Halloween is approaching, and major TELEVISION stations in the United States have presented their halloween gifts - Hulu's "Into the Darkness" on January 1, "Floating Party" with nearly three million readers, and "Strange Talks about Asia" by HBO Asia Channel gathering directors from 6 countries...
However, there is no harm in not contrasting.
Compared with the mad Netflix, the first few are really only small meanings.
This horror thriller drama that still released a whole season (ten episodes) at a time, cut all opponents off the horse as soon as the sword was lit, almost killed the same period of horror dramas in seconds, and enjoyed the first -
Ghost invasion
<h1 class="ql-align-center">The Haunting of Hill House</h1>
We all know that Douban is not cold to horror movies (dramas), so look at its Douban score -
As the number of viewers increased, the ratings rose instead of falling, and eventually stabilized at an outrageous height...
Rotten Tomatoes has a freshness rating of 93%, IMBD has over 40,000 reviews, and a score of 9.0.
It is no exaggeration to say that I have not seen such a highly rated horror drama in so many years.
The famous film review website "Roger Ebert Network" commented ——
Ghost Invasion captures some of the most memorable horror scenes in recent years in film or television.
Douban netizens are not to mention more let -
Veteran horror movie lovers are going to cry!!
The Episode of Ghost Invasion is based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Evil House, which has also been called one of the most literary "ghost" stories of the 20th century and was nominated for the National Book Award.
Shirley Jackson you may not know who it is, but he has a super little fan you are certainly no stranger to - Stephen King (The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, Joker Returns Souls, Phantom Menace, Mist...). ）
——
Shirley Jackson & Stephen King
Stephen King was particularly fond of Ghost Invasion (originally known as The Evil House) and confessed that —
For me, The Evil House and Henry James's Screws Are Tightening are the only two great supernatural novels of the last hundred years.
In terms of individual works, no novel has had a greater impact on Stephen King's creation than "The Evil House".
And the visualization of "After the Evil House" ("Ghost Invasion") is even more frightening than the novel.
This horror story is based on a more complex story.
The Koryan family lives in the Hill mansion.
This is a murderous house, the old owner Hill's family all died in the house 80 years ago, some people hanged and broke their necks, some people sealed themselves in the mezzanine, some people hit the wall and self-harmed themselves, and so on.
In short, it has the attributes that all horror movies have—big, empty, broken, old, and evil.
But for the Kryns, this is a treasure trove of feng shui, because they are the kind of people that today's house slaves hate the most - speculators.
Wives are designers and husbands are masons who buy dilapidated old homes at low prices, then redesign and renovate them and sell them at a high price.
This old Hill house is the old house they bought.
The Coren family has five sons and daughters, and they live in the old mansion until the house is sold, and the house is a bit strange, and strange things often happen.
There are no people in the surrounding area for several kilometers, dogs can always be heard barking at night during the day but never seen a dog, and there are always inexplicable sounds in the room...
There is a red door in the attic on the roof, and there is obviously movement in it, but it can't be opened.
Late one night, the father woke up the children one by one from the dream and fled the house, and the whole family invariably called the night "the last night".
In the panic and fleeing, the mother did not come out, and pretended to be the boss with closed eyes, and saw the "people" chasing them——
This part is just the foreshadowing of the whole series. And then the story line is clearly divided into two: now, then. Now it's divided into three story lines: now, two years ago, and six years ago.
Doesn't that sound messy?
It doesn't matter, the director used a very clever little trick to solve the problem of the thin timeline and the changing perspective of the characters in "Ghost Invasion".
Through it, it can not only complete the fusion of the story and characters in the two timelines, so that the audience knows very clearly who this happened to, but also adds the mystery of the general cross-narrative of "Inception" to the series.
For example —
Now the eldest sister Shirley in the timeline patches the makeup of the dead Nell, and the lens of everything is connected with the picture of her makeup for Nell in the past,
Now Dad pushes the door, but the door opens and comes to the past Hill Hill Villa.
The current second sister Shelly pushed open the refrigerator door to get the milk, and took the picture connected to the past second sister feeding the kitten with milk.
Steven, who was in a car with his father, and Steven, who is now driving, are cut together again.
The continuous switching makes the past and present in the play, the dream and the reality constantly overlap, intersecting in the audience's brain circuit, and the horror effect is infinitely magnified in the virtual and real, true and false.
On the two timelines, different horror stories occur on the same five brothers and sisters.
The first is now.
One night, the youngest sister, Nelly, committed suicide.
At the moment of suicide, the four living brothers and sisters felt a tightness in their necks at the same time——
Because of their childhood encounters, the five brothers and sisters seemed to have some kind of synaesthesia in "Super Sense Hunting", and on the night of the little sister's suicide, they invariably saw ghosts.
There are really ghosts.
The eldest brother, Steven, is a novelist who made his fortune by writing horror novels about his family's childhood encounters, but he himself never believed in ghosts, even if he had seen them with his own eyes as a child.
However, that night, when he had just answered the phone call from his father informing him of his little sister's death, he looked back and saw a crying Nelly-
The second sister, Shelly, because she saw her mother at her mother's funeral, became a mortician.
The night Nelly committed suicide, she happened to be having a nightmare and saw her ghostly father—
The third sister, Theo, doctor of psychology.
Her daily routine is to enlighten psychopaths who claim to be able to see ghosts.
Recently, just in the psychological case of a little girl and her own ghost father, the night Nelly committed suicide, when she was quietly pulled down by something, she sat up and saw the dirty things described by the little girl-
The younger brother, Luke, is twin with Nelly. From an early age he could see ghosts, a big man in a top hat, wandering the hallways of his house.
In order to escape this fear, Luke falls into drug addiction and can't extricate himself, because he finds that as long as he gets up, he can't see ghosts...
