Chen Zifeng
On September 10, 2021, Wen Ziren's new work "Malignant" (literally translated as malignant) was released at the same time on the Chinese iQiyi platform and North American theaters, causing a sensation among horror film fans. There is no big IP guarantee behind this film with a cost of only 40 million, and there is not much early publicity, but it is a microcosm of the process of horror films turning into the mainstream of the big screen and capturing a wider audience in the past two years.
Deadly Induction poster
Horror movies attack the city, but how is the "King of Terror" not terrifying?
If there is a separate history of cinema during the 2020 and 2021 pandemics, horror films must be a very important chapter in it. When the global film industry fell into a downturn due to the epidemic and the consequent economic difficulties, the number of new horror films did not decrease, but increased, and it was not surprising that the scale of the schedule that usually belonged to special effects blockbusters was intercepted. "Invisible Man", "A Quiet Place 2", "The Conjuring 3", "Candy Man", "Psychic Medium", which dominated the list at the same time as "Fatal Induction", and the "Hunger Platform", "Telephone", "Bloody Sky" and "Kingdom" series, which have sprung up on streaming media platforms such as Netflix and have set record clicks, have all gained a super high degree of online discussion while making a big profit.
Some critics have noticed special roles in special period horror films. Industrially speaking, horror films have long been on the track of B-grade films, and are good at using small cost, non-star, fast-paced narratives and contrasting visual language to create "increase the amount without adding price" stimulus. This, while this certainly makes horror films difficult to make, it also means that they are flexible enough to adapt to a sudden shrinking market. While the popular ultra-high-cost special effects blockbusters are afraid of being difficult to return to, horror films can catch up, and even incidentally develop a new market for streaming media, attracting investors to line up and roll into the big snowball of the horror genre.
On the other hand, the popularity of horror movies is not determined by the market alone. At the beginning of 2020, when the world first fell into real fear, the first films that became popular were apocalyptic horrors with contagion as the core element, such as "Flu", "Busan Trip", "Kingdom", "Fatal Visit", and then a wider range of horror genre films. Obviously, as horror culture researchers Noel Carroll and Holly Smith and others have argued, horror movies are to reality, just as cowpox is to smallpox, allowing people to observe, experience, and overcome their fears smoothly in a "safe dose." Doomsday horrors directly project humanity's immediate concerns, whether as a mirror for scrutiny, a code word for criticism, or a simple emotional catharsis, horror films have become a more important, and even groundbreaking, more serious part of mass culture in the special period of human beings.
Against this backdrop, James Wan, a well-known director who had earlier announced that he would no longer be working on horror films, returned with his new film "Fatal Induction". Although the most important thing in 2021 is the horror film, this film can be introduced into the country at the same time, which is still of great significance to film fans. As the father of the Chainsaw Horror series and the Conjuring universe, Wen Ziren continued the tradition of the "horror franchise" of the golden age of horror films in the 1980s, and his name appeared in any position in the film as a "quality guarantee" by fans. Domestic audiences are familiar with the Chinese-American director, but he has been signing a contract with The Chinese entertainment company Starlight Media for six years, and no horror film has been successfully introduced – in fact, due to the lack of a rating system and other reasons, China has basically not introduced horror films in recent years. Although domestic horror films have frequently produced excellent historical works, in recent years, with the withdrawal of head capital, the average level is paraphrased with the encyclopedia words established by fans, that is: no real ghosts, no stories, no production techniques, and no acting skills.
Now, Chinese horror movie fans who have long relied on small video sites have finally waited for a simultaneous movie viewing experience. "Fatal Induction" is priced at 12 yuan on the iQiyi platform, and the VIP price is 6 yuan. At the beginning of the movie, the barrage is full of "you and I have no luck, all rely on 5 yuan". However, at the end of the film, many people said that "it is not worth the 'ticket price'", turned around and gave the movie 2 stars, 3 stars, and asked the soul: "Wen Ziren is not terrible?" ”
This evaluation is very interesting, no less than the film itself. Of course, all horror films will say that it is not scary, just as all romance films will say that it is not touching, not to mention that the audience group is growing, and the threshold for humans infiltrated in the media environment to face stimulation is always getting higher and higher. However, the subtext of this feedback – in fact, it is also the propaganda caliber of the media all along – as the most successful horror film director in contemporary times, the "king of terror" Wen Ziren should be the most terrifying, which is the basis of the "not scary enough" evaluation, and it is also the place of dislocation.
To paraphrase a common saying on the Zhihu platform: first say yes or no, and then say why, this article will next combine Wen Ziren's personal characteristics and the genre characteristics of horror films to show that "more horror" is not the reason why Wen Ziren is more successful, and horror films as a dual reaction of the market and the mentality of the times, "horror" has never been the core essence.
