Jordan Peele, a top 80s B-horror fan. Just watch his latest film [us].
There are thousands of miles of tunnels under the continental United States, some abandoned subway systems, unused maintenance channels, abandoned mines...
This is the opening setting for Jordan Peele's new horror film [Us] .
To enter the world in [us], you must first accept this setting, because it is about the human shock caused by the "monster" living in the underground world entering the above world.
(Spoilers below) It's just that the "monster" this time is nothing else, it's just a clone who looks exactly like everyone.
In 2017, Jordan Peele amazed countless audiences with his debut film [Escape from the Dead Town], a dark horse, regardless of whether he is in the horror film industry or in the mainstream of Hollywood.
The most direct proof is that [Escape from the Dead Town] was nominated for four Oscars that year, and finally won the best original screenplay.
This time, the new film [We] has the same black style and the same many metaphors. The difference is that the director has packed a lot of private goods at a glance.
From the [Jaws] T-shirts on little boys to the T-shirts little girls get with scenes from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" MV , to the classic horror video tapes next to the TV, Jordan Peele's history in the 1970s and 1980s The horror film "Golden Age" took a lot of things to use.
The story told is futuristic. The government has developed a "fetter system" and created a "shadow" in the underground world to control the citizens on the ground. However, because of the failure, the "shadow" was controlled by humans.
So [our] story is essentially a futuristic allegory of "Underground Monsters", but the director who loves the 1980s puts the timeline back in the 80s and now.
Paying tribute to the 1980s, finding many wonderful connections with the B-level horror films of the 80s in the movie has become another fun of watching movies.
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[We] started with a piece of foreplay on Santa Cruz Beach in 1986.
Within 15 minutes of being separated from her parents, a little girl named Adelaide strayed into a wonderful room full of mirrors, where she met another real girl who looked exactly like herself.
Then, the time line came to the present. Adelaide, who had grown up, had a perfect family. When he revisited the hometown with her husband and a pair of children, everything began to develop into a strange unknown.
One night, a family of four with the same face as them appeared in the driveway in front of the door, wearing red clothes, holding hands and looking strange, until the four of them broke into the door with scissors and sharp blades in their hands.
The big counterattack in the underground world has begun.
In the slasher films of the 1980s, there always seemed to be this kind of foreplay .
The first part [Friday the 13th] in 1980 , started with a man and woman cheating in a camp where both men and women were hacked to death, and then the time line came to the "now" a few years later.
In 1978, Carpenter's first movie [Moonlight Panic] started from the first point of view of a boy. He got a sharp knife from the kitchen, went upstairs step by step, picked up the mask on the ground, put it on, and then put it on. The sharp knife in his hand stabbed at the naked sister.
Then, many years later, the timeline reaches the "now" where the story is about to unfold.
It's almost become an unwritten rule of hack and slash movies, that violence in the past leads to trauma, which is reawakened or activated years later in the "now".
So, the context of the past is always very important.
Jordan Peele's [us] is actually similar in many ways to the hack and slash movies that reached their peak in the 1980s, especially in the second half of the movie, where the underground shadows come to the ground to hack and slash each "self".
Shadows appeared quietly in red with a pair of scissors in hand, and among middle-class white men who were particularly sluggish to red flags, a scissors could kill them.
Hack and slash movies may have first taken inspiration from Hitchcock's [Psycho] bathroom murder scene, so they're always unexpectedly fascinated by cold weapons like sharp knives.
There is no need for more high-tech weapons, and there is no need for too many fancy decorations, or slitting the throat or breaking the belly.
In the 1980s, at least three terrifying murderers, Miles, Jason, and Freddy, were born.
They are from the most classic horror films in the 1980s [Moonlight Panic], [Friday the 13th] and [Nightmare Street] series. The three series have created their own style from the first one, and then over the decades, countless series of almost identical films have been made.
Speaking of hack and slash movies, first of all we have to mention John Carpenter's [Moonlight Panic ] .
If you juxtapose [Moonlight Panic] and [Psycho] as one of the greatest horror films in film history, it's no surprise. After all, it was [Psycho] that brought terror into the bathroom, and [Moonlight Panic] brought terror to middle-class neighborhoods in the suburbs.
The murderer Miles in [Moonlight Panic], he is not a deadly monster like [Alien] in a spaceship, not a danger lurking in the backcountry like [Texas Chainsaw Massacre], he just wanders away Among the middle-class communities, following children and young people, killing on Halloween night has become the nightmare of a generation.
