Text | amber edits | The sixth aunt started | "Watching a Movie: Midnight Field", No. 6, 2016
When I was a child, my hometown TV station loved Hong Kong ghost films.
Often when the TV is turned on, the picture is a variety of female ghosts with their heads scattered or their eyes bleeding, which can be called one of the shadows of childhood.
But when I reach adulthood, when I think of these ghostly words, I feel more and more, where are the ghosts? In the middle of the night, he appeared to look for a student, complained about not repeatedly committing evil, and possessed objects to find opportunities... Ghost things are just unfinished business.
Chat about the encounter
The gift of miss's back garden is a male fantasy that has long been circulated in traditional Chinese culture and appears as frequently as "Cinderella". What Wenjun Sima , Hongyu Mengli , Yingying Zhang Sheng , and Bao Junpinggui basically did not come out of this "talented and beautiful" routine.
A beautiful person must spend a beautiful face, a prominent identity, a family with a wealth, a scholar must be talented, a poor family, and then a high school leader and a large and small dengke, so that he has completed several consecutive jumps in class and has made a steady step.
Therefore, the back garden bonus can be said to be the "success fantasy" of the low-level intellectuals, while the opposite is the sexual fantasy: the wilderness meets the female ghost.
This kind of story is basically a spring dream: a bookish student rushing to the road, staying in a deserted house overnight, in the middle of the night, a beautiful woman comes to knock on the window /knock, complain/flirt, and linger all night. The next day the scholar woke up, or found that the person had gone to the empty building, or was shocked to find himself sleeping in the cemetery.
What remains unchanged is that a few pieces of broken luggage are still there.
And because of the imperial examination system and Chinese cultural traditions, there are very few ways out for low-level intellectuals, and although these two stories are at the bottom of the chain of contempt in traditional Chinese literature, they have a great impact.
In the extremely cold night of many readers, it is played and polished, and the poignancy comes from this - let the characters who have experienced the misery of the world experience a prosperous dream - although they are bitter, they do not prevent them from thinking beautifully.
Representatives such as "Liaozhai Zhiyi", this "Book of Lonely Anger" has a variety of female ghosts, satirizing the world with ghost things, and expressing human feelings with ghost feelings.
Although it is terrifying and strange, there is no lack of gentle love, which is widely spread. Therefore, after Hong Kong films entered the heyday of the popularity of supernatural films in the 1970s and 1980s, this became a major source of themes.
For example, the "Ghost Bride" adapted from "Ghost Wife", the "Ghost Called Spring" adapted from "Painted Skin", and the third story in "Soul Destroying Jade", the third verse of Gui Zhihong's playful and ironic [Ghost Story], and so on.
©️ Top left [Ghost Bride], Bottom left [Ghost Talk], Top Right [Ghost Called Spring], Bottom Right [Soul Destroying Jade]
But these films are too "glamorous" or too "noisy", although there is no shortage of bitter and arduous small characters, but it is not the "poignant" we have to say, only Hu Jinquan's "Legend of the Mountain" and a few others, or can talk about this meaning.
In the film, the poor scholar He Yunqing went to the temple in the mountains to copy the scriptures, but accidentally married Le Niang, the daughter of the local wang mother, and the night was happy, and since then he has lived the life of a god and a fairy. The mother and daughter duo and the surrounding characters are all ghosts, only a white bone is left at the end of the film, and the corpse is half a corpse, and the scholar wakes up to find that he is still in the pavilion where he rested when he went up the mountain.
©️ [Legend of The Mountain]
But Hu Jinquan did not stay in this kind of chat and encounter.
The ghosts in the film are all wartime people before they die, suffering from love and hate, separation, and war, so they cannot be overborn.
In his previous life, Shusheng seemed to be a general, and what he copied in this life was the scripture of the super-degree undead, and this ghost was for the sake of the dust of the past life, and this entanglement also brought the pain of the reincarnation of life and death as described in Buddhism.