Horror Films: Genres that are born to return to their roots, the market determines the degree of horror
While it is human instinct to snoop on the unknown and taste fear, it is not a matter of "horror" becoming a genre, but a product of commercial logic. It is rumored that when they got the rights to "Fatal Induction", Wen Ziren and his company Atomic Monsters considered reducing the horror intensity of the previous series because the audience reflected that the previous series was too dark. Horror movie lovers certainly won't want to, but Wen Ziren's team wants to capture more than just their hearts. On the contrary, it is the purpose of warm horror to let horror films go out of the niche "cult" circle and obtain the audience spectrum of large films.
When he first entered the film industry, Wen Ziren and his partner Ray Werner joined the Splash Pack, a youth horror fandom society whose common pursuit is to use small costs, so that horror films can both maintain R-rated heavy mouths and regain the glory of the past in the era of 13PG exclusive screens - the glory here refers to the market and the audience. Since then, Wen Ziren has carefully balanced horror and market throughout his career, and his attempts follow the same logic as the entire horror film industry: when he hopes to rely on niche fans to get a guaranteed income, it will be more terrifying; when he hopes to compete with the mainstream market, it will be less terrifying - but in any case, horror films should not really offend the audience, make them lose their sense of security and distance, otherwise no one will invest in the next horror film.
To put it simply and crudely, horror films are a pair of bottoms in the film industry: not very decent, but they can save the vitality of producers, theaters and the lower strata of the entire industry in various crisis moments, and sometimes get the opportunity to "wear underwear".
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the film was just born, people began to use rudimentary special effects to create illusions, and the five-cent nickelodeon (Nickelodeon) in cities around the world showed a ten-minute-long fantasy movie with special effects like Teletubbies and Thomas's Train, providing cheap stimulation for migrant laborers after work. As the Hollywood film industry took shape, the ornate feature film "The Birth of a Nation" crushed Nickelfitting, only to fall into the Great Depression of the 1930s. In order to stimulate civilian consumption and balance the risk of returning blockbusters, Hollywood producers have transformed the previous double bill (2] to bundle two films at a time, A film is grand and elegant, and subject to the strict ethical restrictions of the Hayes Code, the large-scale production, targeting the middle and upper classes, the producers share the box office; B film is limited by the code of ethics, using violence, pornography, horror, song and dance and other ways to keep the audience in the cinema, each with 70,000-80,000 yuan to buy out.
The price determines the upper limit of the cost of B-grade films, and many can only be completed with the background of the remaining background of the blockbuster and the idle personnel. The conditions are rudimentary, but the "life-saving cinema" is really high expectations, and the B-grade film producers have to repeatedly try the right violent/pornographic formula, while adding strange themes and suspense that make the audience attracted to "this one", science fiction, horror, murder, and strange chaos become the best choice. In 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein saved Universal Pictures with gothic vampires and naïve Frankenstein, and in 1933, "King Kong", which was concocted with scraps on the set, revitalized Raiden and officially opened the era of commercial horror films. In the later stages of the economic crisis, B-rated films almost replaced the A-grade position, and the style was more beautiful than the horror, because it took on the responsibility of capturing more audiences, and the audience living in real horror did not want the viewing experience to be too bleak and miserable. Today's film critics see the beautiful tension in Dracula's shoulder pads, but in the depression era horror film directors did not have the privilege of free pursuit of art, we see more of the industrial conditions, audience expectations and the director's intentions of the difficult reconciliation of the product.
Although the influence of dual-film production continued into the 1990s, the real dual-film production disappeared after World War II, and the breaking of boundaries and the impact of television sets into thousands of households led to the B-gradation of mainstream films, or the mainstreaming of some B-rated films. Horror films began to use a master configuration, the camera language was sophisticated and stylized, and the psychoanalytic/psychological horror route was taken. For example, Hitchcock's "Horror", "Flock of Birds", Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby", Romero's "Night of the Living Dead", etc., not only have a high rating, but also bring Oscars to directors and screenwriters.
Hitchcock's "Flock of Birds" poster
Other horror films have gone deep into the B-grade, hoping to use hunting content to pull people from the living room in front of the TV set to the small theater late at night. From the 1950s to the 1960s, small-budget horror films began to target teenagers who were full of curiosity, excess energy, and nightlife needs (post-war baby boomers would create more such teenagers), and before filming, the company would conduct "specific population surveys" to ensure that the film used the handsome and beautiful women that everyone liked to shoot the subjects that young people were interested in; when it was released, it used marketing methods, such as William Cassel, who bought insurance for every audience when he directed "Journey of Horror", and also equipped nurses and hearse at the door David Friedman prepared vomit bags for each audience when his plasma film Feast of Blood was released. Today, marketers often publicize Wen Ziren as the most terrifying "devil director", and Wen Ziren has also set up the premiere of horror films in the cemetery, which is deeply rooted in the true legend of 20th century horror propaganda. In fact, hearse and vomit bags were gimmicks, and even for the audience at the time, these films were not too hot.
