Wen Shu Sairen
Horror films are a common genre, but not the main genre. There are only two main genres, namely comedy and adventure. Horror films can be classified as a branch of the adventure genre. There is another reason why horror films are not the main genre, that is, its single film has hardly caused a storm in the market, let alone a frenzy. The main genre is marked by size-take-all, while the audience for horror films is clearly not.
That said, there are still many people who either can't get interested, or can't muster up the courage, and refuse to watch this genre. For this, the erotic film has the same treatment as it. Horror movies have a small but stable audience, so they can also create box office miracles with small and large ones. We have "Far Cry" on our side, and the more brilliant performance is the American independent production of "Blair the Witch".
Blair the Witch
From the perspective of the development of film history, horror films have also made great achievements in broadening the frontier of aesthetics. Some people joke that the first work in film history, "The Train Enters the Station", is a horror film. As the train drew closer and closer from the depths, the audience in front of the screen was frightened by the sudden arrival of the landscape and fled. This scene is also shown in the Chinese film "Diorama", which commemorates the centenary of the film.
"The Train Comes In"
Not to mention the two masterpieces of German Expressionism during the silent film period, Dr. Carrigari's Cabin and Nosferatu, which solved the major visual proposition of how composition penetrates the human heart.
Dr. Caligari's Cabin
The Introduction of The Raven and The Devil by the French film maestro Henri Georges Kruzzo around World War II announced, in a way, the rise of psychological horror films.
The Devil
On the other side of the ocean, Hitchcock borrowed Freud's teachings to make the imbalance of personality to the extreme of visualization. In the past three decades, he has been popular in the field of horror films, and has been the first to promote David Lynch. It is the oppression of dreams on dreams, the encirclement of memory by memory, the interlacing of countless unknowns in canine teeth, and the relentless questioning of our habitual cognition with a perceptible image system.
At this point, Antonioni's "Amplification" goes further, like a difficult philosophical paper, in a murder scene that goes unreported, and the reaction of subjectivity to objectivity eventually becomes powerless and emits an extremely beautiful pale.
Zoom in
And in other corners that seem more secretive, but are actually more turbulent. As a sub-genre, horror films have repeatedly become the back garden for many fans. In Asia alone, horror films in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Hong Kong often mushroom, growing naturally and freely.
Horror films have also become regulars in B-grade films and CULT films, where heavy tastes are unleashed without restraint, and weird tastes are re-established psychological walls in a state beyond physics, and they are regarded as the bliss of a certain kind of crowd when watching movies. As a result, under the wrapping of subtypes, many subtypes have been bred, such as viral films, zombie films, vampire films, ghost films, supernatural films, and head-dropping films. Some of these films, while making us tremble in our hearts, can also glimpse the humanities associated with the geopolitical style, which does not need to be examined one by one.
Like Hong Kong's Lam Cheng Ying, Luo Hongyi's "Cry", and like the recent "Southern Witch", it can also be connected to some films of Apichabang. In the hot and humid jungle, our disturbing and exciting awareness is awakened, as if all things are spirits, and as if we have come from fear and finally stopped being afraid. Including the demise of life, up to the loss of the soul.
"Southern Witch"
There are also some films with horror elements, which are really inconvenient to list them one by one. To mention it a little, such as Hitchcock's two most loyal fans in France, namely Truffaut and Chabrol, Bergman's circus-set films, and some of Ras von Trier's anti-religious films, all believe that the unknowability of human nature is greater than the "omniscience" of God.
Kenji Mizoguchi's divine work "The Tale of the Rain Moon" also purifies the most everyday signs of life from the uncontrollable mysterious elements in the strange chaos. There is also Zhou Xingchi, who, in addition to laughing and cursing, always throws a very distrustful and extraordinarily strange glance at the world. Stephen chow
The Tale of the Rainy Moon
Some people also think that Fei Mu's masterpiece "Spring in a Small Town" is like a ghost film, with five people living in a corner, more like five wisps of lonely souls accompanying the vibration of the air, floating around. It can also be said that the fifth generation of Wu Ziniu and the sixth generation of Zhang Ming. A drop of water, a gust of wind, a faint look in our eyes can lead us elsewhere, let us swing between this life and the next life, hear in the ear is empty, and seeing is also a virtual trance.
Most horror films are about anxiety, such as facial anxiety ("Midnight Song"), age anxiety ("Orphanage"), environmental anxiety ("Lake Eden"), and creative anxiety ("The Shining" and "Patton Fink"). Further up, there will be personality anxiety and faith anxiety, such as Du Qifeng's "Big Guy" and "Detective".
The Divine Detective
Hitchcock is most concerned with identity anxiety, most of his films are about the doom caused by one person wanting to become another, and the marital anxiety sandwiched in it, such as "Butterfly Dream" and "Deep Doubt", is only the tip of the iceberg, and below the iceberg, the more turbulent river is unable to reconcile with itself, and the doubts about the whole world are the unfounded worries behind the shadow of the bow and snake.
