She is the vengeful ghost of a young mass murderer and her character is based on Sadako Yamamura, who shares a similar backstory. She also popularized the "string-haired ghost girl" horror trope in Western cinema although the trope has long existed in Japanese culture. Samara was born on the same year Sadako was thrown into the well. She is significantly less sympathetic than Sadako despite both villainesses sharing tragic backstories. Unlike Sadako, Samara took pleasure in some of the killings she did whilst she was alive. Another theory about how Samara kills her victims is that she mentally projects all of the images from the cursed videotape into the victim's mind all at once, causing an intense mental overload which literally causes them to internally explode, leaving their external body seemingly rotten and "dried" out as a result of the overload. This is why the victims receive a heart attack before dying, their mouths are horribly disfigured despite no sign of physical attack and a series of screenshots from the cursed videotape briefly flash moments before he/she dies.