However, the niche + midnight mode did allow horror films to move farther and farther away from mainstream fun, becoming more and more terrifying in the inner volume of the Law of Attraction, and peaking in the 1970s-80s. Horror films have produced many sub-genres, taking different horror elements to the extreme, such as the common slash-and-kill film depicting a murderer chasing prey, and using close-up shots to show the big unloading of the living. Wen Ziren's debut "Chainsaw Horror" and his tribute to "Texas Chainsaw Killer" are typical of this kind, and the new work "Fatal Induction" also returns to retro slashing and slashing films from the previous religious horrors of the "Latent" and "Conjuring" series - from the results, this is not what the audience expects of him. "Fatal Induction" also tasted another type of "physical horror" that uses special effects makeup to express human body changes, but the ancient 1979 "Alien" series, 1982's "Strange Shape", 1986's "Fly Changer", etc., although technologically backward, but the styling is much more unrestrained than "Fatal Induction", perhaps because the former's target audience is cult film fans who polish their nerves in the midnight theater every day, and the latter's progress bar on the player has been advanced for half an hour, and the bullet screen suddenly wakes up "Ah is this a horror film?!" ”
In addition, Wen Ziren himself mentioned that the new work pays tribute to the Italian horror film genre "lead yellow film", which includes: surreal red, blue and green cloth light, beautiful women shining in the light, and sparkling iconic murder weapons. Readers who have seen "Windy Wind" will find that the real lead yellow movie is far more crazy than "Fatal Induction", in large part because this kind of film can even be abandoned in theaters, and can survive only on the emerging videotape market. The videotape market has created the most terrifying era of horror films and the cult culture of horror films, and Chinese audiences in the second two decades of the 20th century should also remember the experience of collecting "The Exorcist", "Ghost Street" and "Friday on the Thirteenth" from the videotape or disc market.
The glory days of B-grade films withdrew from the stage with videotapes and discs, and the horror films from the 1990s onwards could only belong to the big screen, to the bright spots, to the spectacle of capital and green screens, and the horror itself, in the words of film critic Karina Wilson, "returned to the shadow where it should have belonged." "The swaggering ghosts are replaced by urban psychological horrors; the family curses and small-town rampages are replaced by the end of all mankind... This does not mean that small audience horror films are better than large audiences, big productions not only improve the artistic standards, the naked sexual exploitation in lead yellow movies, the gimmick of objectifying women has retired from new-age horror films, and the Madison sisters in "Fatal Induction" are more powerful than any female protagonist in lead yellow movies. However, there will still be people like the members of the Spot Pack, nostalgic for the retro horrors of being violent, naïve, and constantly testing the bottom line. With Wen Ziren's reading volume, it is not difficult for him to shoot truly shocking works, but his expectations for the market and the market's expectations for horror films determine that "Chainsaw Horror" is just right, "Dead Silence" is too niche, and the "Conjuring" series is slightly tepid... And the 40 million that is already a lot for horror films and the expectations of investors for the introduction of streaming media mean that the film can only carefully please a wide audience that wants to be frightened, but is not used to being frightened.
Wen Ziren
Defending the Family: Conservative Values and Domesticated Terror
Horror films survive in the big market and large audience groups, not only need moderate horror, but after Žižek's repeated interpretation, today's directors have made it clear that important horror films must reflect the spirit of the times, or the fear of the times. For example, vampire movies contain resentment against the nobility; retro zombie movies project the rejection of labor and immigration; monster movies and alien movies are behind the fear of science, space, and the other side of the Cold War under the Space Cold War; behind the slash and kill series is the middle class's concerns about community security after the popularization of social news, and the attitude of teenagers to the gradually open sexual culture and self-blame... The Wen terror is popular in large part because he chose a motif that has dominated the dominant ideology for decades — the warm and fragile nuclear family.
