Anyone familiar with Martin Scorsese knows that in addition to his status as a top director, he is also a veteran film fan with a considerable amount of movies.
In martin scorses' "favorite 35 movies" list previously compiled by the American independent film media Indie Wire, the works of horror films accounted for nearly 1/3, which surprised that Lao Ma was also a horror fan.
After all, in his directing career, there is basically no such type of work, with more thriller elements, perhaps only "Cape of Horror" and "Forbidden Island".
"Confinement Island" work photo
In 2009, Martin Scorsese's personal "Top Ten Horror Films" (a total of 11 films) also highly coincided with his favorite 35 films (only 1 did not enter), of which Hitchcock's "Horrors" ranked 10th, which is one of the two films to be said this time.
It is the psychological thriller "Innocent People" directed by British director Jack Clayton.
The innocent man poster
Adapted from the novella "The Screws Are Tightening" published by American novelist Henry James (1843-1916), "The Screws Are Tightening" was well received by readers for more than a century, translated into 15 languages and sold well in more than 30 countries. Stephen King hailed it as one of only two great supernatural novels of the past 100 years, the other being Shirley Jackson's The Evil House, an adaptation of the film of the same name that was the first of the old horse's "Horror Movie Top 10" titles.
The novel was adapted into a Broadway stage play in 1950 and later adapted by John Frankheimer (director of Ronin) into the TELEVISION film "The Injustice of Bilu" starring Ingrid Bergman ("Casablanca") in 1959.
In 1961, Jack Clayton adapted the screenplay of the stage play and brought it to the big screen, with Deborah Koull playing Miss Giddens, the "governess" in the film.
Twentieth Century Fox, which has now been acquired by Disney, was the owner of the script at the time, so it invested in the film.
"Innocent People" is highly regarded by many directors, and Martin Scorsese commented: "The film adaptation is very faithful to the original and successful, and the meticulous action and flawless shots in the film make the fear from the picture go deep and thorough." French New Wave director François Truffaut ("Four Hundred Blows") said: "This is the best British film since Hitchcock left For Hollywood". It is also one of the favorite films of Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth.
Douban 7.9, IMDb 7.8, Rotten Tomatoes 94% freshness and MTC 88 ratings, as well as the late famous American film critic Pauline Kyle: "This is the best horror film I've ever seen" also established its status as a classic horror film in film history.
Especially when I heard that there are two works adapted from this novel at the same time this year, I think many people are looking forward to it.
The two films are the horror film "Tighten Up" and the second season of the Netflix series "Ghost Invasion", which is expected to air in the second half of the year.
Screw Up poster
Unfortunately, after the release of "Tighten" at the beginning of the year, the word of mouth was really unbearable, and it has become a strong candidate for the bad film of the year, and the cost of 14 million US dollars only sold less than 20 million US dollars at the box office, so "double loss", as the producer of this film, Steven Spielberg estimated that his face could not hang up.
"Tighten Up" tells the story of a young woman Kate who is hired to a manor and becomes a tutor for two orphans, Miles and Flora, who live here, but from the moment she comes to the manor, all kinds of supernatural events have never stopped...
The reason why "Innocent People" has become a classic is largely due to the ambiguity of the narrative that is talked about.
For everything that happens in the manor, whether it is the heroine's hallucination or supernatural phenomenon, whether she is the perpetrator or the victim, the film always maintains a sense of ambiguity and ambiguity, and the final open-ended ending also allows the audience to have a lot of imagination and interpretation space.
In order for the film to have a deeper and broader dimension of discussion, a qualified ambiguous narrative, it is necessary to do a good job of details, foreshadowing and appropriate blankness, both certainty and ambiguity, so that there will be no contradiction and conflict between each other, so that it is enough to support the establishment of any interpretation.
Innocent Man is clearly a success in this regard, and in the end you can understand either Giddens' hallucination that drove Flora crazy and killed Miles, or Miles and Flora were possessed by the ghosts of the dead former butler and teacher, and in the end Miles failed to survive the exorcism.
In contrast, "Tightening" did not shoot the charm of the original book, nor did it shoot the ambiguity of "Innocent People", and the whole adaptation gave people a very clumsy feeling.
