adroitly adapted from her Japanese counterpart, Sadako, and Chase performs her with evil, yet empathetic, aplomb. Fans of "The Ring" might be wondering what Chase has been up to in the years since, and here, we look at the trajectory of Chase's career before and after "The Ring."
Before The Ring
Before Daveigh Chase wowed audiences with her terrifying rendition of VHS curses, she briefly appeared in bit parts on television. As a child actor, Chase landed small roles on the likes of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," where she's credited as simply "Little Girl," before graduating to named roles on series like "Charmed" and "ER." Chase continued to appear on small screens post "The Ring," including an appearance on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" as a murdered 13-year-old. Anna (Shannon Cochran) and Richard (Brian Cox), her parents in "The Ring," could only wish.
As an augur for future success, Chase additionally starred alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in Richard Kelly's cult doomsday classic "Donnie Darko" (2001). Chase plays Samantha Darko, younger sister to Gyllenhaal's titular Donnie. While her role is small stuff comparatively, it would later springboard her into a starring role several years later in the sequel, "S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale" (2009). Collectively, however, Chase's early years were as conventional as they come for most aspiring actors, as taking on bit parts and supporting roles whenever they're available is part of the longstanding Hollywood waiting game.
Animated voice work
"The Ring" certainly helped introduce Daveigh Chase to the live-action world, though perceptive viewers might notice that before her horror role, Chase found plenty of success in animated voice work. In 2001, she voiced protagonist Chihiro in the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki's groundbreaking, Oscar-winning "Spirited Away." To this date, "Spirited Away" remains the only hand-drawn animated feature to receive the honor. "Spirited Away" is arguably Miyazaki's most popular work, and while English dubs from the Studio Ghibli library are hit-or-miss, Chase's Chihiro is an exceptional standout, earnestly affecting and profoundly moving.
Chase cemented her voiceover cred with her role as the titular Lilo in Disney's 2002 hit feature, "Lilo & Stitch." Disney has had a longstanding (and often problematic) relationship with Studio Ghibli, even supervising the dub for "Spirited Away," so Chase's roles in both are no doubt connected. And, much like with the Ghibli classic, Chase's performance in "Lilo & Stitch" grounds the innate humanity of Chris Sanders' and Dean DeBlois' animated classic. Stitch doesn't speak for long stretches of the film, so Chase is largely responsible for cultivating the pathos of found family and acceptance.
The Ring
With a stellar opening scene, contagious cinematography (every horror movie aped "The Ring" for years), and genuine scares, "The Ring" endures two decades out for a reason. If anything, time has been even kinder, elevating "The Ring" to something akin to a modern horror masterpiece. The film is aggressively frightening and oppressive, nihilistic in a way that would inspire most post-millennium horror for a while. A considerably less gruesome riff on French Extremism and the colloquial "torture porn" subgenre to come, "The Ring" has little positive to say. Key to those grim ethos is the progenitor of the video cassette curse, Samara Morgan herself.
Daveigh Chase's Samara comes across at first as a sympathetic and aggressively misunderstood young girl. Glimpsed in expositional archival footage and flashbacks, the early goings suggest Samara was doomed from the start. Her parents isolated her and subjected her to cruel medical care, and her mother, Anna, eventually suffocated her and dropped her body into a well. Only, Samara didn't die. She survived for seven days, hence the curse's trademark timeline. Naomi Watt's investigative journalist Rachel frees Samara in the third act, presuming her to be a victim. Only, this isn't the case. Samara intends to spread her curse, and Rachel's actions cost quasi-boyfriend Noah (Martin Henderson) his life. Chase deserves all the credit for the audience investing in Samara's twisted goals and simultaneous need for sympathy. She's a horror villain who threatens to break hearts as often as she does to mangle them.
Pivot back to voice work
The blockbuster status of Disney's "Lilo & Stitch" translated into the direct-to-video sequel (and series pilot) "Stitch! The Movie." It was fine, faring neither better nor worse than Disney's sundry direct-to-video sequels in the early aughts. It's no "The Lion King 1½," to its credit. Chase reprised her role as Lilo Pelekai in the sequel and the inceptive series, creatively titled "Lilo & Stitch: The Series," 65 episodes of which aired on the Disney Channel from 2003 to 2006. Chase also voiced Lilo for the 2006 television movie "Leroy & Stitch."
Chase remained closely tied to Disney, pivoting into adjacent voice-acting work, voicing Lilo in several video game adaptations of "Lilo & Stitch," and guest-starring on the network's safety patrol comedy "Fillmore!" Chase stayed committed to live-action performing, too, co-starring as titular protagonist Oliver's best friend, Joyce, in the short-lived Howard Gewirtz Fox sitcom "Oliver Beene." The early aughts were remarkably busy for Chase, though soon her younger roles would transition into more daring work.
A role on Big Love
One of Daveigh Chase's most notable roles arrived in 2006 with the premiere of HBO's "Big Love." It might be easy to forget but alongside other HBO juggernauts like "Entourage" and "Sex and the City," "Big Love" was a big deal in the mid-to-late aughts. Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer's drama series followed the late Bill Paxton's Bill Henrickson, the patriarch of a fundamentalist Mormon family, and the trials and tribulations of polygamy in contemporary Utah.
