Ridley Scott's Alien came out in 1979, pushing the enclosed space monster genre film to the extreme.
"Alien" as a symbol of the era has been engraved on the cornerstone of film history.
And 3 years after the birth of "Alien", John Carpenter, known as the godfather of cult films, sacrificed his own big killer "Strange Shape", an equally excellent closed space monster movie.
Unlike Ridley Scott's artistic ambitions, John Carpenter was born a cult filmmaker who was purely detached from high-end fun.
Focus on three-dimensional intimidation and blows to the audience's spirit.
Here Brother Pig has a little bit of the meaning of Cult films.
Cult movies refer to films with strange themes, strong personality styles, and some controversies, which usually have the following two characteristics:
Low cost, non-mainstream.
And the Cult films we often mention belong to science fiction and horror themes, and plasma and fright are commonly used elements in them.
John Carpenter has been passionate about such films since the 1974 thriller The Dim Star.
John Carpenter
His "Moonlight Panic" swept the United States, making the heroine Jamie Lee Curtis the queen of a generation of horror films.
As we mentioned earlier, John Carpenter, in contrast to Ridley Scott, who has already entered the hall of the master with half a foot, pursues purer plasma and horror, lacking some profundity.
This makes his film's status in film history not very high.
But this "Strange Shape" is an exception, and in a way, the film's innovation and definition of the frightening elements in the closed space monster genre film has reached the pinnacle.
And together with Alien and later David Cronenberg's Fly man, it became the pinnacle of model effects before the large-scale application of CG technology.
"Fly Man"
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Thrillers like the relative setting of space.
Because this not only saves costs for shooting, but also makes it easier to create tension in the audience, which is conducive to the introduction of perception.
Just like the pressure cooker principle, as long as the ingredients are right and the pressure is right, the small space has great power and extraordinary taste.
But in fact, "Strange Shape" defines the enclosed space in size larger than most similar films.
Alien is in a spaceship and Busan Is in a train.
So where did the story of "Strange Shapes" take place?
South Pole.
In the film, on the cold and empty Antarctic continent, the AMERICAN expedition team sees a crashed Norwegian expedition helicopter.
So they ran to the nearest next-door neighbor's house to see what was going on.
Strangely twisted corpses were scattered throughout the ruins, and the Norwegians were nowhere to be found.
Curiosity kills cats.
The Americans brought back one of them.
Although the space is large enough, on the Antarctic continent, which is empty for tens of miles, the next-door neighbor is completely deadly and helpless, and a deadly monster has been placed in the camp.
With such a setup, the larger the space, the stronger the sense of despair.
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The most important element of horror in such a film is the strange and dangerous creature.
"Strange Shape" is a bit of a sword, and there is very little description of the origin of the monster in the film.
Where they came from and where they went, they were not explained.
It just clearly tells the audience that this guy has the ability to copy all organic objects at will.
copy.
It fits into the crowd like a wedge.
You can't be sure that the person next to you is him or it.
Trust between people and people is destroyed in an instant.
This is also the high level of the thriller elements of "Strange Shape", although the stunt effects have reached the peak of the times, and the bloody scenes have reached the physiological limits of people, but the real soul is the unknown fear of the team collapsing into true and false.
Let's recall the usual routines of classic horror movies.
There is a dangerous creature setting, and then people huddle together to avoid pursuit or seek counter-killing.
The main perspective is people's collaboration, and people have a strong interactive attribute between people.
"Extreme Deep Cold"
In Strange Shapes, such collaboration and interaction are at their lowest.
On the contrary, the distrust between people and people is magnified to the extreme because of the existence of monsters.
People are devoured by terror in their suspicions, which is also what makes the "strange shape" different from the "alien", which relies on overwhelming attack superiority to achieve its goal, and it uses people's mutual suspicion to eliminate humanity.
The anxiety of the people in the film is doubled, because here, there is no such thing as hugging and fighting together.
Anyone could be it.
Even the male protagonist of the final film stands out not because he is supernatural or most human, but because he has become the greatest common denominator of trust, recognized and believed by most people.
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"Strange Shape" perfectly blends the visual fright of special effects with the psychological scare of human nature.
This is also its subtlety, the real horror comes from the isolation of human nature.
For example, in Wolfgang Peterson's "Extreme Panic", the most desperate or human feeling is not the virus, but the bomb that slipped over the town and the no-confidence vote cast by the people behind the bomb.
In the face of danger and fear, the selfish and instinctive side of human nature is more likely to prevail.
Therefore, we say that people who can "retrograde" at this time are rare and valuable.
The vivid interpretation of the fear of human isolation in the thriller "Strange Shape" 37 years ago is not only an innovation in the thriller elements of the genre film, but also a revelation.
We isolate dangers, we isolate hidden dangers, but we cannot isolate people's hearts.
In times of crisis, self-discipline and trust may be the best recipe.
Text/Brother Pig
(Image from network intrusion and deletion)