Text/Zeng Ku rong
The total number of words is about 3000 words
Graph source network, which can cause discomfort.
About half a year ago, I praised "The Wind and the Wind" like this: it is as beautiful as poetry.
In my opinion, the new version of "Stormy Wind" is no longer in the category of horror films, but more like a genre film in which the director adds literature, politics, feminism and psychology to a gorgeous picture sprinkled with blood.
When the comments were polarized, I was particularly curious about how the public would view the feminism in the parsing film, but I couldn't see any answer that matched my heart. From this point of view, the new version of "Wind Gusts" can be briefly described as:
False gods rule over women, give power to believers, believers despise men with contempt and ridicule, and constantly oppress young women, sacrificing false gods with young women; the true gods are equal, freeing women from more than a hundred years of false god rule and eliminating suffering for suffering men.
If the 1977 version of "Stormy Wind" is a perfect fusion of graphics, beauty, and soundtrack, then 2018's "Stormy Wind" is Luca Guadagnino reconstructing an awakening of consciousness about women based on the story of 77 years.
The reason why "Stormy" is mentioned before discussing "A Midsummer Night's Horror" is that as horror films become more and more popular, directors are more and more willing to express their ideas in the film, and even add some cultural elements worthy of scrutiny to the established concept of "horror".
This is true of Tetsuya Nakajima's "Here Comes", as is Luca Guadagino's "Storm of Shadows", and so is "A Midsummer Night's Horror". This is a happy thing, in a sense, horror films are experiencing the Renaissance, from the long-standing jump scare model to the cultural depth and meticulousness of the last century.
Unlike Tetsuya Nakajima and Luca Guadagnino, who have been practicing for many years, Ali Esther began to enter people's attention through "Heredity of Doom". As a new horror director, two horror masterpieces in two years deserve encouragement and praise, what is important is what will he bring to us again next?
Unlike the evil thriller of Heredity of Doom, A Midsummer Night's Horror highlights the visual beauty and the madness of the content.
How would you rate A Midsummer Night's Horror? Personally, I think it's a crazy weird collective unconscious dream, and I started by saying that "Windward Gusts" is a poem, and then the film is a gorgeous and crazy painting.
Set against the backdrop of Sweden's evil tribes, a story of a terrifying civilization and the core of its relationship unfolds.
What is this story about? Let's go one by one.
As the two main characters of the story, the male and female protagonists are not a sweet couple. After four years together, the male protagonist has long forgotten the birthday of the female protagonist, and even more forgotten how long they have been together.
At the beginning of the film, the bipolar sister is out of control, and the female protagonist cannot contact her, crying and calling the male protagonist. The male protagonist was helpless to be perfunctory, because the female protagonist frequently called him because his sister's affairs were out of control.
In this regard, the man's friend said: "You should decisively dump her." "
"But I don't want to regret it later." He was also bored with his girlfriend's uneasiness, but he didn't want to regret it later.
In the face of the heroine's questioning, he said that he had already apologized. But the heroine does not pay.
"You didn't apologize, you just said I'm sorry. It sounds like 'that's it, no way'. "
One side tries to sort it out, and the other side thinks it doesn't matter. This allowed the young Pelle of the evil tribe to take advantage of it step by step to induce the heroine to integrate into the tribe.
When the polite Pelle celebrates her birthday, the indifferent boyfriend instantly contrasts.
During this period, the sister's illness caused the death of her parents, and the heroine became a lonely person. But the male protagonist does not seem to have any emotions, just let the female protagonist accompany him to Sweden for a vacation and continue to devote himself to the paper.
1. Crazy civilization
"Man's life is like the four seasons, before the age of eighteen is spring, eighteen to thirty-six years old is summer, thirty-six to fifty-four years old is autumn, fifty-four to seventy-two years old is winter."
"What about after the age of seventy-two?" The heroine asked Pelle curiously, and Pelle told her plainly that it was death.
The group did not care, but the next day at the cliff festival learned why they died after the age of seventy-two and were afraid of it.
Two old men who had reached the age of seventy-two invariably chose to jump off a cliff to die, and one of them did not die after jumping off the cliff, and the local residents came forward in shame and anger and used the hammer of doctrine to kill him completely.
The female leader of the tribe said: "Compared to fear, dying in pain and humiliation, we are willing to give our lives to stop aging, because aging is meaningless." "
Many people say that this is a cult film, and judging from the content expressed in the film, it is more like a conservative and crazy civilization. They followed the old rules, dressed in costumes that have been passed down to this day, and had their own Bible.
