As a psychoanalysis lover, I am also very interested in this film. Because I found that any movie that makes people especially scary is bound to reveal the psychological secrets in the subconscious.
In the subconscious, people will use images as metaphors and symbols to express some meanings that are different from the superficial meanings. The most obvious example is dreams, which are superficially absurd and have no logic. However, if we understand psychology, we can know that these seemingly inexplicable things actually express the psychology of this person's subconscious. If a person dreams of flying in the sky with a person of the opposite sex, it is illogical. However, this may be a sign that he wants to have sex with the opposite sex, and flying together can represent love, because that happy feeling is like flying.
Dreams are visualized, and so are movies, so movies can also express subconscious psychology in such a symbolic way.
As the screenwriter of the movie, he doesn't understand the psychology of the subconscious. He just wants to tell a scary story, but he wants to achieve the effect that the scarier the better. To have a terrifying effect, the stories he tells must be the ones that frighten him the most, and the ones that make the audience most easily infected with fear. He knows that this kind of plot will make people terrifying, but he doesn't know why such a plot will make people terrifying, so his movies show the subconscious in the most authentic way. This movie is like a writer's nightmare. So we can use psychological methods to interpret this movie just like interpreting a dream.
Psychological theories can be tricky to understand, so let's start straight with the story of the midnight bell. I'll start by telling the story in brief, then use subconscious psychology to analyze the story to see what psychological secrets it reveals.
At the beginning of the midnight bell, it was discovered that several people died strangely in a row. When they died, they all looked like they had their eyes wide open and their expressions were extremely fearful. All the dead have seen the same tape. There is a legend that after watching this video, you will receive a phone call, and no one speaks on the phone. After that, 7 days later, the person who watched the video was sure to die.
A female reporter, Asagawa, investigates the matter. She finds the hotel where the deceased went, and finds a strange video tape in the hotel. She watched the video, and there was something inexplicable in the video. At first there is a mirror, then a woman's image appears in the mirror. Then there is a newspaper. Then came a well in the wild. After watching the video, Asakawa also received a strange and silent phone call.
Asakawa didn't believe in the mystery, so he showed the video to a friend and asked him to help her find clues. However, what happened later made Asakawa more and more believe that the legend was true, which meant that he would die 7 days after watching the video. Unfortunately, her son also watched the video, and the son said that a sister he knew showed him it. And this sister died after watching this video.
Asakawa and the friend follow the clues. The newspaper on the video recorded a volcanic eruption. They came to the village where the volcano erupted and found that the mirror and the woman on the video were a person with special abilities in the village. She had predicted that the volcano would erupt. The woman was deceased, and her daughter also had psychic abilities. I do not know life and death. In the search for the daughter, a secret was revealed in a mysterious video that showed the daughter being pushed into the well on the video by her own father and held down in the well with a slate lid. So, they went to the well in time to fish out the girl's remains and bring the guilty father to court.
They thought it was over and no one would die. However, not so. Asakawa's boyfriend who had seen the video suddenly died. He was frightened to death by seeing a horrific scene. He saw a female ghost in white crawling out of the well in the video, climbed out of the TV, and came to him. She pushed back her long hair to reveal her face, and her eyes had almost no black eyeballs.
Asakawa wondered why he watched the video, and he didn't die for 7 days, but this friend died. In the video, the ghost of this friend appears, suggesting the answer "If you show the video to other people, you won't die yourself." Asakawa began to worry about his son, who was approaching the 7-day deadline. what to do? Who are you looking for to be your son's scapegoat?
At the end of the movie, Asakawa called his father and told him that he would take his grandson to see him.
Using psychological methods, I can explain almost every detail in this movie, it has a symbolic meaning. Using the method of psychology, I found that this movie is a manifestation of a kind of psychological conflict of people.
Let us also analyze step by step, understand the psychology represented by this "female ghost", and understand her motives and behaviors.
The video is broadcast on TV. When we analyze a dream, if there is a TV. Psychologists would consider that to be a symbol of the subconscious, or a symbol of our innermost being. Video recording is a record of the past, so it is a symbol of memory.
The phone can also symbolize the subconscious.
Here, it clearly symbolizes the memory of the girl in the well.
Isn't the girl in the well in the story dead, how can there be any memory? This may seem unreasonable, but it is reasonable in symbolism: to say in subconscious symbolism that a person is dead does not actually mean that the person is physically dead. It just means "the heart is dead", and we usually say "sorrow is greater than the death of the heart", which is what we mean. The death means she has a serious mental handicap. This psychological disorder is of course related to subconscious memory.
