In the 1980s, our mainland films also had a hundred controversies.
At that time, television was not too popular, and the daily entertainment pastime of the Chinese people was to watch movies, so making movies could be very profitable, and for the sake of box office, various creative "strange" films also came into being.
Among them, companies with ideas such as Xi'an Film Studio and Shenzhen Film Industry began to learn from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe and the United States, and add commercial elements to their films. But there are also unscrupulous companies that like to make articles on movie posters and print "not suitable for children" subtitles to attract more curious audiences.
However, the horror film "The Lonely Soul of the Black Building" launched by Shenzhen Pictures in 1989 is a real "child's inappropriate".
It is said that the original version that was released that year was 100 minutes, and it was banned because it scared people to death during the screening, and then it was re-cut, and by the time it was seen again, it was already an 88-minute abridged version.
So far, the 100-minute full version of "Lonely Soul in the Black Building" is still the object of yearning in the minds of fans.
But even after the 12-minute horror and sensitivity was cut, the 88-minute "LoneLy Soul in the Dark House" still seems to be a top-notch presence.
One
The film takes place in the late 1960s, in a hospital room, an old man with only one breath left entrusts his 14-year-old daughter Xiaoju to a friend he trusts.
The old man was persecuted to death, and his daughter Xiaoju was also killed shortly after, and the person who killed her was the old man's friend, because the man wanted to rob the old man's family property.
The scene of the murder was in the basement of a building in Beijing's Dongjiaomin Lane — the faceless murderer carefully cleaned up the scene, disguised Xiao Ju's body as a hanged suicide, and locked the door to create the illusion of "murder in the secret room" .
Although the body was later found, it was treated as a suicide case, and the murderer has been at large ever since.
After more than a decade, the building has become a dangerous building, and the government is ready to demolish it. Most of the occupants of the building have moved away, leaving only three people without a family business, who have nowhere to go and become nail households.
Among them are Lao Lin (Guan Zongxiang), a retired worker, You Fei, a young man without a proper job, and Huo Feng (Chen Xiguang), a recording engineer who works in a film company.
Once, while filming a shot of him going up the stairs, Huo Feng was not satisfied with the sound effect of stepping on the stairs, so he took the heroine of the film, Yu Hong (Pan Jie), to the building where he lived to record.
In the process of recording the sound effects, Yu Hong always felt uncomfortable, as if a pair of eyes were staring at her, and this strange feeling seemed to come from the basement located under the stairs.
Is there anything in the basement? Huo Feng felt curious, and he wanted to go and see it. So, he left Yu Hong at the stairwell and opened the locked basement door himself and went in to check it out.
And as soon as the door opened, it seemed to alarm the spirits sleeping in the basement, and plunged the whole building into a shroud of terror.
There is a long aisle in the basement filled with all sorts of garbage and debris. At the bottom is a room with a red door, which is where Xiao Ju was killed.
Huo Feng opened the small red door with a nervous mood, although it was very strange, all he saw was furniture covered with spider webs and gray layers, and Xiao Ju's body had already been cleaned up.
Yu Hong stood outside alone and was uncomfortable, so he left first.
When Huo Feng came out of the basement, he happened to meet You Fei who was going upstairs, and only then did he hear him say that there had been people dead in this basement.
At night, Huo Feng played the recorded sound effects, but heard some strange noises coming from the recording.
Huo Feng felt that this matter was very strange, so he went with Yu Hong to visit his neighbor Lao Lin, who had lived in this building for a long time. Old Lin then talked about Xiao Ju, who died in the basement, and what happened to her family.
When Xiao Ju's father was persecuted, her mother had gone to find Lao Lin and wanted to seek his help, but Lao Lin was also a mud bodhisattva crossing the river, and she could not help.
At this time, Yu Hong looked at Old Lin and talked, but some hallucinations appeared in his eyes, which seemed to be Xiao Ju's ghost revealing the truth to her.
Yu Hong saw that old Lin not only failed to help, but also raped Xiao Ju's mother in the room, committing an unforgivable sin.
At this time, Xiao Ju's ghost had awakened, and Lao Lin naturally became the first target.
Old Lin, who was watching TV in the living room that night, was frightened. He heard a sound in the bathroom, but when he went into the bathroom to check it, he saw that the bathtub was dripping blood, and when he opened the frame on the wall, he saw the ghost.
Old Lin was frightened and ran outside, but when he went down the stairs, he fell to his feet and died.
Then, the unemployed vagrant You Fei also had an accident - it turned out that he had stolen an ancestral golden Buddha from Xiao Ju's family because of his greed.
Yu Fei had some hallucinations in his eyes when he went upstairs, and seeing that there were a lot of dollars in the basement, he was seduced into the basement that he did not want to go.
In the end, Yu Fei lost his soul because he was frightened and went crazy.
Huo Feng has a spirit of inquisition, he decided to uncover the truth behind Xiao Ju's bizarre death, so he found the policeman who was in charge of the case.
