Edit: Marker
A horror film actually sparked a foreign dancing craze?
Just when domestic netizens were still frantically teasing ChatGPT, foreign netizens were already agitated because of a terrorist robot.
The thriller "Megan", produced by Wen Ziren, has occupied Europe and the United States, and at the premiere, dancers dressed as "Megan" danced the film's signature dance.
Fans on the Internet started a robot dance parody show, as well as dancing and flipping their heads.
There is an old brother who is directly dressed up, and his posture is quite wonderful.
However, the evaluation of the film "Meghan" by Chinese and American netizens is very different.
Douban netizens generally evaluated
IMBD felt that this was a comedy dressed in a "horror cloak"
"Meghan" is confirmed to be released in mainland theaters on March 17, how to say?
Chinese netizens want to see horror, but American netizens just want to have fun.
Many people say that the core of comedy is tragedy, and the logic is to base funny on the ugliness of others.
Then the routine of horror films is often a lost process. At the beginning of many horror films, everything is so calm, and there is often a "more positive" small climax.
For example, in "Ghost Record", the couple moves to a new house and starts a new family life, and they excitedly set up a camera to track and film the two of them.
Another example is in "Don't Stop the Camera", a film crew runs to an abandoned factory in the suburbs to shoot a crude and simple zombie film. Like many young people with movie dreams, rudimentary equipment can't extinguish their love for zombies.
The movie "Meghan" is also this routine. The story begins with the fragmentation and reorganization of an ordinary family. If it weren't for Wen Ziren's name reminder, I would even have thought I was watching a movie that healed my soul.
Katie, an 8-year-old girl, lost her parents in a car accident. Her aunt Gemma became her guardian. Gemma is a roboticist at a toy company that develops smart dolls.
For Gemma, Katie is a problem, and Gemma, who is so focused on her career, has no time to take care of her niece. However, if she does not have a good relationship with her niece, she may lose custody.
Eventually, she came up with a way to get the best of both worlds. Use her newly developed less mature intelligent robot Megan to accompany Katie. Megan can accompany Katie in every way, and Katie can teach Meghan to "be human".
The aunt may not have imagined that the family relationship composed of robots is indeed unbreakable.
Meghan gradually developed a sense of self, seeing anyone who might cause harm to Katie as a potential threat.
When Katie accidentally bites her hand by a neighbor's dog, Megan secretly kills the dog at night and hides the body. In the face of the neighbor's unforgiveness, Megan simply killed the neighbor.
In the process, Meghan's sense of self-protection has also been increasing. When bully boy Brandon takes Megan into the woods to plot against him, Megan grabs Brandon's ears on the spot and finally forces him to roll onto the road and be hit by a car.
And when Gemma realizes Megan's changes and tries to shut her down, Meghan has long exceeded her comprehension, and Gemma finally plays with fire and sets herself on fire.
The movie does not have a high rating on Douban. Many netizens thought that Meghan's behavior was illogical.
What netizens want may belong to the logic of artificial intelligence, like the three laws of robotics proposed by Asimov, even if artificial intelligence gains self-awareness, it should be based on the principle of not harming humans, at least struggle before starting to kill.
But this is precisely the logic of horror films, artificial intelligence out of control, violent walk to start killing and killing, is from the climax of the warm film to the climax of the runaway.
Until Megan, who was finally turned into a thousand feet by her aunt with a chainsaw, shouted "you ungrateful little bitch", Megan was completely "alive".
Some netizens said that "Megan" is somewhat suspected of hanging a sheep's head and selling dog meat, the front is full of gimmicks, the back should be bloody and not bloody, and it must be scary and not scary.
This is the cleverness of the film side, which controls the scale at PG-13, that is, children over 13 years old can watch it, and at the same time can be introduced into China.
The film sacrifices the horror effect in exchange for the opportunity to be released on a large scale. In the end, the film received a global box office of $125.4 million at a low cost of $12 million.
And the film party that made a lot of money directly left the button at the end, there must be a sequel.
Seeing the name of producer Wen Ziren, we all thought we would see a horror movie, but this film can only be regarded as a thriller. If you remove this little bit of thriller elements, you will look at it, isn't this "Growing Pains"?
For European and American audiences, some routines have been tried and tested, such as the fear of artificial intelligence, such as the love of family.
