It takes some sympathy to evaluate ghost films, especially a ghost film many years ago. Many times people forget one thing: Ghost movies challenge the time-sensitive human emotion of "fear", and fear comes from unknown and uncertainty, which means that when the elements that trigger fear are known and well-known to the audience And after it is confirmed, it is difficult to produce the same degree of fear. It’s as if we’ve never been numb to romance movies because our lovers eventually become married, nor will we turn a blind eye to war movies because of the stories that still exude humanity under the shadow of death, but when we see a group of movies for the second time Dead young people have to play pen fairy in the old house in the deserted village, we will definitely find it particularly boring, and even succeed in guessing which hapless guy should be the first to die. Therefore, if you only evaluate the quality of a ghost film based on the sense of "not scary", or based on technical parameters such as perseverance, sound effects, plot, etc., then almost no ghost film can stand the time. test. Having said that, I have to mention the "Sixth Sense". Every time I see "Every day.", I can't help crying again, but obviously the classic of this ghost film is that it is not the respect earned by technology, and even its original intention is not to trigger Fear, and more like creating a family film through the cloak of a ghost film.
"The Grudge Videotape Edition" is not a family movie, its goal is to be scary. However, even though the shape and appearance of Kayako are outdated today, I still think it is a great ghost film. Even if one day "Midnight Ring" and its inherited "Mountain Village Old Corpse" cease to exist as a ghost film, "The Grudge Videotape Version" should still have a name, and it may even be more suitable than the "The Grudge" movie version. .
Compared with the Grudge series, "Midnight Ring" is actually a sci-fi film about viruses that replicate and evolve continuously through new media. When the scary element has a theoretical basis and the ghost's behavior has a reason, then it is actually less scary. It really doesn't work, there is a vaccine, right? As long as there is a root cause, there will eventually be a solution. Looking at Hong Kong ghost movies of the same period or Korean ghost movies and Thai ghost movies of the first ten years of the new century, it is nothing more than revenge or wanting to "re-behave" through the flesh of a living person. In the final analysis, ghosts are scary, and they have to be drawn. As long as they know what the ghosts are, the audience must have a way to digest and solve its existence.
What is the Kayakoto diagram? The scariest part of this movie is that scaring people to death is not good for Jaya. Her grievances only exist in that house. The cursed people will not spread her grievances to the whole world, and the loss of life did not make Kay coconut stronger; and her indiscriminate harm is even more touching. Confused, because there is no difference between the treatment of a crush and a stranger, it seems that no matter who dies, it will not make her feel more comfortable. The unreasonable harm can maintain the pure fear from the unknown.
The better part of the videotape version than the movie version is that it makes scary scare more unreasonable and direct, and even through this refinement, it enhances the absurd fear. Each victim is an independent chapter, each name must die, the timeline is deliberately disrupted, logic can't help at all, and Gayako himself has upgraded his fear. When she was a child, she was not accepted by her classmates, and she did not dare to express her favorites. When she grew up, she became a victim of domestic violence. Obviously, when she was alive, she never lived for herself. It is revealed in the film that the only little bit of resistance she made to this world, that is, she madly wrote down her feelings about her crush in her diary, which in turn became the fuse of all misfortunes. But did she find herself after she died? no. The most exciting thing about this movie is that Kayako actually is a ghost and doesn't know what she wants.
Don't forget, the unknown triggers fear. If the source of fear doesn't know what kind of result you want to pursue, then naturally you don't know how to get away.
Intuitively, it may be possible to understand the grievances as harsh and ruthless accusations against social problems such as native family, bullying, and domestic violence. But when I think of a problem that cannot be solved before death, there will be no answer after death. This is the most scary place.
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I once had a low-level misunderstanding of "The Grudge Videotape Edition". Many years ago, every time I saw this title on Maze, I only extracted the two keywords "The Grudge" and "Videotape", so that I always thought it was a combination of "The Grudge" and "Midnight Ring". The mixed chaos is something like "Freddy vs. Jason" that looks like a bad movie by its name. Of course, who would have thought that a brain fragment like "Sadako vs. Kayako" would really come out many years later. Thanks for this misunderstanding, it gave me the opportunity to watch this movie many years later, and I didn't just sigh "not scary".
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