The film is filmed with magnificent and lonely mountains and rivers, empty and remote temples, and houses lit up at night, which makes the film add a desolation of red dust and dreams in addition to Zen, which makes people feel infinitely sad.
Ghost affairs
Li Bihua, like Pu Songling, has written many ghost stories, and his works are known as "Urban Chat", but they are different from "The Book of Lonely Anger".
"Pan Jinlian's Previous Life and This Life", "Rouge Buckle", "Overlord Farewell", "Green Snake", "Dumplings", etc., even if they are full of strange feelings and thrills, they still can't hide a penetrating and decisive sadness.
In [Rouge Buckle], the wind and dust woman Ruhua meets the obsessive rich family twelve young, and wants to entrust her life and be good, but the timing is not good, and the two can only be martyred.
©️ [Rouge buckle]
Ruhua, who had become a ghost, could not wait for the twelve less in the mansion, so Shangyang jian came to look for him. This search, Ruhua went away because of the disappointment of the twelve young people, we forgave Ruhua for her sleeping pills murder because she was afraid that "he stole his life, he left me behind", and because Yongding said, "We are ordinary people... Not to get the chance to commit suicide for love" and forgive twelve less.
Emotional bias is at an impasse, and what causes such tragedy is not like a flower or a twelve-year-old, but life, love, our powerless fate and helpless instinct.
Li Bihua made a clear note on this powerlessness and helplessness in the novel:
This is life: even if you do everything in your power, the result is determined by heaven. Some people have not yet stepped down and are exhausted; some people are eager to close, and there is room for excess for no reason. This is love: only among about ten million people, only a pair of beams can be transformed into butterflies. The others are only moths, cockroaches, mosquitoes, flies, scarab beetles... It's just not a butterfly. There is no imaginary beauty. Li Bihua
Therefore, the end of the film is almost bloody, such as the flower put the rouge buckle into the hands of the twelve young people who are already old and stumbling, saying, "I don't wait anymore." Because I know that you are just afraid, so scared that you survive, leaving me dead, so I don't hate you.
Butterflies can't fly in the ocean, I'm just disappointed.
So warm and beautiful, so sad and powerless, [Rouge Buckle] so poignant, no other film of the same kind can be left out.
The 1989 [Pan Jinlian's Previous Life and Present Life] was equally poignant.
The film features Pan Jinlian, who is named "slut" in the male perspective, who refuses to drink Meng Po soup in the underworld, shouts "I want revenge" and reincarnates, becoming Shan Yulian, and once again reluctantly marrying for her livelihood.
When the love is deeply rooted but cannot be loved, it is only when it is understood that the so-called "revenge" is just "please love me".
©️ [Pan Jinlian's Previous And Present Lives]
At the end of the film, the pages of "Jin Ping Mei" are scattered, she holds her dead lover and cries bitterly, and then crashes and explodes, disappearing in the light of the soaring fire.
Although it is slightly inferior in narrative and appeal to [Rouge Buckle], because it is Wang Zuxian who plays Pan Jinlian, this sad and inexplicable face can bring the character into a sense of sadness as long as he looks at the camera, and the coldness of joy and joy and non-hesitation can bring the character into a sense of sadness.
The most obvious manifestation is [Qiannu Ghost], whose personal temperament makes the not-so-sad reincarnation in this comedy become a death parting that hooks people's tears.
©️ [Ghost of a Woman]
And there are Wang Zuxian's ghost films, basically not bad, [Painting skin of the Yin and Yang Dharma King], [Magic Painting Love], [Millennium Banshee], [Flying Over the Yin and Yang Realm], [Painting in the Immortals], etc., no matter the drama comedy farce, as long as there is Wang Zuxian, we must be ready to accept a tragic story.
Under neon lights
Now, the chat of sexual encounters has long been unable to attract the audience.
The original popular nonsense haunting films have also plummeted, and because of the fierce competition for social survival, the indifferent relationship between people, etc., horror films may occasionally have some old-fashioned ghost films, but more to the gray-blue tone of urban alienation.