In the midsummer, when the sun shines for more than 15 hours, they worship the gods in a way that is not understood by others, dance on the grass, and continue to write their Bibles for the sages in the deformity of inbreeding.
Is this sick tribe out of touch with modern times? No, they also go out to study, even in institutions of higher learning, and politely communicate with friends. But as long as primitive civilization is involved, no inviolability is tolerated.
2. The collective unconscious
In 1922, Jung proposed the concept of the collective unconscious. Simply put, it is a cultural recognition of a group by an individual formed by social, cultural, and even genetic inheritance.
This concept can explain to some extent what cultural differences are, and people in different cultures hold different ideas to continue their lives.
In the process of the heroine's continuous integration into the tribe, this unconscious influence makes her smile at the end, at this time, she has become a member of the tribe.
The bipolar sister went to Huangquan with her parents, and her boyfriend was cold and cowardly for many years, and her boyfriend's friends always held a certain contempt for her. And the people of the tribe told her, "We are a family, a family in the true sense of the word." "
From the moment she stepped into the land, the tribal priest had already begun this hint. Politely say hello to the other passengers and welcome home with a warm hug.
Consciously terrified of what the local residents are doing, she unconsciously receives their "kindness" and eventually becomes their true family.
1. Life
The tribal youth said: "A person's life is like four seasons, and after the cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter, it is death." "The heroine is puzzled.
The tribal chiefess said: "Instead of dying in pain, fear and humiliation, we chose to give our lives to stop aging." The heroine began to have her own feelings, which was the first step in her identification with the tribal culture, because witnessing the tragic death of her family, she began to re-explore the meaning of life.
2. Medicine, food
At the beginning of the sister's bipolar attack, the heroine took cloxapam, a drug suitable for anxiety and insomnia. After arriving at the tribe, close-ups of food run through almost the entire film.
The food of the male protagonist is always more special, which is obvious, and it is very frightening to think about whether the food of the local residents is also a problem?
Can those weird and distorted pictures really be seen by the heroine?
One can be hypothesized: the source of this civilization, the chiefs used "food" to control the people, and passed on from generation to generation led to the continuation of this crazy horror.
3. Dreams
The assumptions of drugs and food allow for a scientific, more rigorous explanation of the distorted dream-like images. It is a civilization that rules the ethnic group with drugs, and at the end of the film two local people become sacrificed, and the priest asks them to take some kind of medicine to make themselves less afraid. But when the flames burned on their bodies, they still screamed in pain.
Really not afraid? Is it really not painful?
4. Details
When they first arrived at this tribe, a certain shot pointed to a strange and evil painting, and the ending of the male protagonist was laid at this time.
Every time the heroine collapsed, she cried alone away from the crowd, and the last time she witnessed the male protagonist's ugly state out of control and crying, the sisters around her accompanied her in pain. When their sufferings are connected, they naturally become a family.
The most shocking scene in the film is when the heroine cries and sheds tears, and the women gathered around her cry together with her crying.
"We are real family." So your pain and joy are synchronized with the race, and a kind of crazy tribalism is vividly displayed.
Another sexual scene is very similar to the ending of the 18th edition of "Storm of Shadows", but this scene of "Storm of Shadows" has a strong sense of female awakening; while "A Midsummer Night's Horror" is more like an ancient and primitive reproduction.
Graphically, A Midsummer Night's Horror is smoother and more sophisticated than Doom Heredity, constantly rotating and distorting the camera effects that make the story look particularly weird.
However, the ability to tell the story is weaker and boring than the previous work.
Horror movies have begun to undergo a certain transformation, and directors have tacitly agreed to expand from popcorn-style commercialization to esoteric literary essence. This is not only a test of the director himself, but also a test of whether the audience can develop from the previous fast and refreshing movie-watching experience to being willing to understand the in-depth content of the story.
While Wen Ziren is developing the Soul Conjuring Universe, it is not impossible for other directors to develop their own horror universes.
Back to today's topic, "A Midsummer Night's Horror" is a movie for literary lovers, if you want to experience a simple and rough thriller effect, then you who didn't like "Dark Wind" a year ago will still not like "A Midsummer Night's Horror".
It's not thrilling enough, it's not fierce enough, but it's worth savoring.