From the moment Kate stepped into the manor, she tried to create a horror atmosphere with a full of frightening passages, but the scary techniques and bridge design used were very low-level, such as Kate's first report to go to the stables to greet Flora, which was too mysterious and completely unnecessary.
And the continuous, not to make people gasp for breath at first glance, but also let the film lose the sense of gradual layering. The problem is, it's not scary yet.
The front is obviously using haunted thinking to advance the plot, but in the end, it hopes to form multiple interpretations with a double-layered ending, which is really inexplicable, but only leaves a very one-way interpretation, everything is actually Kate inherited the hallucinations produced by her mother's mental illness and madness, such an ending is not convincing in the absence of detailed support.
In addition, the exquisite and thoughtful compositional images are also the highlights of "Innocent People" that deserve to be taken to detail.
Because Foss insisted on shooting in a widescreen format at the time, director Clayton and the cinematographer designed a large number of deep-focus lenses for this purpose, making full use of the width of the frame to compose the picture, and giving the function to assist the narrative and guide the audience's emotions.
These scenes, which somewhat ignore the rationality of perspective and have a strong sense of depth, are, to be honest, more three-dimensional than most of today's so-called 3D movies.
For example, in some paragraphs of character dialogue, instead of using the conventional front and back to switch the perspective, but to cut the picture into two halves, forming a front and back scene of the separation of the sense of space, the characters in the foreground as the narrative subject, with a closer and enlarged local close-up closer to the audience, such a visual effect will firmly absorb the audience's attention, more susceptible to the emotional infection of the narrative subject, substituted into it.
In contrast, apart from the factors of shooting equipment and technological upgrades, the audiovisual language of "Tighten" can only be considered decent at best, and there is nothing particularly commendable.
As for the closest degree of completion of "Tightening" to "Innocent People", it may only be performance.
The siblings in "Tighten Up" are played by Finn Woofad and Brooklyn Prince, both of whom have been eye-catching child stars in recent years.
Finn Woofad's characters in Stranger Things and Joker Return are both ghostly and hilarious genres.
This time, the Miles he played was full of mystery from the first appearance, with the kind of spoiled rich young master personality, not listening to the teachings, but also like to play pranks and tricks, and Kate has always been contradictory, conflicting, but at the same time a little vague ambiguous feelings for her, the character image created is completely different from the previous work.
And after the 10th generation of Brooklyn Prince, many people were impressed by her performance in "Florida Paradise", especially the crying scene that finally made people see their hearts, and the young age is really very good at acting.
Stills from "Florida Paradise"
Flora, played this time, is very ghostly most of the time, but when she needs to show panic, depth, hidden thoughts and secrets, she also plays a good role.
And when the movie was filmed, it is estimated that it just lost her teeth, and the image of this missing corner of the front teeth is also very suitable for the naughty personality that she should have at this age, and it looks more cute.
The performance of the two of them is also the only place where this movie can still be done.
With Stephen King's praise of the novel and the 61-year version of the film admired by many directors in the past, this adaptation of "Tighten" can be said to be a complete failure, from the story to the video audio-visual is not desirable, the shape of the gothic, the appearance of a pair of horror films, but also filmed "The Handmaid's Tale" of the female director Floria Sergis Mondy, this car overturned a bit seriously.
Fortunately, there is another season 2 adaptation of this novel this year.
I have to say that the novels adapted from the two seasons of this drama have a lot of success.
With a good reputation (Douban and IMDb both 8.7 points), the scary and touching Season 1 of Ghost Invasion, adapted from Shirley Jackson's Evil House, and season 2 from Henry James's Screws Tightening, are exactly the only two great supernatural novels in the past 100 years that Stephen King has praised.
Ghost Invasion Season 1 poster
It can be said that Mike Flanagan, as a director and screenwriter, is really very good at choosing, and last year he also just directed the sequel to "The Shining" adapted from Stephen King's work, "Doctor Sleep", and he is still very confident about the quality of his production.
Finally, if you haven't seen this horror movie yet, then I recommend you go straight to "Innocent People" first.
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Author: Hui-Movie