Especially the latter, as long as who shouts "logging tired" in the movie, the audience immediately bursts into tears.
Isn't this "innovation" to give it such a mixture of these two routines?
So this film is a family ethics film in its bones, and the three "women" in the film grow up in catching horses and killing in growth.
In the face of the sudden arrival of her niece, Gemma, who has no childcare experience and is busy with work, has no choice, in order to be lazy, she asks a test robot doll to accompany Katie.
So, in the end, it's a plot line of "I love you more than she loves you".
Having lost her parents, Katie suddenly arrives in an unfamiliar environment and is overwhelmed by her estranged aunt. And Megan's arrival fills in the emotional void in her. This made Katie feel a strong dependence on Meghan.
But as Gemma gradually realized Katie's inseparable attachment to Megan and what Megan did, she decided to end Meghan's company. This is the growth of Gema.
And Megan, in her dealings with humans, has learned the pattern of human behavior - if you can't solve the trouble, then solve the troublemaker. This is also a different kind of "growth", right?
When Megan chases Gemma, Katie withstands Meghan's emotional offensive and single-handedly manipulates the robot "Bruce" to tear Megan in half, which is Katie's growth. That scene is comparable to the end of Cameron's "Alien 2".
So in this film dressed as a horror film, the director is actually discussing education with us. He used a killer artificial intelligence to warn us not to let children play on their phones for more than 30 minutes.
As a result, a horror movie involving AI, robot dancing, education, child companionship, family affection, and "logging tired" that European and American audiences are happy to see was completed.
If at the beginning "Meghan" only wanted to catch the audience's attention with blood and horror, it would really become a work of defense.
According to the previous way of making gimmicks at a small cost, "Meghan" opened a new era of horror films with a cost of more than 12 million.
The total box office on IMBD, $170 million
The original horror film genre, natural selection, through strong visual and auditory stimulation, triggered the audience nausea, fear, creepy and other negative emotions. Sensory stimulation is the most basic underlying logic of horror films.
For example, Peter Jackson's famous work "The Corpse Plays Over the Line", and Rodriguez's "Kill the Dawn". This kind of film, through the splashing of plasma and flying limbs, makes the audience feel physically uncomfortable.
However, as the number of moviegoings increases, the audience's psychological threshold will continue to increase, and they will soon lose interest in this horror film that is scary purely through sensory stimulation.
People crave richer experiences of fear, so life scene horror films have emerged, such as "Ghost Record" and "The Exorcism". This horror film is characterized by enveloping the audience with life scenes and mobilizing the audience's fear derived from life experience. This sense of substitution is incomparable to simple and direct sensory stimulation.
Even zombie films, over the years, began to blade inward. Zombies constitute only a backdrop, and what really chills is the cannibalism of humans. For example, the American drama "The Walking Dead" and the recently popular "The Last of the Survivors".
In recent years, horror films have begun to get close to current affairs, looking for creative hotspots in popular elements. And artificial intelligence happens to be the hottest topic today.
From Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" to the rebooted version of "Ghost Baby Returns", they are all using artificial intelligence as a selling point, and even the domestic sci-fi film "The Wandering Earth 2" is not exempt.
New "Ghost Baby Returns to the Soul"
If the changes before horror movies were based on content considerations, then for Wen Ziren, this transformation was based on commercial operation considerations. After filming box office blockbusters such as "Fast and Furious" and "Aquaman", Wen Ziren also wanted to create a horror movie universe with a wider audience.
Suffice it to say, the success of "Meghan" is definitely a win-win.
"Meghan" producer Blumhouse, a company specializing in horror movies, including "Ghost Record", "Escape from Desperate Town" and "Happy Death Day".
The bigger winner is Universal Pictures. At the end of last year, there were rumors in the industry that Blumhouse and Wen Ziren's production company "Atomic Monster" were expected to merge. If this is successful, it means that Universal Pictures, which signed a 10-year contract with Blumhouse, will control both Hollywood horror labels.
This means that Universal Pictures will obtain a series of horror film IPs that rank at the forefront of the market, which will greatly expand the commercial territory of Universal Pictures.
Wen Ziren further expanded the audience of horror films through the "horror downgrade" operation.
Now understand why this show looks so "mediocre", right?
Wen Ziren and Universal Pictures are playing the next big chess game, and horror films are also facing a reshuffle.
Design/Vision: Strong