The recently popular Korean movie "Broken Tomb", have you watched it?
The number of local moviegoers exceeded 11 million, and the total box office exceeded 114 billion won, equivalent to 600 million yuan.
It is the biggest "pride" of the Korean cinema market this year.
But recently, when it was introduced to China, it exploded into a pot of porridge on the Internet.
Someone mocked.
said that these ghost-hunting routines in the film were all leftovers from our games twenty or thirty years ago;
Even a lot of the feng shui culture in the movie actually originated from China.
Others are busy "introspecting".
In the past twenty or thirty years, our censorship has become more and more strict, which has given Korean films an opportunity.
Now even this kind of theme has been filmed by them.
Although these two schools of thought are inconsistent, they actually point to zombie films that were once in the Chinese film industry.
In the 80s and 90s of the last century, zombie films starring Lin Zhengying were all the rage, and many works are still classics that you never get tired of watching.
One of the pioneering works is "Mr. Zombie" directed by Liu Guanwei in 1985.
This small-budget horror action film, which won a box office of 20.09 million Hong Kong dollars that year, not only successfully created the image of the Taoist priest "Uncle Jiu", but also defined the "work nature" of the special profession of Maoshan Taoist.
This profession may seem simple, but in fact there are many hidden doorways.
Their daily work includes: fortune telling, divination, feng shui, funeral treatment, auspicious day selection, and eight characters.
But they also have some special skills, such as demon slaying, demon suppression, ghost hunting, and corpse chasing.
When they cast spells, they will also use some complex tools and magic weapons, mainly incense, yellow paper, ink fountains, brushes, wooden swords, copper coin swords, glutinous rice, red ropes, black dog blood, and rooster blood.
They also usually had a fixed residence: Yizhuang, which was also a post station for corpse chasers to stop and a place to park corpses.
These seemingly simple and inexpensive costumes and scene designs provide a reference for the creation of zombie horror films in the future.
And the influence of zombie horror films in the 80s even spread to Thailand, South Korea and other countries.
However, after entering 2000, with the death of Lin Zhengying and the decline of Hong Kong films, "zombie films" have gradually faded out of the vision of Chinese people.
Occasionally, a few works, such as "Zombie" directed by Mak Junlong in 2013, were only short-lived.
It was during this period of time that Koreans who were good at "take-it-or-leave-it" successfully stole and made works with elements of old zombie films, and they were also box office hits.
"Broken Tomb" is one of the most typical works.
The director of the film, Zhang Zaixian, has a deep study of Asian religion and folk culture.
In 2019, he directed "Suo Po He", which used Buddhist elements such as Maitreya Buddha and the Four Heavenly Kings, and the title of the film is also from the Buddhist classic "Great Compassion Mantra".
In "Broken Tomb", Zhang Zaixian is even more "intensified".
not only copied the props in the Hong Kong-style zombie film, but also carried the "zombies" directly.
So how true is this New Year's hit that the Korean film industry is proud of, how true is it and how fake is it?
01, "Mr. Zombie" and "Broken Tomb" are compared, and the difference is clear at a glance
First, let's take a look at the story of "Broken Tomb".
The witch Lee Hwa-rim (played by Kim Go-eun) and the witch Yoon Bong-gil (played by Lee Ji-hyun), who specialize in exorcizing ghosts and evil spirits for customers, received a big order one day to exorcise the newborn son of Park Ji-yong, a wealthy man who immigrated to the United States.
Park Ji-yong's son has been crying incessantly since he was born, and doctors have tried all kinds of methods to find the cause.
Regardless of the opposition of his family, Park Ji-yong returned to China to invite Hwarin and Bong-gil to diagnose their son.
Hua Lin pinched his fingers and learned that there was a problem with the ancestral grave of the ancestors of the Park family, and the grave had to be broken and moved to resolve it.
But the siblings are not good at looking at feng shui and moving graves, so they found two foreign aids, Kim Sang-deok (played by Choi Min-sik), a feng shui master who is good at reading feng shui, and Ko Yong-geun (played by Yoo Hae-jin), a church elder and ceremonial master.