From the mouth of the police, Huo Feng learned that this case actually had many doubts, although the police suspected that he killed, but in that era of turmoil, everyone was in danger, and no one cared about this kind of case.
After investigation, Huo Feng and Yu Hong confirmed that it was Zheng Lei (Han Xiaolei), the director of their crew, who adopted Xiaoju that year, and the person who killed Xiaoju was naturally him.
Huo Feng wanted to find evidence and let the police arrest Zheng Lei, but Xiao Ju's ghost did not want to let Zheng Lei go. Later, yu Hong helped Xiao Ju and let her lure Zheng Lei to the building and hang herself.
Two
The script of "The Lonely Soul of the Black Building" was jointly created by director Mu Deyuan and screenwriter Chen Yanming, and sent to several film studios to see, all of which were good, but no one picked up.
Later, it was sent to Shenzhen Pictures, and it is said that the reviewers could not help but burst into tears after reading the script, and immediately decided to shoot the film, and the director was Mu Deyuan and Liang Ming.
The film took 54 days to shoot, the original length was 100 minutes, and it was released on April 4, 1989, but it was later released urgently, just like we have now for "technical reasons".
It is said that it was because there was a disturbance during the screening, and it scared people to death in a certain movie theater. Then the studio did a lot of edits, and we only see 88 minutes now.
This 88-minute story, in addition to a large number of shots that need to be deleted, also includes some shots that were later added to the furnace to make up for the shooting.
The newly added ending is interesting, defining everything that happens earlier as the chat of a group of patients in a mental hospital who are the characters who appear in the story.
At the end of the movie, Yu Hong pushed the door in, and it turned out that she was a nurse in a mental hospital. Yu Hong pushed a small car full of pills and said to everyone, "Take the medicine." ”
It turned out to be the time for the patient to take the medicine, was this medicine for the people in the movie, or for the audience in front of the screen? This is an intriguing question.
Over the years, the 100-minute "Lonely Soul in the Black Building" is like an urban legend, which has been painstakingly sought by the majority of netizens.
According to rumors on the Internet, in the original ending, the old building was finally demolished, and the demolished building revealed one of the walls, and the walls were written with blood and some indictive words.
But these also exist only in imagination, like the one that can't even find stills, but it has always existed in the legendary "Painted Skin"; the 1989 version of the TV series "Fengshen List" that was banned because of excessive bloodshed.
Maybe the full version of "Lonely Soul in the Black House" we will never see, which is a big regret for this movie.
Three
There are not many characters in the film, but two of the actors have died.
One is the lead actor Chen Xiguang, who is an actor in the National Theatre of China and was also a handsome man at that time. In the 80s and 90s, he starred in many movies, such as Bai Yunfei in "Haiwang", Chen Tianhua in "Qiu Jin", and Peng Enliang in "Women's World".
After entering 2000, he also starred in many TV series, such as Playing Cheng Hao in "Women Don't Cry", Playing Tang Jingming in "Seeing Flowers in the Mist", and Playing Wang Zong in "How Daughters-in-law Are Made".
But in 2013 he faded out of show business and died of illness on June 1, 2017, at the age of 62.
The second is Han Xiaolei, who plays the villain Zheng Lei, who is an associate professor at the Beijing Film Academy, and in addition to acting, he is also a film director and screenwriter.
He has directed the movies "Sakura", "The End of the World", "Trainee Lawyer", etc., as well as the TV series "Love Covers Your Wind and Rain" and "The Legend of Liu Luo's Judgment Case".
On March 19, 2003, Han Xiaolei died of a sudden blood clot due to overwork, which was only 62 years old at the time, and his wife was actor Bai Han, who also died of illness on February 19, 2012, at the age of 56.
The heroine Pan Jie is a model, and "The Lonely Soul of the Black Building" is her film debut.
After this film, she also ushered in a career start, and later starred in many movies and TV series, and was active until 2016. She once fell in love with Wang Zhiwen and seems to be single.
Guan Zongxiang, who plays Lao Lin, is an opera, drama, Peking opera, film and television drama actor, the father of Guan Hu, the director of "Eight Hundred", and people in the circle call him Guan Uncle.
Guan Zongxiang has also acted in many movies and TV series, and his last work is Guan Hu's "Old Cannon" in 2015, in which he played the role of the second master.
Four
Unlike the current "fake ghost films" that can't see ghosts, "Lonely Ghost in the Black Building" is really ghostly, which is why it is often mentioned.
But the "ghost" that appears in the film is actually just a rag doll that looks a little dirty, but at that time, it could scare people not lightly, thanks to the use of stereo sound effects in the movie, which was the first movie in China to use stereo sound effects at that time.
Nowadays, whenever Chinese people mention domestic horror films produced in the mainland, they often talk about "The Lonely Soul of the Black Building".
Some say it has reached an unprecedented peak, but after this peak, there is no way to continue. "The Lonely Soul of the Black Building" is undoubtedly very good, but the domestic horror movie has stopped moving forward...
(Rotten Tomatoes Movie Editorial Department: Blood Dan Heart)