[Heterogeneous space] can be regarded as one of the representatives.
The protagonists Zhang Xin and Ah Zhan are both marginalized people, the former parents divorced when she was a child, successively immigrated to various groups of families, leaving her in Hong Kong, and the latter was split due to the suicide of his girlfriend.
Although in this Hong Kong, as Ah Zhan said, "so many people, where do the ghosts live", the two are entangled in the shadows of longing ghosts, and in addition to the horror, there is a sense of loneliness in a culturally mixed metropolis.
©️ [Heterogeneous space]
What is more ingenious is that the film intertwines ghosts with mental illness, and what the two see cannot find witnesses other than themselves, regardless of right or wrong, this feeling of "no one believes what I say" is extremely sad and helpless.
Zhang Guorong committed suicide because of depression a year after the film's release, which added to this sadness.
Adapted from Li Bihua's novels, "Fantasy Night" and "Lost Night", although they are short stories, they are not poignant because of the juxtaposition of human feelings and worldly feelings.
The former's "pillow demon" section, like Ji Liaozhai, although it lacks appeal, but Chen Fara's several large-scale shots still have a thin layer of poignancy.
©️ [Li Bihua Ghost Series: Fantasy Night]
As for the "sting" and "black umbrella" sections, although they are short, they are full of hardships and hardships under the gorgeous neon of Hong Kong, which is very Hong Kong.com.
"Black Umbrella" occurs on the night of the fourteenth day of the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar, commonly known as "Zhongyuan Festival", the role of Teddy Robin wants to be a person, but he is harmed by people and becomes a ghost again, burning clothes in front of low houses along the street, gamblers who are beaten by gangsters, and "Beigu" who wants to be a chicken and not a man, all of which cover up the local atmosphere under the "internationalization" of Hong Kong.
In "Sting", the godmother played by Shao Yinyin set up a stall to beat the villain, called the Gooseneck Bridge, which is one of the famous folk attractions in Hong Kong, and usually there are old women who set up stalls to beat the villain, and the most before and after the sting of this festival.
The setting of the characters who come to fight the villain in the film is very interesting.
A noblewoman, fluent in English, but full of paternalism, treats her daughter-in-law as an enemy who snatches her son; a big brother with a golden chain, who is hindered in her superior position, shyly answers and answers grievances to beat the villain;
The last one was a female ghost, who wanted to take revenge on the three men and one woman who had raped and killed her, and one of the men was the son of the godmother.
Although the godmother's inability to save the female ghost and her connivance with her son's evil deeds are infuriating, the anxiety of the son in the end, and the begging of wanting to exchange his life for a life when he is pressed under the car, cannot but be moved.
©️ [Li Bihua Ghost Series: Lost night]
These two stories are not high in the degree of fright, but the hardships of life shown in them are lamentable.
Although there are also such settings in ghost films in the 70s and 80s, such as the pulling car brother in [Soul Destroying Jade], from today's point of view, the heartache contained under the prosperity is poignant.
[Zombies] in 2013 is one of the few ghost movies in recent years.
The overall tone of the film is gray and dark, and the ghosts that occasionally appear are strange and strange, and the opening qian Xiaohao looks up at the building that covers the sky, which is almost the epitome of the living environment of the low-level people in Hong Kong, and the life and death in the building are even more sad and gloomy under this stylized lens.
©️ [Zombie]
Man has eight sufferings, and he is the most bitter.
Qian Xiaohao's identity as a former Hong Kong star reminds people of the decline of Hong Kong films, which adds practical significance to the obsessive characters in the film.
And Zhang Jiahui's [Menglan Shengong] and [Tuodi Exorcist], the former is bad in the story, the latter is ruined at the end, although some passages can also be seen in the poignant approach to the old Hong Kong-style ghost film, but the poignant and incitement, glamorous and vulgar is an extremely difficult degree to grasp.
Today's Hong Kong films can maintain very few people.