In 2018, the divine drama "Ghost Invasion" turned out.
With its super high quality, it has been passed on by word of mouth in the fan circle, attracting a group of audiences who have come to visit. 150,000 people on IMDB scored, 50,000 people on Douban scored, and finally fixed at 8.7 points. Since the announcement of the second season renewal, 200,000 people have been waiting for its sequel.
A few days ago, Netflix released the full episode of the second season of "Ghost Manor" at one time. However, the word of mouth is not satisfactory, and this golden sign on the altar has also been smashed?
01
The plot of the two seasons is not related, and "Ghost Manor" is a separate story.
In 1987, in London, England, the American girl Dani first arrived and stayed in a small hotel. She enlisted as a governess at the Wengrave family.
She was hired by Henry Wengrave, who lived in the city, and his brother and sister-in-law died unexpectedly, leaving his nephews and nieces living in the country manor of Bly. Henry Wengrave was a negligent uncle who could give the siblings only money and no companionship.
Dani's job responsibilities are: to work as a tutor and nanny for the siblings. She moved into The Manor of Bly, where she met a troubled housekeeper, a gentle and amiable cook, an eccentric gardener, and a pair of intelligent and precocious siblings.
Isolated manors, picturesque scenery, a good and relaxed life, everything looks beautiful. However, the sensitive Dani still sniffed out the mystery.
The brothers and sisters often spoke distractedly into the air, playing with each other to compliment Dani's questioning. They are modest and well-behaved in most cases, but occasionally they reveal a cold and strange side.
In her sister's bedroom were models of Bly manor and dolls sewn in their human form. She didn't let Dany sort out the dolls, stubbornly placing them in a fixed position. But Dani found that the dolls seemed to have long legs, often scattered in different corners of the manor.
My brother used to live in boarding school and was later expelled for behaving misbehavingly. He seemed much calmer than his sister, often comforting the out-of-control Dani. Just handing out hair combs, sending flowers, and plucking hair, these ambiguous and sophisticated behaviors are too different from the actions of a 10-year-old boy.
Except for that, day after day, there are footprints with mud, calls from no one speaking, and erratic "figures" in the manor. But everyone except Dany was at ease and used to it.
The oppressive atmosphere pushes Dani to the brink of loss of control, and she tries to find the long-hidden dark secrets of this chilling manor.
02 Old-fashioned. triteness. bland.
This is the intuitive feeling given by the opening episodes of "Ghost Manor".
The pace of the plot's development is so slow that it almost freezes, and the occasional jump scare (sudden fright) also reduces the quality.
If you look forward to "Ghost Invasion", you will inevitably be disappointed. After all, the two works are like clouds of mud. Unfortunately, most viewers are loyal fans of "Ghost Invasion", which also exacerbates the psychological gap.
When we review the plot routine of "Ghost Invasion", we will find that two years later, the director is still in place. Ghost Manor is like a failed replica.
Ghost Invasion is good because of its clever weaving of horror and warmth.
The five siblings live in their own orbits and no longer have any contact with their father. But the death of the little sister at Hill Manor reunited them. They have to face the fears of childhood and the dangers of adulthood and return to their long-abandoned former homes to find out the truth.
The story begins with a terrifying and cold tone, full of suspense and mystery. The shadow of the past hangs over the brothers and sisters, so that they will never forget the Hill Manor.
Watching episode by episode, like peeling an onion, the audience will be amazed by the two-line narrative of childhood/adulthood, and the mystery is constantly solved, giving people a sudden and enlightened look.
No one will forget the sudden blow at the end of episode 5: the crooked-necked female ghost that Little Sister constantly saw in her childhood was actually the ghost she transformed into after she died hanging. A creepy shot that shatters all the distortions of time and space.
Of course, how scary the front is, how good it is to cry in the back. At the end of "Ghost Invasion", it returns to the warm and touching family line. It can be seen from this that it is not limited to the obvious ambition of telling ghost stories.