"Big Love" proved considerably more even-handed than it sounds, though Chase playing Rhonda Volmer for the first two seasons (with a recurring role later on) was anything but. She clearly had a field day with Rhonda, bride-to-be for series antagonist Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton). Rhonda, a pathological liar and deeply manipulative, regularly treats those around her as a means to an end. She wants to be a celebrity in New York City, after all. It's a remarkable showcase for Chase. Just 15 when the show premiered, she was more than capable of playing within the big leagues. That league, for reference, featured the likes of Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin. Chase never fell behind for a second.
Back to animation (again)
Daveigh Chase would portray Rhonda in a supporting role through "Big Love's" second season before transitioning into a recurring guest spot as the plot demanded. To fill the time as the decade came to a close, Chase transitioned back into animated voice work for a beat, voicing the lead in PBS' "Betsy's Kindergarten Adventure." Chase played the titular Betsy, a five-year-old having a really hard time getting acclimated to life in Kindergarten. Just wait, Betsy. It's only going to get harder.
The short-lived show aired from January to September 2008, with Chase on board for all 24 episodes. It's a cute show and certainly starkly juxtaposed with Chase's more mature work in "Big Love." While it's difficult to say for certain, Chase seemed more at ease in animated fare, often lending her characters an excess of personality and exuberance with just her voice. A lot has been said about celebrity stunt-casting in animated roles before, but Chase bucks the trend with an earnest commitment to an admittedly difficult craft.
Archival footage and S. Darko
Daveigh Chase's role in "The Ring" carried all the way through 2017. While Kelly Stables would take over in "The Ring 2," a sequel directed by series creator Hideo Nakata himself, and Bonnie Morgan assumed the role in F. Javier Gutiérrez's 2017 quasi-reboot "Rings," archival footage of Chase's original character supplemented the series' ever-growing mythology with precision-cut exposition whenever needed. Chase's high-profile connection with the franchise helped her transition to more mature, leading roles, most notably in Chris Fisher's sequel to cult classic "Donnie Darko," "S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale."
"Donnie Darko" director Richard Kelly may not be a fan of the sequel — he's quoted in an interview with PopMatters as saying, "I've never seen it and I never will" — but it was Chase's first opportunity at not only leading a feature film but also a potential franchise. And while, no, "S. Darko" failed to launch an extended "Donnie Darko" universe, the movie did showcase Chase's newfound on-screen maturity and confidence. Though the movie is more a novelty than anything else, Chase successfully branched out into thematically rich territory while keeping one foot in the animated fare that defined her early career.
Lead roles
Daveigh Chase remained an active performer into the 2010s, though the legacy of her work undoubtedly suffered some. With lead roles in "Killer Crush" and "Wild in Blue" among others, Chase was an active thespian, though not necessarily in projects most people saw. She co-starred in the horror feature "Jack Goes Home," which premiered at the 2016 South By Southwest Film Festival but is not something even horror fans are inclined to remember. The same could be said for both "Killer Crush" and "Wild in Blue." They were small, independent projects, and despite Chase's lead status, they were considerably smaller platforms than films like "The Ring" or even "S. Darko."
While it's common for performers to hit something of a sophomore slump, especially seasoned child actors transitioning into more mature, adult roles, as we'll see below, Chase never necessarily recovered from her slump. While archival footage in the 2017 feature "Rings" would give Chase another theatrical outing, it was peripheral at best.
Daveigh Chase goes ghost
In 2016, Daveigh Chase starred in her last feature film, the serial killer thriller "American Romance," a feature Dann Gire of The Daily Herald called "deathly dull and just plain icky." In fact, Gire's review is the only prominent feature still available online, with Zackary Adler's movie consigned to obscurity despite being less than a decade old. Coincidentally, the decline in Chase's screen presence occurred with a simultaneous disappearance from social media. While her Instagram account remains online, she hasn't posted anything since November 2017. Her Twitter account has been inactive since 2014.
Even her Tumblr, the long-lost relic of angsty millennials everywhere, is conspicuously dated. One of her most recent posts is the poster of 2011 Saoirse Ronan vehicle "Violet and Daisy." Last year, Disney announced plans to remake "Lilo & Stitch" as a live-action feature from "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On" director Dean Fleischer Camp at the helm. Presently, there are no notes on Daveigh Chase returning in any capacity. In April of this year, it was announced that newcomer Maia Kealoha would play Lilo. Unfortunately, "Lilo & Stitch" feels inconsequential compared to Chase's recent troubles.
Legal Troubles
In 2019, The Daily Mail reported that Daveigh Chase had been arrested on misdemeanor charges stemming from a 2018 warrant for drug possession and drug paraphernalia. Chase reportedly spent a night in jail before posting bail. The Daily Mail similarly reported that Chase had been charged with felony driving in November 2017 while additionally getting picked up by the police 10 months prior after leaving a dying man in a car outside a hospital; he was later pronounced dead from a suspected overdose.
Recently, Chase (under her father's last name, Schwallier), was arrested on July 23 of this year. While the case is pending trial on October 31 of this year, the Los Angeles Superior Court has confirmed that Chase's arrest was made in violation of penal code 459 for burglary. It seems unlikely that Chase will return to the screen anytime soon on account of ongoing legal troubles, and the best we can hope for is that she gets well soon. Samara Morgan is a horror icon, and no matter what, Daveigh Chase is responsible for making her terrifying legacy what it is today.