The white pullover mask, wearing a technical uniform, holding a sharp knife, slashing at the young flesh indifferently and frantically, has become the classic screen image of Miles.
Let's take a look at the [Friday the 13th] series that appeared after learning [Moonlight Panic]. The same is true for the character of Jason——
Impressive white hockey mask, dirty outdoor clothes, black gloves and white sharp knife, taciturn, hands up and down, at the same time with some supernatural mysterious power to guide.
There [Nightmare on Elm Street] in the devil Freddy, always in the Elm Street kids coming out of a dream, between a dirty brown leather gloves out terrible as scissors-like claws.
In [us], it is the omnipotent scissors in the hands of the replicators, the gloves before slaughtering with scissors, and the uniform red overalls.
These, naturally, come from the classic routines of hack and slash movies in the 1980s.
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But it's not just hack and slash that [we] pay homage to, there are a lot of weird movies from the '80s that still show up in movies in all sorts of weird ways.
For example, at the beginning of the movie, a TV is playing a hand-in-hand advertisement of the non-profit organization "Hands Across America", and next to the TV, the vertical film tapes include a 1984 [Underground Monster] and 85 A "Seven Treasures" of the year .
What these two films have in common is that they are both films about underworld fantasy . From the very beginning, [we] hinted at the underworld it was built on.
Another one that appeared is the 1983 movie [Double-Brained Man] , a sci-fi comedy that combines elements of old American B-level horror movies , and the setting that two lives share the same soul comes from this movie .
The way two twin girls died in a white family pays homage to the 1980 horror classic [The Shining] .
There is also Santa Cruz Beach, which has an important role in [Us], and the same one in the classic vampire cult film [Ghostbusters] in 1987 .
There is even a line in [us] "they are shooting a movie over the carousel" , which implies that [Ghostbusters] will be released a year later, after all, the foreplay in [us] is set right It is 1986.
Of course, the 1980s in Hollywood was a magical era of strange films.
The directors of the 1970s, Spielberg, De Palma, George Romero, and the aforementioned Carpenter, continued to shoot their fantasy and weird movies in the 1980s.
In addition, David Cronenberg made B-movie classics like [Murder on Video] (1983) and [The Flies] (1986), and John Landis made [American Werewolf in London] ( 1981), Sam Raimi made the first [Ghosts] (1981), Clive Barker made [Ghosts and Cannibals] (1987), Stuart Gordon made [Alive] Corpse] (1985) …
In the 1980s, with the rise of the video tape market, various low-cost B-movies and independent films were on the rise, forming a wave of counter-cultural films.
Filmmakers are breaking through the sensory limits of horror movies with new special effects, the scale of blood and viscera flying together, and the vivid and bizarre imagination.
They are also consciously or unconsciously in the film, showing the era notes of the 80s.
[Moonlight Panic], [Friday the 13th], the perverted murderers who roam the world and slaughter the world but are rarely punished in hack and slash movies are like a product of the Reagan economy in the 1980s. The widening gap between the rich and the poor, the broken social contract, racism, the drug epidemic, the AIDS crisis...
The 1980s was a typical "my era", where everyone only cared about money, cared about themselves, and was independent and isolated. The 1980s were not heaven on earth, even for the middle class who thought they could get away with it.
So stories like [Moonlight and Panic] are set in middle-class neighborhoods, in big, single-family houses in the suburbs.
Reminiscent of the white family in [us], listening to music and drinking wine in the big cozy house, accompanied by a beautiful wife, completely oblivious to the impending danger, dying instantly in indulgent joy .
There are also satires against authorities such as the government and the police. The hostess shouted the artificial intelligence "call the police" before she died, but the hip-hop music of "fuck the police" was automatically played in the room.
In the '80s [Underground Monster], it was the corrupt government's mishandling of toxic waste that led to New Yorkers being plundered from the streets by burrowing cannibals.
In today's [us], it is the government's "fetter system" control experiment that failed, giving birth to a huge and resentful underground shadow, returning to the ground to plunder the world.
Jordan Peele's retro 80s, not only in form, but also "segregation and division" in the same connotation, class, gender, and color.
The division between the above-ground and the below-ground world caused by the gap between the rich and the poor seems to be a futuristic fable, but it is actually an ongoing and happening present.
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Author / Curly Hair
This article was first published on the WeChat public account [Broken Word]
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