"Deep Doubt"
Below, the film, like a container, bundles the major anxieties of human beings, that is, the 1945 British film "Night of the Dead".
Night of the Dead
The film is a collection of works, jointly completed by four British directors. Among them, Charles Clayton later directed the famous British comedy "A Fish Called Wanda", Robert Hammer became more famous, was once a regular at the Venice Film Festival, and his "Kindness and Crown" is an extremely important work in the history of British cinema. Their collaboration with two other directors made it difficult for me to tell the five stories told in the film, strictly speaking six, and which director was in charge.
But that shouldn't matter. Importantly, this short film set is clearly a psychological sample of Freud psychoanalysis, but the first four stories it presents, namely "Hearse Driver", "Christmas Party", "Ghost Mirror", and "Golf", are like an old legend that can be humorous, and the first three stories do not deal with the depths of human nature, and are not subject to the backlash under moral pressure.
The fourth story, "Golf", tells the story of two golfers who cheat on each other because they fall in love with the same woman. According to the people in the play - "too immoral", and in the flow of the story, the creators are like watching the fire from the other side, and do not want to write it as a cautionary tale. It is only when the "puppet who can speak belly" suddenly enters the field of vision that psychology must scan, but it is not only that.
It's a dream, and the structure of the whole film is a dream. A middle-aged man came to the country house as a guest, and there were six or seven people sitting back and forth in the house. The middle-aged man had seen them, but they had not met the middle-aged man, who said that he had met them in a dream, and that the time and place were highly consistent with a dream he had repeatedly made.
So people began to tell all kinds of horror stories they had encountered. It is a dream after another, and it is a dream in a dream, and because there is a dream that dominates all the dreams, we wake up forever. I have to think of our sage Zhuangzi, who became a butterfly in a dream, and when he woke up, he thought that what he was doing now was a dream made by a butterfly. It seems that life is not like a dream, but life is a dream.
In this way, it can neither be confirmed nor falsified. In this way, Freud's various interpretations of dreams are indispensable to emotional elements compared with conventional science, and according to the film, you have no evidence. As long as you tell the dream, there will inevitably be omissions and deviations. How do we analyze a "endgame" precisely and thoughtfully?
We are far from capable of installing a surveillance device in our minds, which shows that modern science can only explore the external world at best, and is helpless to our inner kingdom. There has always been a correspondence between the dreamer and the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was naturally incompetent, and he eventually died in a prophecy he did not believe, strangled.
As a classic thriller, I wasn't nervous about any of the images, and those sudden grotesque shapes could evoke my horror. If you go into my heart in a serious way, my attention will be distracted. But I personally prefer the so-called "deep" horror films, like this one. I like the film's literal translation of "Late Night", translated as "Night of death", naturally more eye-catching.
Each of the five stories is interesting, and I personally, obviously, will only love the last one, the fifth story.
Its narrator is the self-righteous psychiatrist, the first four, all of whom have love in arranging flowers or planting willows, and this one does not. And the continuation of the theme of the previous four stories, all involve the split of personality, that is, one person wants to be another person, I am not so afraid of death, so despotic, so despicable. In the end, he is still deeply immersed in the black hole of human nature and cannot extricate himself. So, the dream is here, not to comfort us, but to remind us like a mirror that you are not so perfect.
The fifth story, whose meaning is not as clear as the first four, is more and more dark and frightening because of the lack of words.
The duel between the two belly whisperers at the beginning, its rhythmic precision, the scheduling progression, is really impressive. The first person who thought that the young whisperer was depressed and unhappy because he was born Yu and He Shengliang. Seeing the end, it is not so simple to find. One person controls a puppet, and in turn, is swayed by a puppet, which is like the setting of too many robot movies. To some extent, the story also maintains a certain triangular relationship. Between the two whisperers and the puppet, they are mutually exclusive. The injured belly whisperer not only knew belly language, but was also estimated to be very dark. The fight in the hotel lobby, on the surface, he was doing peace, but maybe he was pulling a fight.
As soon as he appeared, he intended to disrupt the rhythm of the young whisperer's performance, and when he came, he pretended to cooperate with the other party. This puts the young whisperer's possession of the puppet in great danger. He destroyed the puppet. The film treats it as a scene of killing without blood but as horrific as it is. It is better to crush the jade than to be complete. It is also in this passage that the dilemma of our consciousness and training consciousness arises, but we are swallowed up by consciousness. When your possessiveness is difficult to contain, you are possessed by possessiveness.
The film was completed in 1945, and it is more or less reflective on the just-concluded World War II. The structural pressure that dominates the film is that when the listener and narrator merge into one, you can only repeat those thrilling stories in an endless cycle, until one day, your nerves begin to tire and you are no longer nervous about anything. Forgot to say the second story, the sweetest one.
And the little girl who told the story was also the first to leave the murder scene, to be precise, to leave that dream. The owner of the dream beat the girl, but they couldn't bear to fight. The dreamer did not shake hands with the little girl, as if he was most indifferent to her. At the end, you will find that there is a very complicated pity mixed here.