Just like the American horror films we are more and more familiar with, together with the Spanish and Australian horror films that have emerged in recent years, today's horror films have a tendency to carry forward a certain horror model. From the selection and design of the protagonist, to the hints; from the only hope of escape after being cornered, to the usual imagery to reveal the real fear experienced by everyone in the physical world; from the injection of pure and exciting horror elements to the final evil The evil ending that trumps all. It has become easier and easier for us to straighten out this horror path, and we are also familiar with the logic that it brings is not so new. With its release time of "2008", "Ruin" effortlessly squeezed into our list of new films. However, after watching it, it is not difficult to find that we still don't need to work hard to watch this collection of fresh shots, from protecting brain cells. From this point of view, the movie is pretty decent.
The film tells the story of four young Americans who were on vacation in Cancun, Mexico, when they met a German who was planning to go to the ruins to find their brothers. The four followed the German and six of their partners to the ruins. In the end, no one escaped the ruins.
According to the traditional horror mode, the injection of horror elements naturally begins with the choice of the protagonist. One of the most common designs is young people, young men and women in college. With such a role comes a context in which moments of youth, impulsiveness, adventure, etc. can have unintended consequences; but the good news is that these young men clearly have a wit beyond their youth. Based on this, the storyline is very easy to advance step by step, and we can follow their footsteps into a wasteland that we may not have the guts to enter, and this time the wasteland was chosen as "ruins". Germans looking for relatives and American college students looking for excitement constitute the protagonists. Of course, as the story progresses, we suddenly find that the leader we thought—the German young man is not the ultimate leader. The real protagonist is still It was four American college students with equal sex ratios, and the leader of the smooth "usurpation" was the medical student. However, no matter how the role is set, the group protagonist in horror mode will inevitably have a leader, and the leader is either calm and omniscient, or seemingly omniscient and calm... The Germans lead with more knowledge of excavation of ruins Four American college students who knew nothing about excavation skills came to the ruins, but the director seemed to change his mind suddenly, the American superiority must be re-emphasized, and the Germans' doom began. The young German was the first person to be seriously injured after the accident, so he performed the rest of his scene on a stretcher and was strangled by a plant in his mouth. Of course, any logical and common sense group will inevitably have a leadership role, so no matter how this American boy accidentally replaces the rigorous and professional German, we are very used to hoping for one. The desire to emerge as a leader, this role change is not much new.
The footage begins to follow the usual horror-movie lines. At the beginning of the expedition, the tribes on horseback confronted the ruins, but the difficulties were only just beginning, and the difficulties were exaggerated by the language barrier. Representatives of advanced civilizations had to be imprisoned in the ruins of ancient civilizations, losing all contact with the outside world. At the same time, the ruins were guarded by alien tribes. The camera shot repeatedly and frequently echoed on the plants, constantly reminding the mysterious characteristics of plants. At the same time, corpses surrounded by plants began to appear frequently. The group of young people had to stage round after round of wilderness survival among these plants. The superposition of all the coincidences makes it difficult to run through a specially designed scenario route, and the protagonist of the shot can only follow the director's preset path step by step without any openness. They had to try to find the cell phone in the well, they had to go down to rescue the Germans, they had to operate on the Germans... the repeated hints of the horror of uncertainty and the slow clarity of the only way to survive these stylized tricks Skillfully entangled in most of the film's passages, and this proficiency is nothing more than the basic work of filming in horror mode.
For a long time, different directors have collectively and unconsciously formed a "horror mode" that we can easily sort out in their own horror movies. For example, they are all filled with the fear of "isolation" without exception. From the star hotel trapped on top of the snow in the most classic "The Shining", the wooden house deep in the suburbs in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", the car imprisoned by four trees in "Horror Pulp Fiction", "The Pinhole Hotel" "The suburban motel in "The Saw", the unknown time and space that was completely cut off in "The Chainsaw", to the apartment building under martial law in the recent "Death Video", to the alien guarded ruins in "The Ruins"... Horror movies, especially as In psychological horror movies, "isolation" is increasingly playing an important role in the film as a fixed element. The consequences of "isolation" are the source of "fear"—the uncertainty of peril and the unprecedented loneliness of being alone. Therefore, we are drawn into horror movies by more figurative factors related to this; as in "Ruins": strange countries, strangers, strange plants, strange tribes, strange ruins, strange voices... all of which are in the "uncertainty" Sex” is entangled in the creation. The most representative is the mobile phone with no signal. "No cell phone" puts young people in a violent dilemma of isolation. The imagery of the mobile phone keeps recurring in various horror movies, and it is hard to say whether it comes from our attachment to this modern means of communication, or from the lingering fear of the high technology behind it. In such a large city where the community of the past has been destroyed, individuals emerge as four isolated young men and women on top of the ruins. The first phenomenon brought about by the city is unfamiliar neighbors. We can no longer feel the tenderness of "distant relatives are not as good as near neighbors" as in the past. On the contrary, our kinship is both more attached and more fragile. Just like in the film, when four young men and women tried to get in touch with the outside world, they were easily cut off from the possibility of communication, and this was achieved through mobile phones with no signal.
As a horror movie that does not forget the experience of its predecessors, "Ruin" still does not hesitate to put "blood", the linear and exciting primary element of horror, into the plot. Two operations in the open air and a "self-knife cutting" are interspersed in the middle and late stages of the film as a compensation for psychological fear that is difficult to achieve. I think the reason why many people don't like horror movies is also here: the bloody elements are viewed as a dessert without sympathy, in addition to satisfying the alternative desire to kill other lives, it does not make us feel Respect for the body of life itself. In my opinion, the bloody element itself is abused in most cases, adding a chip of exasperation to the method of resorting to fear, the result is more of a sudden stimulation of the retina. The amputation in Ruin doesn't seem like it should be performed with such great effort outdoors and given an animal-like close-up of broken bones and rotten flesh; it denigrates life's imprint of civilization.
Another common element of horror is the difficult and pressing time pressure. The difficult time is highlighted, and the long and difficult sense of depression is combined with a slowly drawn and difficult plot. The remaining blood, the broken spine, the plants spreading in the body, etc. all aggravate the sense of urgency of time. The intact body and the intact life are destroyed again and again, and the end of the predicament time is still the broken corpse, reflecting the plants. success. "Ruins" still repeats the evil cycle of evil that will still exist on the time axis, but this ending is the reality. Even if horror movies have formed their own inherent patterns, this ending, in my opinion, should continue the most. part.
Aside from the excellent horror tradition of "evil endings", in my opinion, there is still a tender and compassionate portrayal of psychological fear in stylized horror movies. They have always paid great attention to the excavation of psychological factors. In an unpredictable predicament, four young people staged a case of group transmission in a relatively relaxed and even procrastinated movie scene; anxiety and fear of uncertainty, mutual infection of fear, A series of speech acts that may appear in group communication, such as the positive intervention of rational leaders on group emotions, is placed as the focus of the narrative in this section.
If it is said that the whole film is strictly abiding by the "law of terror", then the director's efforts in the above attempt to express the panic of the group are still worthy of recognition, even if this explanation is too simple, such as the medical student as the leader of the freshman has no The retreating sacrificial spirit has an effortless open-mindedness to the desire to survive. At times, this kind of unrelenting suicidal behavior can seem extremely unreal and irrelevant to the choice of outcome, but at least I can't see the medical student's nostalgia for life. After all, the end of life is different from the beginning of the next game after game over is so easy and simple, let it be.
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