After watching the whole film, my mood is a bit complicated, and I have been thinking in my heart, where is the development of horror films going?
The director's horror film technique inherits the fine tradition of Japanese horror film production. Twelve minutes into the opening session, I had turned the headphones very loudly so that I could hear every effect sound and the faint soundtrack. A high-level and excellent horror film should give the audience this kind of trust, not abuse the physical fear created by the sound effects, and let the audience feel relieved to give their ears to the director.
In addition to the sound, the design of the picture is not bad. The fixed lens, the unsmooth feeling when shaking, effectively conveys a sense of surveillance, either from ghosts or modern appliances. The coordination of internal scheduling and camera movement is the main way to create horror effects in this film - the camera is fixed, the characters leave, but the camera does not move with it. After a short blank, you know that the characters will definitely come back, and something will definitely come back. waiting for him.
Lighting and color use are more closely tied to the theme, which is a plus. The world in which humans and technology live together is always dark, and the only bright colors are green plants, which symbolize that the world is actually beautiful, and it is people who are alienated. However, lighting and composition have similar shortcomings, that is, the expressiveness and design feel are a little too much. It can be seen from the large amount of indoor lighting that the director likes to use pseudo-natural light sources to shape the picture, but it seems too neat in the process. If you look closely, you will find that almost every fixed indoor shot is neatly divided into several parts by the light... The composition is also the same. The distribution of the front and rear background and the center of gravity of the picture is too neat, which once gave me the illusion of watching the MV again. This screen arrangement must be intentional by the director, because it is related to the theme, and the part related to it is also what I don't like very much in the theme.
The things to be discussed in the film are still relatively simple, and even many places are directly explained with lines, and there is no foreshadowing before the appearance of these lines, as if they were just forcibly expressed by the actors. This also leads to the whole film is full of a strong sense of fable. It's more of a fable than a dark fairy tale.
The theme of the film is about the surveillance of people by modern technology and the loneliness of modern people. In a large number of shots, the monitor screen directly appeared, and the scene was also filled with computers and monitors, which was simply a reproduction of Nam June Paik's installation art. In addition to the isolation of people from technology, the loneliness of modern people is more of a group emotion. Everyone doesn't care about each other and is indifferent to each other. The alienation of the industrial system to modern people is vividly displayed through death. Only when facing death will people discover their loneliness, ask back what is wrong, and ask for help. In the words of Camus, "realizing one's connection to the world and starting to think about it" - this is the absurd.
But the above two themes are either obviously stacked on the camera lens, or are directly expressed by the lines, and are lines that are separated from the narrative. This leads to a deep sense of overhead and combing, leaving the audience immersed in the fog and lost in purely expressive shots.
Now back to the question asked at the beginning, how should horror films develop? Advanced horror films use advanced film techniques to create psychological depression and bring psychological fear. Arousing reflection on reality through fear - an elegant method of extremes. However, ordinary narrative techniques are becoming more and more difficult to bring enough fear to modern audiences. Those directors who do not want to be in low-level physiological fear may have to follow the method in "The Loop", dig deep into the social nature of the theme, and create it through expressive methods. A symbolic atmosphere to evoke common negative emotions. The result can easily become, like this film, an intractable world of coding—a dull fable.
I have been thinking about this problem for a long time and feel that this is not the solution. At the same time, I think that the fear potential in narrative has not been fully tapped. China has a huge treasure of folk fear information that has not been fully tapped. The previous "Zhongxie" was a small step. Secondly, combined with psychology, the excavation of the human fear element is not thorough enough, which I also gained confidence from Ito Junji's comics. Where will the future of horror movies go, maybe it can only drift into the distance like the humans at the end of the movie.
Finally, say something. When I saw Masaharu Fukuyama at the beginning, I was overjoyed, but it turned out that it was just a cameo... Also, the actress who played Chunjiang was too good-looking~
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