She informs Rachel that she found her daughter's distorted corpse in the closet and that her official cause of death was a heart attack, despite Katie being a healthy teenager.

Rachel researches the lighthouse from the tape and discovers that it was located in Moesko Island, the home of an ill-fated horse breeder named Anna Morgan, who appeared on the cursed videotape.

After investigating, Rachel discovers Anna had an adopted daughter named Samara, who possessed the power to burn disturbing images into the minds of people, animals and objects.

Rachel meets Anna's widower Richard, but he makes her leave when she begins to ask questions about Samara.

She then speaks to the island's physician, Dr. Grasnik, who explains that Anna experienced horrible visions and dreams after Samara began burning gruesome images into her mind.

Noah arrives and they discover an image of the same tree found in both Shelter Mountain Inn and the cursed videotape beneath the wallpaper in the attic of a horse barn, where Samara was kept to prevent her from inflicting harm onto others.

Rachel accidentally falls into the well, where she receives a vision revealing that Anna suffocated Samara with a plastic bag and throwing her into the well, where she survived for seven days.

Samara's malignant spirit emerges from Noah's TV and kills him, with Rachel arriving too late to save him.

Rachel learns of a local teen's death and begins investigating; from the horrified expression on the boy's face, she deduces that Samara is involved.

Upon awakening, Rachel drugs Samara with sleeping pills and places her in the bath to temporarily drown Aidan in order to exorcise her.

[5] Following the success of the 2002 film, Naomi Watts revealed that she was contractually obligated to star in The Ring Two, stating that she "didn't have the power of choice" but said that she did not have any second thoughts about reprising her role as Rachel stating that her character "had a lot more substance and it was about confronting the situation, the psychological aspects to it, and moral dilemmas, which I think have come up again in the sequel.

That process allows her to become Rachel in this movie and go to some darker areas that I think a lot of actors wouldn't feel comfortable doing".

[8] In Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage, S. Short discusses the distinctiveness of the character noting that "the woman responsible for investigating the murder mystery at the heart of The Ring is not led by visions or intuition, but by her instincts as a journalist working for the Seattle Correspondent".

[9] In Heroes of Film, Comics and American Culture: Essays on Real and Fictional Defenders of Home, Lisa M. DeTora states: Leigh Kolb from IndieWire notes that the "ambiguous ending suggests that Rachel may indeed save her son, but will have to harm another to do so.

[13] In a post for AMC, Stacie Ponder wrote: "One of the things I like about Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) in Gore Verbinski's The Ring is that she wasn't the best mom in the world.