So, what memory does she have in her subconscious?
On the surface, it is scattered, with the appearance of his mother, reports of earthquakes, and the well where he died.
Asakawa and the friend follow the clues. It's as if we psychologists are doing psychological counseling for this girl, trying to find the root cause of her mental disorder. Through layers of clues, they found the root cause, because she was killed in the well by her father.
What does "killed in the well" signify?
The well is shaped like a female vagina and is closed. Being killed by his father in this well represents a psychological conflict common to psychologists—the psychological desire for incest and the fear of incest.
In the movie, it is not said why the father killed his daughter. And from a psychoanalytical point of view, we can know what happened: the father had a sexual desire for his daughter, and perhaps he also aroused her daughter's sexual consciousness. Then, he threw her into the well judging how many meanings this act has. Representative on the one hand. The reason is that the shape of the well is similar to that of a female vagina. Moreover, in women's sexual fantasies, sex is sometimes associated with abuse and subjugation. This scenario is a father who abuses and subjugates his daughter. Another meaning is to represent depression. Because the daughter was locked in the well. Moreover, there is a cover on the well, which is also representative of depression. The closedness of the well is also related to the fear of incest, because the greatest harm of incestuous emotion is to close people's emotions, and their emotions are not directed to outsiders but to their own family members.
In the movie, while searching for the girl's remains in the well. The girl's skeleton reached out and grabbed Asakawa's arm. However, Asakawa, who should have been frightened, did not show fear. She held the skeleton in her arms like comforting a child.
In fact it is also a symbol. The appearance of the skeleton symbolizes catharsis, and Asakawa is comforting her.
The process of the death of the boyfriend who watched the video also needs to be explained. A female ghost in white crawled out of the well in the video and climbed out of the TV. A TV influence comes out of TV, which represents "the line between fantasy and reality is blurred". What is inside the TV represents imagination or fantasy, and outside the TV is the real world. If a person's imagination and reality are not clear, this person is a serious mental illness patient.
The mentally ill are all "female ghosts" who take their hallucinations as real things . What's so scary about this? She didn't have blood all over her face, she didn't stick her tongue out, she just showed her eyes. Why scare a man to death?
In fact, anyone who has studied psychoanalytical psychology knows why it is the most terrifying sight to see eyes without black eyeballs when they open their long hair.
Because it's also related to incest, symbolizing seeing something that shouldn't be seen. Long hair symbolizes the hair on the genitals, while eyes without black eyeballs symbolize the female genitals.
The greatest fear of a person is the fear of having an incestuous desire.
At the end of the movie, Asakawa called his father and told him that he would take his grandson to see him. what to do. The movie doesn't say. However, we can reasonably guess that she wants her son to show his father the video. This is the greatest fear of jujube murder.
The so-called "female ghost" conspiracy to say that you will die after watching it for 7 days, and that you will not die if you let someone else do it as a surrogate ghost. There is no such law at all, and the "female ghost" told them that there is such a law. The purpose is the last plot, to let the heroine do what she wants to do, judging to kill her father.
This episode reflects her hatred for her father.
Synthesizing the whole movie, our psychoanalytic conclusion is that this movie is illustrating the psychological experience of a girl with a mental disorder.
She may have been sexually harassed by her father, and perhaps subconsciously, she has a sexual desire for her father and a huge anger towards her father. These emotions were suppressed by her father.
Asakawa is what this girl looks like when she comes of age, and she finds the root of her mental block (finds the remains). Comfort the victim and let her do catharsis (dirty water in the well is a symbol of catharsis). However, she didn't solve her own problems, so she still had a huge anger towards her father subconsciously.
Her psyche affected her male friend, causing the man to also arouse the fear of incest, and even go mad because of it.
Do you feel terrified after watching the midnight bell? Are these horrific images haunting your mind? If so, you also have a fear of incest. Although you don't consciously understand what the midnight bell is saying, your subconscious is infected by it, and it evokes the same psychological conflict in you.
This is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, the master psychoanalyst Freud pointed out that everyone has more or less such psychological conflicts. However, the vast majority of people can gradually emerge from this conflict without developing mental illness.
If there is no psychology, I am afraid that no one will know that there is such a psychological secret in this horror movie.
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