Man terrifies girlfriend with puppet prank inspired by The Ring

There’s pranks. There’re movies. And then there’s this: the most horrific movie prank ever.

A video capturing the moment a boyfriend woke his sleeping girlfriend with a scream-inducing reconstruction of the terrifying TV-crawling scene from ‘The Ring’ has gone viral - racking up the hits and damaging the ear-drums.

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The prank’s perpetrator, James Williams, spent weeks designing and making a convincing replica puppet, based on infamously otherworldly Samara from 2002 horror ‘The Ring’ – a remake of the cult Japanese movie ‘Ringu’.

In the movie about a cursed videotape, the ghostly Samara would crawl out of the TV screen to literally terrify any unsuspecting couch-sleepers to death. Judging by the screams, James is lucky he didn’t do just that to his girlfriend.

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An aspiring artist, James constructed the real-life video nasty out of rubber gloves, balloons, old clothes, a coat hanger and some paint. 

Speaking to Yahoo! News, he said: "I get random thoughts in my head sometimes and thought I'd try this prank out."

"My girlfriend knows I'm a bit of a practical joker, but I was quite shocked by her reaction. I thought she would realise what it was after a few seconds - that it was just me messing around.

"When she was screaming for several seconds I started thinking after a while, "How long should I do this for?"

In a stroke of genius (or malice?) James even prefaced his prank by telling his girlfriend that he thought he “saw a woman standing at the end of our bed in the middle of the night”. He insists, however, that she has since forgiven him:

"I love her to bits though, and I'm so happy she puts up with me," he said.

"I took her out the next night to make up for it, and she said she was a bit shaken up by it. I honestly didn't expect her to react like that though.'

Brilliant. Or just brave? We’re not sure…