There is a scene in "Annabel 2: Birth": Linda, played by Lulu Wilson, sits in the room, waiting for the darkness deep in the corridor outside the door, holding a ball gun in her hand and making a "bang" Shot a "bullet" into the darkness. Everything is quiet. After the "bang", there is the sound of the ball hitting the ground, followed by the sound of Linda turning the handle of the gun-it will drive the string attached to the ball to the only one" The bullet" retracted the barrel.
The scene where Linda confronts the darkness is a bit similar to the scene where the actor sits in the hut waiting for the death in " Reaper Is Coming ". I personally like this situation very much. They are like sculptures, condensing all the momentum potential energy before the climax eruption with a unique "stillness" , which makes people breathless.
Although like the god of death, the demons in "Annabel 2" are also pervasive, but at least they are still visible and tangible. We have seen its bright eyes hidden in the dark in movies, and its dark and sharp minions in the mutation of Scarecrow. Sometimes it turns into the figure of a young girl who died young, and sometimes it reveals even more weird and terrifying. modeling.
In fact, the demon in "Annabel 2" has always been in a state of unidentified form. Most of the time, it shows the spirituality of manipulating others that is common in the evil possession movies, but in some other clips, It has acquired a kind of "hybrid technique" of crossing type :
1. The girl's phantom crawled rapidly under the warehouse planks, grabbing Janice who fell on the ground, and spitting out black matter into her mouth, thereby robbing her of her body—the sense of sight of Robert Kirkman's " Exorcist Ronin ". But the question is, isn’t the subject vomiting "black juice" a phantom here ? Why does it need substantial contact and excess?
2. The scarecrow tied up with weeds gains "life", and the twisted clothes are full of demonic bodies. I have no intention to question whether the demon’s parasitism of inanimate objects is reasonable. I am just a little curious: the Annabel doll that appears as the title has always been (at least in the "Call of Souls" series) the demon parasitized entity, so why In this movie, it has left the doll in a state of inaction all the time, and it has to create another phantom of a young girl who died prematurely?
Horror movies are facing similar creative dilemmas in contemporary and another type of novel-mystery fiction. I recently finished reading Shichen’s " Mirror Prison Island Incident ". In the postscript comments, his friend Lu Yehua wrote:
When you start inference creation, it is as if you are in the arena of Olympus. The same mode must be conceived with novel settings, and the same mystery must be conceived of different tricks. The excellent tricks written by others are blocked. The high wall in front of you, and even your previous creations may become a ceiling that hinders you. If you want to write it down, you must be faster, stronger, and more novel.
For horror movies, such challenges also exist. In the same mode, you have to conceive novel settings and tricks to scare your audience. When facing genre creation, the audience is always accustomed to challenging creators easily, no matter whether such a confrontation is fair or not.
For readers of mystery novels, it seems that seeing through the tricks in the book before the author reveals the secrets in advance seems to be able to suggest to themselves (or others) that they have superior intelligence, so for the audience of horror movies, they remain contemptuous from beginning to end. Can the determination of calmness and sneer show oneself (or others) the courage of oneself?
This certainly seems ridiculous. Moreover, the quality of courage is not so easy to prove compared to intelligence, and it does not seem to have a direct and effective superior effect. "Calling the Soul" is not more creative than Wen Ziren's "Latent", he is just more practical and reliable to practice some traditional effective skills, and Wen Ziren's style is not created by Wen Ziren, but he just happens to be An influential example nearby.
Both written and unwritten laws of terror have taught us that the invisible threats that are approaching will always be more scary than the visible terror. But some people also think that only seeing is believing and stubbornly complaining about the invisible (the killing without seeing the blood) is the director's delusion, dullness and boredom.
Janice trapped in the elevator chair was suddenly sucked up by the devil, but the camera panned down to the floor of the floor. After a while , one of Janice’s shoes fell, and then a while later —I couldn’t help but think of the joke about hearing a guest kick off a shoe from the guest upstairs in the middle of the night. I think some people will always wait for another one. Only the shoes were kicked off, and the other people gradually fell asleep while waiting anxiously. However, the director of "Annabel 2" still chose to let Janice's body fall immediately to end the storyboard.
But I still like the treatment of this passage. In these unspoken links, the director named David seems quite calm. In other places, he seemed a little hesitant, perhaps because of the challenge of dealing with the precedent we just discussed. He is like Linda in his lens, throwing an empty gun into the darkness meaninglessly, but if anyone accepts his invitation and catches the pinball, the cable may be immediately tightened, and there will be a precarious situation under the battle between the two sides. Cracking effect-the girl's phantom is just such an example.
The room where Annabel was first sealed in the movie is also an interesting contradiction.
In the follow-up flashbacks, we learned that it was the seal that the parents finally discovered that the returned daughter was indeed a demon, and invited two priests to come and implement the exorcism. The compartment was filled with broken pages of the scriptures. Before the door was closed, we saw the two priests continue to pour holy water on the doll according to the standard procedure. (This may explain why the parents in the movie were brutally killed by the devil. One joint was twisted by the root, the other was torn in two and nailed to the wall, while the girls in other orphanages were as far as possible" Treat with tenderness" because there is resentment that has been banned for many years.)
Unlike "Calling the Soul", "Annabel 2" lacks the means and characters to fight against the devil, and all the characters in the movie can only passively wait for the doom to come. And this group of clergy figures that appeared in flashbacks became one of the only powers that could be compared with (and undoubtedly won temporarily), but in the timeline of the occurrence, the priest was in an absent position. At the beginning of the movie, he drove this group of orphanage children led by nuns to this family, thinking about it afterwards, as if sending sheep into the mouth of a tiger . On the second day after the matter was over, he reappeared in anguish, with a funny tone of "open light", which was very different from the identity that he had always been on the front line of fighting with the devil in his impression.
Another interesting setting is Janice's disability.
In the movie, the nun comforted her that the devil would only invade the fragile mind, and had nothing to do with the incompleteness of your body. Considering that Lulu, who played by her good sister Linda , had a similar experience before in another supernatural event related to divination , we can easily think that maybe the devil might find another way if this is not possible. , And the strong will of the disabled can also be shown in the movie. But the facts did not develop as we expected.
Although David is very good at hanging people's appetite, he still gives the most visible appearance of the devil in the film (although there are some subtle setting vacillations as mentioned above), he may be a "teacher" Wen Ziren's "Calling the Soul" series and "Latent" series are confused (or deliberately opening up the background connection between the two). And recently (more precisely, yesterday when I wrote this article) I watched another movie called " It comes at night ", facing the same darkness, we always "don’t know" the danger. Things . My neighbor described it like this: "'it' can be any small thing that can destroy humanity in the dark."
It is in this sense that the two newly watched movies are intertwined under the same dark field lens. We can imagine the breakthrough of horror movies. It may need to induce the audience to stop being a brave spectator. It is to put yourself in the dark to sink into the darkness, but not to be a victim, but to play the other side wrestling with the characters in the movie, and finally shudder when you find yourself in the darkness.
But I quickly thought that when we were watching a murderous movie, even if we appreciate the development of the story from the subjective perspective of the murderer, it would not produce any guilt and cautious feelings. So or there is still not much possibility of this road. Every creator who faces it directly still needs to work hard to deal with the challenges of the past high walls, with a "strong ambition" (Lu Yehua commented on Shichen's "Mirror Prison Island Incident").
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