Until the night of Nelly's suicide, the ghost gentleman in the top hat appeared behind him again.
And the little sister Nelly is the first person to see the ghost.
When she first moved to the house, she saw a "crooked neck lady", which is what we commonly call "hanging ghost".
When Nelly grew up, she still couldn't get rid of this ghost, and there was always a ghost press, until she met a senior sleeper, who cured Nelly and married her.
Soon, Nelly fell ill again, and her husband was curing her when her neck was crooked and died.
A psychiatrist who didn't know much about the situation suggested that she return to the cottage and face her fears.
Years later, When Nelly returns to Hill Hill, did she commit suicide or was she killed by something in the villa?
Leave it to you to see for yourself.
Back in that year, it turned out that when the five brothers and sisters were young, they each experienced extremely strange things.
The encounters of the eldest brother Steven and the younger sister Nelly have been mentioned and will not be repeated.
The second sister Shelly is actually not much better.
When he was a child, he had a litter of kittens, took good care of them, and fed them every day. As a result, the next morning, a kitten died.
Shelly buried the kitten accompanied by her parents when she noticed that its mouth was moving.
Her parents thought she was overly sad, and as a result, a strange beetle ran out of the mouth of the dead kitten.
When she grew up to make up for Nelly, Nelly's mouth was also moving, and a beetle that ran out of the same way.
Could it be that this beetle has a story too?
The next day, a litter of kittens all died. When she finally found a gossamer creature in a pile of dead cats, the cat turned into this-
The third sister Theo has had some kind of superpower since childhood, perception. When she touches something, she can feel the truth behind it, she touches people, she can perceive people's real thoughts.
When she was a child, she touched a wooden box and saved a bottle of 49 years of rare wine for her father.
When the children of the family claimed to have met ghosts, she touched the palms of everyone's hands and was convinced that they were not made up.
Little brother Luke, the second hellish child.
He saw the "long-legged top hat gentleman", the flesh that he saw in the mezzanine that had bitten his skeleton.
At the same time, the gentleman had always just floated in the air, his feet off the ground, completely ignoring the function of his skate shoes.
The childhood encounters of the five children and the fearful memories of the five adults are tightly tied together through the suicide of the little sister, and the gradually blurred virtual and real boundaries, as well as the gradually clear strange reasons, have just begun to be staged one by one in the real life of the four brothers and sisters.
The horror memes of "Ghost Invasion" are extremely dense, spread throughout the play, and almost every shot may appear to be a horror bridge, comparable to the funny lines in "The Big Bang Theory".
Moreover, the horror in the play is obviously graded, and it is possible that you at the higher level did not find out at all, because you have been scared and crying at the lower level!
unbelief? Look at the first level, which is also the most common method of scariness.
It holds firmly on your mental expectations, and it does not favor ghosts when you self-righteously believe that there will be ghosts.
Then the camera will be chaotic, or dark, so that you can't feel the situation and can't tell when the ghost will appear.
Suddenly, the camera stops, or the eyes light up, close the door and let the ghost go, and the slot !!!
Sleeper !!!
The second level, the details of Mimi are terrifying.
You don't anticipate what's going to happen in the camera, maybe the tight nerves don't find anything,
But if you find out, this horror won't send you an adrenaline rush, but it will leave you with sequelae.
For example, two children just finished discussing the door and there was nothing, but found out -
(Look closely at the light and shadow under the door)
For example, the little sister is sleeping soundly, and the one who appears behind her -
The third level, knowing that the ghost is coming, but still having to watch the terrible things happen, deteriorate, unstoppable...
Looking at this kind of shot, the feeling of powerlessness runs through the whole body, as if he is pressed by a ghost, and his hand cannot be stopped on the fast-forward button.
Look at this --
Look at this again -
The horror shots in "Ghost Invasion" do not use rotten stems, and after watching ten episodes, you will find that the scary shots are never repeated.
There is also an Easter egg link, perhaps a gift from the director, which can only be said that the creators are very careful, and they openly state that "there are 8 to 10 grimaces hidden in each episode".
This means that if you are careful, you can also play a "everyone comes to find a ghost" -
As a gift, here's a little game, find out where the ghost in this still is, remember, zoom in and look closely, don't look behind you!
"Ghost Invasion" is not only a superior drama in terms of horror atmosphere creation, but also does not lose in terms of photography skills.
A long mirror, the contradictory core of the brothers and sisters is exposed to the audience's vision,
It is also a long mirror, and the core of the whole drama is about to come out.
This long mirror is The Death of Nelly, a rope hanging, connecting Nelly's infancy and adulthood, nightmare and reality, survival and death, which can be called the pen of the whole drama.
Similarly, Nelly's death was not accidental, but it was already doomed.
At the beginning of the play, the mother meets the future of the two youngest children in a hallucination -
Nelly had told her parents more than once the truth about "Lady Crooked Neck", but their parents never believed her.
Even if she yells, her parents turn a blind eye,
In horror films, there are often parents who do not believe in their children.
In the past, we always thought that this was the screenwriter's gold finger, but now we feel more and more confused by the original family.
Adults always look at children with their own worldly eyes, and the neglect and harm in the name of love have become the mental trauma of their lives.
When Nelly went to the cottage alone, she hallucinated and saw that her family was here.
But in fact, in the empty villa, she was the only one dancing alone like a madman.
Growing up, this was Nelly's inner world.
When a rope ends her life, when everything flashes back in front of her eyes, when she knows that the "crooked neck lady" who has plagued her since childhood is actually herself,
Would you like to say a word to your parents —
It's ugly when you pretend to be kind and comfort me.
(Rotten Tomatoes Editorial Board: Yang Yang)