Speaking of "Ghost Manor", it actually wants to replicate the success of "Ghost Invasion" in every way, but each one is a dimensional reduction in completion.
The setting of the two works is simply copy-and-paste: not only are there ghosts in the manor, but there are many ghosts of different eras, and they cannot get out of the boundary. But the short-lived ghost in "Ghost Manor" makes it lose completely in the horror atmosphere.
The previous work is about family affection, and the sequel is about love. Perhaps in line with the trend of LGBT dramas, the highlight love line of "Ghost Manor" belongs to Dany and the Gardener. However, the plot twist is abrupt, the two actresses have limited acting skills, and they have performed the feeling of "straight women dressed as Ji".
Since it is impossible for the audience to feel the sincere love, then the last episode of snuggling and seeking each other will not produce the desired effect. Finally, I have to borrow lines to repeatedly emphasize, "This is not a ghost story, but a love story."
The most amazing time and space transformation in the previous work, "Ghost Manor" is still trembling and insisting, but it is no longer natural and smooth.
The editing technique is fine, still using the same object to constantly transition; the multi-line narrative is very problematic, lacking the explicit childhood/adult time and space in the previous game.
"Ghost Manor" allows the soul to travel through different scenes, but it not only gives people a sense of chaos, but also makes people wonder whether the director is only this trick.
03
Ghost Manor is based on Henry James's novel Screws Tightening.
The work was published in 1898 and is set in the Victorian era. The title describes the tense atmosphere of the story, like a screw that is constantly tightened, until the last minute to reach its climax.
The novel begins with an elaborate introduction: in the night talk of the hearth, a certain gentleman tells a ghost story for everyone. He claimed the story came from a manuscript of his sister's governess. From his flickering words, everyone speculated that they had a sister-brother relationship.
The main text of the novel is all about a female teacher: she came to the manor to teach his nieces and nephews out of admiration for her employer. The ghost of the previous tutor and employer's assistant floats around the manor and is close to the siblings. She made every effort, just to keep her children from being taken away by ghosts.
After the release of Screws Tightened, It was translated into 15 languages and sold well in more than 30 countries. The biggest charm of the novel is the ambiguity and ambiguity brought by the text.
Is there a ghost or no ghost in the manor? Are female teachers sacrificial redeemers, or are they imaginary sufferers of sexual repression? Are the siblings precocious by nature, or are they ghost-possessed? Is the gentleman who tells the story the brother in the story?
For more than a hundred years, these issues have been debated endlessly, and there are many related works. Therefore, the film and television adaptations of "Screws Are Tightening" are facing a thorny problem: how to change it? Which explanation do you believe?
A relatively well-known adaptation is the 1961 film The Innocent Man. Director Jack Clayton is adept at literary adaptations, better known as The Great Gatsby (1974).
"Innocent People" can be said to grasp the essence of the original work, and authentically create the suppressed love and desire in the Gothic Castle. The neurotic female teacher is played by Deborah Kouer, and the precocious boy is played by Martin Stephens, who starred in "The Magic Boy Village". This is more apt, he has a smart and evil face.
In the 2009 film "Bilu Wronged", Michelle Dockery was invited to take the lead. "Big Miss" performed mediocrely and completely lost her ease in "Downton Abbey". Of course, this time the adaptation is also very mediocre.
This year, before the "Ghost Manor" aired, there were already two versions of the film adaptation. New Zealand's "Screws are Tightening" changed the story of female teachers into a play-in-play; Britain's "Screws are Tightening" is a decent bad film, with only 4.5 points in Douban.
Until Zhu Yu's "Ghost Manor" in front, "Screws Are Tightening" still did not escape the spell of "more and more rotten".
It can be seen that the director and screenwriter of "Ghost Manor" drastically cut off the important plot and expanded the extension of the story as much as possible, but the results are still unsatisfactory.
The Ghost Invasion series could have been made into a long-lived series like "American Horror Story", but after the reputation of "Ghost Manor" fell, the prospect of the third season of the series was marked with a huge question mark.