From the perspective of narrative and story performance, "Midnight Bell" can be said to be an excellent horror film, especially in Asia, and its best part is the excavation of the collective subconscious in East Asia, which is actually the source of fear .
The key to unlocking the code of the story lies in the epilogue. In order to save her son, the heroine decides to make her father a scapegoat. There are two important collective subconscious minds in it - the plot of the murder of the father and the plot of the love of the son, and the support behind these two plots is the incestuous desire.
The key to the story is not Sadako, but the well where Sadako is located. After Sadako's death, her consciousness was attached to the well, and the well implanted Sadako's resentment into her subconscious through the videotape. Seven days later, the subconscious attacked, and the person would surely die.
Why is Sadako's grievance so great? The root of this lies in the repression of sexual instinct and the final incestuous desire, the object of which is the projection of his father. And her father's unavoidable killing completely cut off the possibility of her desire to realize, and eventually evolved into a soaring resentment clinging to the well.
This is the most successful part of this film, the excavation of the incestuous desire in the collective subconscious, which is the most feared place for East Asians. The huge wave of horror films after the film circulated all over East Asia is enough to show that this is the dark side of the collective subconscious of the entire East Asian region.
This incestuous desire is not only reflected in the relationship between Sadako and her father, but also in the relationship between the heroine and her father. After the heroine's incestuous desire for her father cannot be satisfied, she projects it on her son. At the beginning of the film, the heroine asks her son to pull the zipper for herself, which is the most direct manifestation.
The heroine and Sadako are actually two sides of the same body, representing the human self and shadow. Sadako is the release after the incest desire cannot be satisfied, and the heroine is the repression after the incest desire cannot be satisfied. And it's not so much their father who creates this shadow, it's more about themselves.
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