Horror Cruises is a horror suspense film directed by Christopher Smith and starring Melissa George, Liam Haymersworth, and Rachel Cappani. The film tells the story of Jesse, a single mother, and her companions who go to sea to play, where they encounter a strong storm, the yacht overturns, and in a time of crisis, they board a huge cruise ship called "Aeolus", and then Jesse is caught in a cycle of eternal doom.
First, the double loop nested structure
Different from the general single-loop film, in "Horror Cruise Ship", a double-loop nested structure is used, and the two loops overlap and intertext with each other, such as Jesse at home picking up the toy boat that his son overturned, corresponding to the boat that overturned after going to sea; the drum when the car accident occurred, corresponding to the drum on the cruise ship, and the time of the car accident corresponding to the time on the cruise ship... In addition, the director also used a lot of flashbacks and interludes, making the whole story very complicated.
The narrative of the first cycle in the film includes the plot of the heroine Jesse before getting on the ship, that is, Jesse drove his son out to sea, and as a result, he encountered a car accident on the road, in order to make everything start again, Jesse decided to go to sea, but lost his memory in the cabin, and then experienced a storm, after experiencing a series of cruise ship cycles, returning home again, only to encounter a car accident and complete the closure of the cycle.
The second cycle is jesse on the cruise ship, from the time she boards the ship until she is killed and falls into the sea. In the second layer of the loop, the cruise ship loop looped a total of three times, and each time three Jesse appeared, tentatively named ABC. A is a storyline where Jesse, who has just boarded a cruise ship, experiences witnessing his companion being killed by Jesse C, being hunted down and killing Jesse C in a fight. B is Jesse, who witnesses A's experience, and she wants to protect her companion from being killed, but fails to change the ending, resulting in a third cycle.
In the third loop, Jesse B has become Jesse C, and understands the rules of the horror cruise ship, that is, there are two conditions for triggering the cycle, one is that all the companions on the ship are killed and killed, and the other is that Jesse is killed, and only if these two conditions are met at the same time, the cycle will open. These three Jesse, forming a loop chain, together constitute the second loop pattern.
The double loops intersect each other and run alternately with a fixed mechanism, eventually forming a closed ring structure, and the final scene of the car accident leaves Jesse in this endless cycle, giving people a sense of fatalism that cannot be escaped.
Second, the meaning of symbols inside and outside the loop
The multiple appearances of seabirds in the film add to the film's sense of serenity. At first, the water birds appeared on the mural in Room 237, then accidentally killed a seabird on Jesse's way to the appointment, and during the voyage, flocks of seabirds appeared, and the ship was hit by a storm. In the second cycle, Jesse B finds herself trapped in the loop, and she points the body to her companions, but by this time the body has disappeared, leaving only a group of seabirds on the surface of the sea.
At the junction of the first cycle and the second cycle, Jesse C is thrown into the sea by Jesse A, returning to his own home, and repeating the behavior of the first shot of the film, driving a car on the island to kill a seabird, opening into a new cycle, the film waterbird is a scavenger bird, from beginning to end accompanied by Jesse's water bird, each appearance is accompanied by the arrival of bad luck. The large number of dead water birds foreshadows a never-ending cycle of all this.
The name of the ship "Aeolus", which appears every time the cycle is opened, also carries a deep meaning. When Jesse and his party encountered a storm, a cruise ship called "Aeolus" came to them in the backlight, and when they boarded the ship, as they walked through the cloister, they saw a picture of the ship on the wall, and their companions talked: "Aeolus is the wind god of the Wax myth, and he is also the father of Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods to push a large stone to the top of the mountain and then watch it roll down." And the reason he was punished was that he had made a promise to death and had not kept it.
The contextual significance of this context in "Horror Cruise Ship" corresponds to Jesse is Aeolus, the infinite cycle she experiences is punished by the gods, she is in a car accident, the driver (death) asks: "I keep the meter on, you will come back, right?" Jesse replied, "Yes, I must." But after arriving at the docks, in order to save her son, she chose to go to sea, violating her agreement with the god of death, so she has been imprisoned in this cycle, opening up disaster after disaster. This endless cycle of eternal destruction is like the punishment of "Aeolus" in Greek mythology, which constitutes an intertext in the film.
3. Summary
The text of "Horror Cruise" is exquisitely conceived, and the film completes the narrative mode of the cycle with the help of complex narrative modes and multiple symbolic meanings, showing us the tragedy of fate in Jesse's cycle of never ending again and again.