In the early 2000s, American cinema had a brief love affair with J-Horror, or horror films created in Japan. The biggest of these was 2002's The Ring, starring Naomi Watts as a mother trying to protect her son from a curse. This film was based on a 1998 Japanese film, Ringu, which in turn was based on a 1991 novel of the same name by Japanese author Koji Suzuki. The Ring wasn't Suzuki's only brush with Hollywood, though.
Another of Suzuki's stories was made into an American film called Dark Water and was released in 2005. Starring Jennifer Connelly, the film shares some eerie similarities to Elisa Lam's case, according to Watson Street Pictures.
In Dark Water, a woman and her daughter move into a new apartment complex only to find that the building seems to be haunted, with numerous problems cropping up, including the building's water, which is a murky color and has problems with its pressure, and the elevator in the apartments, which behaves oddly. Spoilers ahead, but before long, the two find out the dark truth — a young girl died in the building's rooftop water tank, and it's her decaying corpse (as well as her ghost) causing the numerous issues in the apartments. It's unknown if Elisa Lam ever saw this movie, but the similarities seem to be a coincidence.