In this way, a four-member "Tomb Breaking Squad" was formed, and each person was paid as much as 500 million won (equivalent to 2.63 million yuan).
The ancestral grave of Park Geun-hyun, the ancestor of the Park family, is located at the incense burner peak in Gangwon Province, on the border of North Korea.
The burial was very sloppy, just a small bare grave.
There is no name on the tombstone, only a string of numbers indicating latitude and longitude.
Needless to say, the big murderer can't move, and if he doesn't do it well, he will lose his life.
But the temptation of 500 million won was too great, and Kim Sang-deok's team could only bite the bullet.
In order to suppress the ghosts in the tomb, Hua Lin found five pig workers to dig the grave.
At the same time, five pigs are prepared, and then the great god is said to be able to transfer the yin qi emitted when the tomb is broken to the flesh of the five pigs, so that the grave diggers can avoid the invasion of yin qi.
In this way, after some tossing, the bones of Park Ji-yong's grandfather, Park Geun-hyun, were exhumed and cremated along with the coffin.
Park Geun-hyun's evil spirit was also laid to rest, and Park Ji-yong's son was saved.
This is the first half of the story.
Everyone looks at the process of these four people from accepting the commission, to looking at feng shui, raising altars, and then digging graves, is it the same as the plot in "Mr. Zombie"?
The difference is only that Zhang Zaixian is good at stewing folk culture, and replaces our Taoist altar with the shamanic dancing god.
If these are just imitations, then the appearance of "zombies" next is an obvious copy.
Just a few days after the tomb was broken, one of the workers involved in the tomb was decided.
Kim Sang-deok had a vague sense of foreboding, so he went to the mountain to inspect the grave, only to find that under the original coffin, there was a coffin buried vertically.
Back then, Uncle Jiu once said that a horizontal burial is called a "flat burial", and a vertical burial like this is called a "legal burial".
The large, blackened coffin was stuck like a nail into the earth.
The coffin was still firmly tied with iron wires around it, apparently afraid that the "living creatures" in the coffin would break out of the coffin.
And this "living thing" is the protagonist of this film, a giant zombie from the island nation of Japan.
Since then, the movie has entered the climax, the ultimate PK between the "Tomb Breaking Squad" and the island zombies.
The process of fighting is full of peaks and loops.
The four of them all used the housekeeping skills they had learned in their lives, and Hua Lin also invited two of his classmates to come to help.
And the magic weapons and props they use can also be seen everywhere to learn from "Mr. Zombie".
For example, Uncle Nine once used rooster blood to seal the coffin and glutinous rice to restrain zombies;
Hua Lin in the film also sprinkled glutinous rice and horse blood around the coffin to seal the zombies in the coffin.
Hua Lin's fellow practitioners also used roosters, charms, and paper talismans in the process of suppressing ghosts.
In order to defend themselves, the four members of the team wrote the scriptures of the "Diamond Sutra" all over their bodies.
We have also seen this kind of commotion in the Taiwanese horror film "Curse" in 2022.
But in fact, the earliest appearance of this design in Hong Kong films can be traced back to "Evil" directed by Gui Zhihong in 1980, which is a representative work of New Wave films.
In "Mr. Zombie", when Uncle Nine fights with zombies, he often bites his fingers and smears his own blood on the wooden sword to increase his mana.
In the film, after Kim Sang-deok realized the theory of the five elements in Feng Shui, he also smeared his own blood on the pickaxe in his hand, and finally split the zombie into two.
So from these, it can be seen that "Broken Tomb" not only borrows from Hong Kong-style horror films in terms of folklore elements and props, but even the entire story framework is copied from the development line of "Mr. Zombie - Finding Zombies - Destroying Zombies" in "Mr. Zombie".
This is known as "new bottled wine".
And the great thing about director Jang Jae-hyun is that he can repackage this old story from the 80s and install a main theme that Koreans love to watch, which can capture the hearts of Koreans.
02, the names of the four protagonists, each with a "metaphor", and the other details added by the movie are wonderful, all of which hit the pain points of Koreans
Anti-American, anti-Japanese, and deep exposure to the shady scenes of politics are the three main themes of South Korea's main theme films.