In the standard Wen horror, not only will the victim always be a family with cute children, but even the exorcist is not the traditional Lin Zhengying-style lone wolf, but has its own family side line, both as their weakness to deepen the contradiction and as their energy source to promote the climax. After watching "Latent", it is difficult for the audience to forget the white-haired psychic medium Elise blowing the whistle in the underworld, and the mother who promised to appear when she heard the whistle in childhood appeared as a soul to help her fight; after watching "Summoning Souls", many viewers said that the exorcist Warren couple combined the love of camaraderie and family affection to turn the horror film into a romance. To paraphrase the popular film screenwriting guide Save the Cat, the horror of the family scene is appealing because it involves the most essential (or contemporaneously) human appeal, allowing the audience to bring themselves in and desperately hope that the protagonist will win.
Wen Ziren is "positive energy", he will always heal the broken family in the end, the dawn comes, and the people who have been taken away by the demons return home safely. In contrast, the contemporaneous "Psychic Medium" continues the homogeneous revenge tradition of Thai horror and the social critical perspective of Korean horror, leaving families to fall apart in mutual harm and then be destroyed one by one in despair. Wen Ziren's works will always have a happy ending, they are more popular on the big screen, and they are less terrifying.
The problem is that too many reunions destroy the aesthetics that form around the unknown in horror films, and also produce aesthetic fatigue. In the process of watching "Fatal Induction", what the author felt as a horror film fan was not the nervousness of holding his breath, but the excessive comfort and security - after the flashback in the pseudo-documentary form, the first shot of the main film pushed closer to a single-family house from a distance, exactly the same as the "Latent" and "Conjuring" series, which means that there is another family that is coveted by danger and does not know it. This family is generally harmonious, but there are also hidden pains and rifts for the devil to take advantage of the void, but the core family of this film is not between the heroine and the boyfriend. Stained glass and the ubiquitous cross-characters bring a religious atmosphere and also hint at the villain's demonic nature – although the first half of the film is deliberately confused with psychological horror in order to create suspense, they have a key difference: the devil is always foreign, and the protagonist does not have to reflect on himself, only bravery and love. The characters ( the protagonist, the villain or the helper ) alternately push the story forward and unveil the truth, and the audience knows that the misunderstanding will be solved and the family will return, so before the end of the movie, the author can "spoilers" And finally there will be a scene of the whole family hugging and crying. It's just that the mother role in this film appeared too late, did not fight side by side with the protagonist's sisters, and the last moment of forgiveness was slightly blunt, which was called "the North American version of the Tangshan earthquake" by netizens.
Self-replication is only part of the problem, if we are more demanding, we can even say that the narrative genre itself is a kind of self-hypnosis: on the one hand, it is constantly confirmed that the family will overcome all difficulties, or all difficulties can be overcome by the family; on the other hand, there is a hidden suspicion of family myths, after all, evil spirits from outside are always possessed by the family to cause harm, then "Did Daddy really beat me because he was possessed by evil spirits?" Further, Wen Ziren's family lives in a detached house without neighbors, which is not a necessity of horror movies, but a manifestation of the "defending the family" discourse in a contemporary context— in conservative and self-centered middle-class family values, the entire collapsed society is surrounded by the wilderness around the house, ready to invade the family. Because of this, in the simple binary opposition between family and demon, the protagonist's social life and work scenes will certainly not be shown, and social factors will be difficult to appear in the film alone. Wen Ziren and his team once tried to use the demonic priest's illegitimate daughter identity to imply the ruthlessness and decay of the Holy See in "The Conjuring 3", and several times in "Fatal Induction", the scientific evil of human experiments in mental hospitals was stopped, but they did not unfold, because in the framework of defending the family and the tone of the reunion, external evil can only appear behind the devil as a general whole.
The positive energy defense of family horror stories is the box office password that Wen Ziren found on the big screen, but the excessive security guarantee makes horror films (no matter what the appearance of ghosts) lose the pleasure mode of "overcoming fear", and also limits the multiple possibilities of narrative development.
Somewhat regrettable but seemingly predestined, Wen Ziren's starting point is to unleash the potential of horror films, but this potential gradually disappears in self-repetition under the dual influence of the market and ideology. He brought R-rated films back to the big screen, but domesticated R-rated films for the big screen, perhaps this is the meaning of the "King of Horrors" theme. However, in the film world that is constantly changing contexts, horror movie fans can still expect that one day horror movies can break through the shackles of innate original sin and acquired nature, and release a hearty experience of tragedy and joy and a charming imagination in the face of the unknown.
exegesis:
[1] With a few exceptions, Puppet Contract and A Quiet Place 2 were introduced because of the PG13 rating and little bloody violence, while the R-rated film The Invisible Man went through an almost one-year window and had a hard time attracting audiences when it was released.
[2] Before the economic downturn, dual-film production was more of a "blind box" of monopoly film: if you want to rent blockbusters, you have to package and buy several other low-budget films that you don't know what they are, and theaters are very dissatisfied with this.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yijia Xu