Although Chinese crime films have gained momentum in recent years, the thriller horror films adjacent to them have stagnated for many years, and no masterpieces have been born.
What is particularly embarrassing is that nowadays, as long as they hear about the horror films in mainland theaters, most fans will laugh contemptuously. The scary routine of pretending to be a ghost, the ending of forced scientific explanation, make horror movies often equate with absurd comedies.
However, in Hong Kong 18 years ago, there were three consecutive horror film masterpieces, which were the Pang brothers' "See the Ghost", Luo Zhiliang's "Alien Space", and Chen Kexin's "Three More", making 2002 a bumper year for Hong Kong horror films.
Among them, the most special one should be "Three Changes".
It's a highlight-style film co-produced by Three Regions – Kim Ji-woon from South Korea, Lance Nimebita from Thailand, and Kexin Chan from Hong Kong – who direct "Amnesia", "Reincarnation" and "Homecoming" respectively, and let us feel three very different horror flavors.
First, contemporary horror and strange talk
The first story of "Sangen" was "Amnesia" directed by Kim Ji-woon.
A fixed shot of the indoor vista, focusing on the man sleeping on the sofa, as the camera advances, he gradually wakes up and feels something strange in the room.
Rag doll that suddenly turns its head.
A blue balloon that flies in the air.
And the curled up woman sobbing by the side of the duffel bag.
Set the tone of this short film: abrupt, broken, inexplicable.
It turned out that the man's wife disappeared not long ago, and his series of strange feelings were diagnosed by doctors as schizophrenia after temporarily separating from his lover.
Indeed, in the later episodes, he always felt all kinds of strange things, whether it was the strange talk of the building administrator or the unknown phone call, which made him deeply afraid.
But is it really caused by the loss of his wife by the male protagonist?
This is not the case, although the male protagonist will feel frightened and afraid when he sees the car accident; in the face of the sister-in-law's questioning, he cannot hide his sorrow. But from his expression, we can always feel a little uneasy, it seems that his wife's disappearance has a great connection with him.
At this point, director Jin Zhiyun uses another clue - a woman in white who has just woken up from the road, in the amnesiac search, gradually reveals the answer for us.
When she followed the fragments of memories of the past, she found herself like a transparent person, and no one could see her existence.
The point is that the film shoots her shots, always captured in an unusual way of jumping frames and fast-forwarding, which makes people feel that the woman is actually detached from the normal world.
Sure enough, after she found the way home step by step, she saw the process of her tragic death and the tragic situation of being dismembered. And the person who killed her was her husband.
At this time, the source of the hero's fear and the tragic end of the woman intersect on the floor of the two people's homes. That's right, they're a couple.
Therefore, the male protagonist is not suffering from schizophrenia because of the loss of his wife, but because of the fear in his heart after killing and crushing the body.
Jin Zhiyun uses a montage technique to surprise us in two seemingly unrelated clues to find this tragic ending.
2. The Parable of the Punishment of Greed
If Kim Ji-woon tells the fragmentation and horror of Korean urban families in the strange images of suspense, then Thailand's Lance Nimebida's "Reincarnation" uses southeast Asian unique "witchcraft" as a gimmick to show a parable about greed.
The puppeteer was about to die, and he swore a poisonous oath that after his death, the puppets he had made before his death must be buried, and anyone who took possession of them would be cruelly cursed.
Unlike the Puppet Master Sect, the Mask Master, who has long coveted his puppet property, is waiting for the competitor to die. In addition, he and the puppet master are in league, and there is a reason to embezzle property.
Therefore, when the puppet master died, the mask master ignored the curse and took all the delicate puppets for himself. Sure enough, the ancient curse descended step by step.
First, his wife was frightened by the spirit and hanged herself.
Later, the mask master's body was associated with the puppet, and after the puppet's right leg was torn off by his granddaughter, he also had the pain of breaking his leg.
As for the apprentice and son, they were also trapped by love and eventually fought and died.
The mask master himself was in a state of panic all day long, because he saw the puppet show master before he died, overturned the oil lamp, and was burned alive.
He originally thought that after the death of this brother-in-law, he would be able to dominate one side, take down all the performance business of mask plays and puppet shows, and create his own handicraft drama class kingdom, but he did not expect that the cleverness was mistaken by the clever, the theater career was completely destroyed, and his family was all killed.
"Reincarnation" is similar to a series of cult horror films produced by The Shaw Film Company in Hong Kong at the beginning of the 1980s.
Witchcraft is often designed to stimulate the visual level of the audience, and its core still cannot escape the moral admonition of East Asian culture that "good and evil are rewarded, and there must be no greed".
The tragic end of the mask drama master's family is actually in a single thought. Didn't the spirit attached to the puppet give the Mask Play Master a chance?
Non-ye, as early as the beginning, the mask master had an accident when cleaning the puppet - the puppet floated on the surface of the water, but he knew that he almost drowned, but he still insisted on it. This eventually leads to a series of causal cycles.
However, to be honest, although the two horror short films in South Korea and Thailand are more thrilling and interesting than the pseudo-horror films in the mainland now, the reason why "Three More" enjoys a classic status in Hong Kong horror films lies in Chen Kexin's "Homecoming".
Third, the love oath wrapped in "necrophilia"
"Homecoming" begins in a photo studio, where only one little girl wears a bright red coat, and everyone else wears monotonous and low-key clothing.
Visually, this little girl is not very human.