As long as you grasp these "three themes", you can grasp the traffic password, and movies that meet this theme can often be box office hits.
For example, Luo Hongzhen's "Crying" in 2016.
The story of the conflict between shamanism, Shintoism, and Christianity, the three major religions in Korea, is confusing and particularly puzzling.
However, due to the affirmation of the audience for the theme of "anti-Japanese", it not only sold $49.85 million at the box office worldwide, but also allowed Luo Hongzhen to win the Best Director of the Korean Film Blue Dragon Award.
With the same "anti-Japanese" theme, compared with "Broken Tomb" and "The Cry", its story line is much more straightforward.
In order to make it easier for the audience to understand, he even split the movie into 6 chapters, namely: "Yin and Yang Five Elements", "Tomb", "Soul", "Moving Earth", "Ghost (おに)" and "Iron Needle".
And the last chapter, "Iron Needle", is the core of the whole story.
There is a saying among Korean folklore that "iron nails break veins".
Legend has it that during the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese colonizers organized a special task force to cut off the "dragon vein" of the Korean nation, and carried out a geographical survey in Korea for more than a year in the name of drawing maps, and finally mastered the dragon vein of the Korean Peninsula.
After that, they drove countless nails into the caves of famous mountains such as Mount Kumgang, Mount Songak, Mount Jiris, Mount Daesong in Pyongyang, Mount Bukak in Seoul, and Mount Badal in Suwon, as well as the main hall of the Imperial Palace.
The steel used to make these nails, from the blades of the katana used by Japanese samurai, "gathered the heroic spirits of the samurai of the Great Japanese Empire" who wanted to use the spirits of their ancestors to suppress the Korean Peninsula.
In 1985, a group of mountaineering enthusiasts spontaneously formed a team called "Thinking About Us" and set off a "nail removal campaign" in South Korea.
In the 27 years from 1985 to 2012, they traveled all over the famous mountains and rivers of South Korea, pulling out more than 360 iron nails.
This group of people is called the "Iron Nail Hunters", which is the prototype of the "Iron Blood Group" in the film.
The "nail removal movement" reached its climax in 1995.
At that time, it coincided with the 50th anniversary of South Korea's liberation, and the then South Korean President Kim Yong-sam included the "dismantling of iron needles left by the Japanese" as a major national project.
According to the policy address at the time, the South Korean government conducted a nationwide survey and identified and removed a total of 180 iron piles.
To this day, Koreans still believe in the "theory of island country feng shui aggression" and the "theory of the Japanese empire's broken veins".
Director Jang Jae-hyun saw this.
In the interview, he called the emphasis on national consciousness, the presentation of patriotic issues, and the elimination of the negative impact of Japanese culture "corn-eye surgery", believing that "only by uprooting it can something new appear."
For this reason, director Jang Jae-hyun wanted to tell a story about a pro-Japanese faction who was cursed.
The rich Park Ji-yong family in the film is the descendants of Korean traitors during the Japanese occupation.
His grandfather, Park Geun-hyun, was a great Korean traitor, and after his death, he was buried by Junji Murayama, a fox demon from Japan, at the latitude and longitude of "383417, 1283189" on the incense burner peak in Gangwon Province.
Legend has it that during the Japanese occupation, the Korean Peninsula was depicted as a tiger on a map.
And Park Geun-hyun's tomb is in the position of "tiger's waist", that is, "the fox cut off the tiger's waist" in the movie.
And this Han traitor's tomb is actually used to cover the tomb of the "island country zombie" below.
Under it, there is a large coffin inserted into the soil, which is an iron needle of the fox demon onmyoji "cutting off the tiger's waist".
In the film, it is explained that this big zombie was a general of the Western Army who participated in the "Battle of Sekigahara" before his death.
It was based on Ishida Mitsunari, the commander of the Western Army, who fought against the Eastern Army led by Tokugawa Ieyasu, and was beheaded at Rokujo Kawara in Kyoto after his defeat.
