2016 can be regarded as a big year for horror genre films, with many excellent works of high quality emerging, at least one hand cannot count them. In addition to Wen Ziren's work "The Conjuring 2", which continues to expand for the "Conjuring Cinematic Universe", there are also films such as "Hold Your Breath", "The Witch", "After Turning Off the Lights", "Under the Shadow", and even China has contributed A rural theme of "Zhongxie". Of course, if you want to talk about sensory welfare, then I'm afraid it must be "The Corpse of an Unknown Woman".
Let's talk about welfare first. That year, there were two movies that used corpses to play new routines. One is "Swiss Army Knife Man". Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), who has grown into an uncle, plays a fart corpse. The autistic patient living on the isolated island regards him as a Swiss Army knife. Drinking water, chopping firewood, setting fires, and being able to serve as a boatman are almost omnipotent. And the other is "Unknown Female Corpse", previously unknown Irish actress Owen Katherine Kelly performed the most beautiful female corpse in history, with delicate face, fair skin, exquisite embossed, graceful undulating body , I don't know how many male audience's necrophilias have been drawn, and here I must pay tribute to the cast and crew who can still manage to shoot around her.
Of course, it is true that the benefits are coveted, but we still have to give full respect and admiration to Kelly, who is extremely dedicated and motionless throughout the process. Is acting a corpse acting? Certainly! Xing Ye told us in "The King of Comedy" that acting as a corpse also requires acting skills and literacy. Although some prosthetic limbs were used during filming, most of the time it was Kelly's live performance. According to the director, one of the main reasons for Kelly was selected because she understands yoga and can control her body and breathing very well. In the biased structure of "the most beautiful corpse", beauty is second, and acting like a corpse is the key.
The film begins with a bizarre homicide. In a closed house in Grantham, Virginia, everyone was bloodied and dead, but there was no sign of outsiders breaking into the house. Judging from the situation inside the house, the victims seemed to be trying to call for help or escape before dying. What made the police officer even more puzzled was that there was an unidentified, naked female corpse buried in the basement of the house. To find out the cause of death, officers took the body to the town's Tilton Crematorium. This crematorium is a privately run, nearly 100-year-old shop. It is now managed by Tilton and his son. In addition to cremation, it is also responsible for autopsy. It belongs to the ancestral arts of the Tilton family. The story began in the morgue of this old shop.
In fact, the director of this film, Andre Overlando, is also a rookie. It was after watching Wen Ziren's "The Conjuring" that he had the idea to make a horror film, but he didn't expect it to be an instant hit. The success of "Anonymous Female Corpse" is that it does not take the usual path. Although the welfare elements in similar films are often the usual tricks of horror films, the beauty of the female corpse is beautiful, and it is the story itself that affects the audience's heart. There is room for the director's narrative, and there is almost no scary way to see it at first glance. Instead, the details are used to pave the way for a terrifying atmosphere, giving people a feeling of being overwhelmed.
The first half of the story is retro and rigorous. The small town, the airtight morgue, the craftsmanship inherited from father and son, and the radio with occasional murmurs, have a taste of thirty years ago. The police officer asked to find out the cause of death of the woman's body that night, and Tilton and his son had to work overtime for the autopsy work. The paragraphs of the autopsy of the two are as detailed as textbooks, and each step is explained and analyzed, which not only allows the audience to understand the steps of the autopsy, but at the same time shows the mystery of the female corpse in front of everyone - this corpse. Judging from the color of the eyes, it seems that he has been dead for many days, but the limbs and torso are not stiff; the body has no scars on the outside, but in fact, the wrists and ankles are fractured, the tongue is cut, the lower body is torn, the lungs are severely burned, and the heart and other organs are also covered. scars; what is even more surprising is that the autopsy was like a recently dead blood rushing, a paralyzing purple mandala was found in the stomach, and a cloth wrapped around the teeth of a corpse's own. strip.
There are all kinds of signs that the girl was tortured before her death, but there are all kinds of incomprehensible things. As the father and son found more and more clues, all kinds of supernatural horror visions began to appear: blood oozing from the refrigerator, a light bulb in the room burst, the father's wrist was scratched, the family cat died in the ventilation duct, The other three corpses in the morgue disappeared, and the son accidentally hacked his girlfriend to death... In fact, a fly crawling out of the nostrils of the woman's corpse earlier was a symbol of disaster in the Bible, indicating that the killing was about to be staged.
Stories about corpses usually go in two directions, either purely and directly creating fear, or with a bleak setting. Take the ancient Chinese "Strange Tales from a Liaozhai" as an example, in which "The Corpse Change" belongs to the former, and "Gongsun Jiuniang" belongs to the latter. The same is true of today's horror movies, and they are increasingly abandoning that cheap sensory stimulation, instead incorporating cultural anxiety into horror, or speaking for society, human nature, and even a certain group of people, reward and recourse .
The same is true for The Unknown Corpse. The Tiltons, who were close to a dead end by death, studied the mysterious code on the skin of the woman's corpse and the handwriting on the cloth strip in the stomach, and finally found the chapter in "Bible Leviticus" "Whether men and women, whether they are ghosts, or Those who practice witchcraft will always put them to death, they will be stoned to death, and the blame will be placed on them." With the addition of keywords such as "seventeenth century" and "New England", the answer is ready to emerge. The female corpse was a victim of the "witch hunt" in North America before her death. The "witch hunt" swept across Europe for three hundred years (and later spread to North America), and the torture of countless innocent women was the darkest page in the history of human civilization. Coincidentally, another high-scoring horror film from 2016, The Witches, is also about witches and faith in New England at the end of the seventeenth century. Relatively speaking, this film just borrowed this material.
Tilton and his son died tragically in the end, and it is thought that the people in the room at the beginning of the film also died under the supernatural power of the female corpse. The girl who was unjustly killed in the "Witch Hunt" died without dying, and came to claim her life over more than three centuries. It stands to reason that the injustice has the first debt and the owner. Virginia is 108,000 miles away from the New England area in the northeastern United States. It really doesn't make sense. But on the other hand, how wrong is the so-called "witch" represented by this female corpse! What's the point of view for them? Going deeper, I am afraid that the screenwriter's intention is not to drink alcohol, but to the cultural anxiety and conflict that are difficult to reconcile.
In fact, some clues can be seen from the setting of the Tilton father and son in the film. The father loves autopsy work and follows traditional habits, but the son does not want to inherit the family business, and he wants to look at the outside world. Father was reluctant. Moreover, this superficial and life-like conflict is further reflected in the conflict of world views. The father abides by the principles of medicine and always looks for scientific explanations in the face of visions, while the son is more inclined to think that it is caused by supernatural forces. It's like a father and son, let alone a female corpse who swears by the world? If it is placed in the context of today's world, it will become more and more obvious. The differences and conflicts between groups divided by race, culture, and various ideological orientations are constantly intensifying, and there is a trend of "either you die or I die". From this point of view, perhaps the subtext of "The Unknown Female Corpse" is the most terrifying.
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