The choice of photo studio as the first scene of the opening also has deep meaning.
According to Chen Kexin in the Blu-ray disc review track of "Three Changes", photo studios used to have two functions: happy events and funerals. One is to commemorate the happy moments of marriage and family, and the other is to record the appearance of the elderly before they died, which is used as a posthumous photo.
This can also be seen in the wooden photos of the old people on the walls of the photo studio. Therefore, the photo studio is actually a junction of yin and yang, and the little red girl is a ghost that travels through the yin and yang realm.
Subsequently, the policeman Ah Wei, played by Zeng Zhiwei, took his son Ah Xiang to live in a deserted residential building that was about to be demolished. Here, in addition to Ah Wei's father and son, only Yu Hui, played by Dawn, and his wife are left.
Here, Chen Kexin uses a wide-angle camera to shake the entire building in a skewed view — empty, eerie and full of the indifference of the city's steel concrete.
Ah Wei did not have the heart and lungs to adapt quickly here, but his son Ah Xiang always felt that something was wrong, and often saw the little red girl at the beginning of the film.
Soon, after Ah Xiang disappeared after playing with the little girl, Ah Wei continued to look for his son.
The only two residents of the whole building, Afterglow, naturally has the biggest suspicion. Coupled with Yuhui's strange behavior and in-depth simplicity, Ah Wei concludes that Yuhui kidnapped Ah Xiang.
After he sneaks into Afterglow's house, he discovers a shocking scene, where Afterglow's wife lies motionless in the bath tub and is long dead.
Just at this moment, Afterglow smashed ah wei from behind and tied it up.
It turned out that Yu Hui was a doctor with excellent Chinese medicine skills, and his wife died of cancer three years ago, but Yu Hui was convinced that using Chinese medicine could bring his wife back to life.
To this end, he carefully boiled Chinese medicine every day, wiped his wife's body, and cut his nails. He also often talks to his wife and gets a response from his wife in hallucinations.
When Ah Wei saw all this, he of course thought that Afterglow was crazy and suffered from severe necrophilia psychosis.
On the day that Afterglow's wife was about to be resurrected, Ah Wei's police colleagues found Afterglow, arrested her, and rescued Ah Wei. Afterglow's wife, on the other hand, was placed in a body bag.
Seeing all this, Afterglow broke through the policemen's defense line and was suddenly killed in a car accident while trying to stop the body of his wife in the ambulance.
Is Afterglow really a lunatic? The end of the film gives us a poignant answer.
It turned out that Afterglow had also suffered from cancer six years ago. After being "sentenced to death" by Western medicine, his wife, who was also a Chinese medicine doctor, took care of Aftergüh for three years with Traditional Chinese medicine and medical techniques after Yuhui's death, and finally brought Yuhui back to life.
Unfortunately, after Afterglow's resurrection, his wife suffered from the same cancer, which is why Afterglow insisted on three years and was sure that his wife could be resurrected.
This truth, finally in the form of a videotape, was seen by Ah Wei at the police station, and he knew that he had made a terrible mistake, so that two couples who loved each other so much, because of their own hasty interference, eventually both died.
There is no doubt that the short film "Homecoming" is not a standardized horror film. Although there are ghosts in the film, such as the little girl, there is no lack of horror atmosphere, such as afterglow taking care of the female corpse for three years, and the horror of his constant speech to the female corpse, we shudder.
Compared with the two standard horror films of "Amnesia" and "Reincarnation", "Homecoming" has a touching and profound love legend, which weaves a heartbreaking love story with the sensational plot of loving corpses and hiding corpses, no less than any Chinese romance film.
In addition, the film uses empty, soon-to-be-demolished buildings and dark and low tones to metaphorically describe everyone's island plight. Why would Ah Wei take his children to such a remote and secluded house? Why wouldn't he want to mention his wife?
These tragic lovers through the afterglow couple tell the painful experience that everyone does not know from the side.
Fourth, it is regarded as a classic horror film masterpiece
"Three Changes Homecoming" has been 18 years now, this film is also the only horror film directed by Chen Kexin so far, but it has left countless fans with a completely different sense of view.
Originally, due to the presentation form and plot of the highlight film, the film was greatly reduced. At the beginning, Chen Kexin planned to shoot a suspense crime film, through Zeng Zhiwei's police perspective, step by step to discover the secret of mutual rescue and resurrection between YuHui and his wife.
It is said that there are also strange rituals in the specific resurrection process, but Chen Kexin finally found in the editing that instead of telling a cult story full of curiosity, it is better to focus on the love thread of the afterglow couple. As a result, Chen Kexin cut almost half of the length, compressing the length of Zeng Zhiwei and his son to the minimum.
In this movie, the biggest surprise should be the afterglow played by Dawn - although Dawn has always been used as a vase by many audiences because of her handsome appearance, only in Chen Kexin's films, he has an inconspicuous, but warm and jade temperament.
In "Homecoming", he convinces us of this hot love of Afterglow with a stubborn but infatuated image. But in the first half of the film, he also shows a kind of fanatical perversion, which makes people fear it.
So, whether it's Chen Kexin's unique vision or Dawn's different talent, they have made this short film an indispensable classic in the Hong Kong horror film sequence.
To this day, there are still many fans who expect this film to be able to produce a full or extended version of the Blu-ray Disc, which shows the status of "Homecoming" in the hearts of fans.
(Rotten Tomatoes Movie Editorial Department: Flowers Without a Feast)