After his death, his body was collected by the Yuanjian National Master of Daitoku Temple and buried in the Sanxuan Temple in the temple, which coincides with the words of the big zombie mentioned "buried in Daitoku Temple" in the film.
The centipede-shaped helmet worn by the big zombie comes from Itami, who is known as the "Oshu Fierce General";
I like to eat sweetfish and melons, one is from Gifu, which is rich in sweetfish, which is the hometown of Oda Nobunaga, a famous Japanese warring states;
The second is derived from Tokugawa Ieyasu's special preference for melons.
It should be said that the big zombie is a combination that integrates the image of Japan's Warring States military generals.
After the martial artist was beheaded, a katana was inserted into the body by the fox demon onmyoji from the gap in the neck, and from then on, the katana and the corpse were fused into one, in the form of an iron needle that "cut off the tiger's waist".
Therefore, for Koreans, the process of patriots "pulling out the iron needle" carries profound national feelings and symbolic meanings.
Let's talk about the four people of the "Tomb Breaking Squad", their names also come from four patriots in Korean history-
Kim Sang-deok was the chief contributor to the independence of the Republic of Korea;
Ko Yong-geun was a patriotic youth at the end of Joseon;
Lee Hwa-rim is a well-known female independence activist in South Korea;
Yin Bong-gil was an anti-Japanese righteous soldier during the Japanese occupation.
These four people themselves represent patriots among the Korean people.
They are serving the rich on weekdays, but in the face of the great rights and wrongs of the nation, these ordinary people are also willing to give up their lives.
The poster design of the movie obviously put a lot of thought into it.
The part of the sky formed by the silhouettes of the trees and figures is exactly the shape of the Korean Peninsula.
It is these emotions that resonate among Korean audiences that made the movie sing all the way after its release and win the box office.
03. Compared with meaningless scolding wars, these are the key
Let's go back to the movie, maybe netizens who have watched "Broken Tomb" will have some grievances.
We have also filmed thriller themes such as feng shui, ghosts, fighting methods, and grave digging.
Not to mention Hong Kong films, our mainland also made movies like "Night Robbery of Concubine Zhen's Tomb", "Lonely Soul in the Black Mansion", and "Murderous House Beauty" as early as the 80s of the last century.
To this day, Koreans have filmed "The Cry", "Su Po He", and "Broken Tomb";
The Japanese filmed "Filth", "Magical Spell", and "Ghost Water Monster Talk";
The Thai filmed "Ghost Shadow", "Ghost Wife", and "Ghost Husband";
Taiwan's film industry has also filmed shocking works such as "Double Eyes", "Silk", and "Curse".
And we're still standing still, not moving an inch.
Some attribute this to the reason for the audit.
But in fact, in recent years, the standards of mainland film censorship have been relaxed.
Films such as "The History of the Disappearance of Romantic" and "Wading through the Sea of Anger" are very large-scale, and the review department still gives them the green light.
Therefore, Pi Ge feels that mainland filmmakers still have to find reasons from themselves.
Refer to some successful cases inside and outside the Chinese film industry, and carefully create scripts, and the theme should also be positive and profound.
In fact, putting a lofty patriotic theme on commercial films, so that the theme of the movie can be sublimated, and there is a precedent for our mainland films.
For example, Wu Jing's "Wolf Warrior 2", the core of which is an action movie that shows personal heroism.
However, if the "battlefield" is moved to a foreign country, and then the theme of "withdrawing from China" is applied, and under the banner of patriotism, its ideology and appearance are completely different.
Let's talk about the sci-fi film "The Wandering Earth 2".
The main story line is set on the earth facing the end of the world in the future, which seems to have nothing to do with "patriotism".
However, the spirit of sacrificing one's life and self-sacrifice expressed in the film is in line with our national spirit.
Through the theme of science fiction, our national spirit has also been able to spread to the whole world.
Therefore, in the area of folk themes, Pi Ge feels that our filmmakers should also try boldly in the future.
Like "Broken Tomb", it combines patriotism with the heavenly master's fighting method that the audience loves to watch, and makes our own good works.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Bloody Danxin
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