The idea of "After Turning Off the Lights" came from a short film made by the director before. After his wife turned off the lights and saw ghosts, she turned the lights on and off a few times. to his wife. The creativity of this short film is quite good. It uses the common fears of ghosts, the fear of the dark, and the shadow of childhood, which are shared by the audience, and supplemented by a daily scene that everyone has, so it naturally became popular on the Internet. Of course, this idea cannot be said to be original after the lights are turned off. After all, ghosts and darkness in horror films have always coexisted. Turning off the lights to see ghosts is also the basic part of ghost films, but the director after turning off the lights pulled this common bridge away. After perfecting it a little further, the effect came out. So a feature film version was launched with the support of the production company. Initially, this film was promoted under the name of Wen Ziren. Since the "Chainsaw 1", Wen Ziren has gradually risen in the Hollywood horror film industry, and released many horror films, although the quality has always been consistent. They are all in the middle and lower range, but maybe because of their Chinese blood, they are also very popular in my dynasty. Although I have been out of the horror film industry for many years, I am still full of expectations for this feature film based on the director's previous short film and the trailer of this film, but unfortunately I am extremely disappointed after watching it.
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The previous short film only had a simple scene, but the feature film has to be shot for 80 minutes anyway, and as a film, no matter the story is good or bad, at least there must be a complete story. So the director limited the story to a family of four. The heroine's mother met a eccentric girl with mind-reading skills when she was a child in a mental hospital. She was influenced by the girl and recognized her as her best friend. The strange girl also suffered from a deadly disease that prevented her from seeing light, and was later burned to death by an incandescent lamp in an oversight by researchers. After that, the strange girl exists in the brain of the heroine's mother in the form of consciousness. By the time the movie starts, this female ghost can already materialize in the dark and has deadly lethality.
Saying this, it seems that although the setting of the story is cliché, it seems to be quite interesting, but in the process of watching it, there is no such feeling at all. Because the protagonist of the film is the daughter of the female ghost's friend, and the story revolves around her, which makes it impossible for the story to directly touch the core of the horror - the female ghost, so the whole plot has been in a state of ignorance, unable to truly Make the most of the horror effect of this black lamp ghost.
Although the original short film was short, it captured several terrifying points that either disappeared from the film or were diluted by redundant plots. For example, a ghost that was motionless in the dark suddenly moved to the front. The scene is scary not because of the ghosts in the dark, but because of the sudden movement of the ghosts. It's not even because of the movement of the ghost, because the audience will subconsciously guess whether the ghost will move in this kind of scene, just don't know when. This is a psychological battle between the movie and the audience on the level of fear. Maybe you know that the ghost will move after you turn on the light, but the ghost will not move when the switch is turned on or closed. When the ghost is tilted in the direction that the ghost will not move, the sudden movement of the ghost after turning on the light will naturally startle you. But the basic psychological game process of this interesting horror film in the short film is almost absent. Of course, at the beginning of the film, the director pulled his wife and replayed the game of turning the lights on and off, but in the end the ghost did not move, and then this very psychologically terrifying bridge basically lost its terrifying significance, and become a means of defense. The main characters of the plot that followed basically fell into the pit of family dramas - the heroine's stepfather was killed for no reason, the heroine and mother couldn't get along and picked up the younger brother. In the process, the family encountered female ghosts one after another. At the end of the story, they all returned to their homes, and the heroine's mother committed suicide and the female ghost died.
You can also see from this outline that "After Turning Off the Lights" is actually still a film with family feelings as its theme, and most of the film's length is also devoted to the heroine, and the female ghost is not a vicious one. Extremely Specter, he did not encircle and suppress all the protagonists in the film without interruption, so the whole film has been advancing very gently. Especially in the later part of the film, the female ghost is portrayed as a very realistic existence, so the illusory and unknown horror brought by the ghost is greatly reduced. It seems that even the director and screenwriter have not thought about whether this female ghost is to be materialized or illusory. Besides turning off the lights to be scary, there are other scary bridges that can be used. At the end of the film, there is a section of an ultraviolet basement, which could have maximized the horror of darkness, but the director chose Chang Ming's ultraviolet rays and a real female ghost, which could not create a sense of horror at all.
Of course, the most breakthrough and most worth mentioning of this film is that the heroine has a boyfriend with a normal IQ who escapes the horror film routine, and does not act in the usual way of insulting the audience's IQ in horror films, thus winning many audiences. This is probably the reason why the film has not received too many negative reviews. But it is obvious that this also weakens the deterrent power of female ghosts, which does more harm than good.
Darkness is the source of human fear, and this film is supposed to be about darkness, but the director doesn't know how to use darkness to mobilize the audience's fear. Whether it's the female ghosts who look like Rips and Edward Scissorhands, or the female ghosts who look like Sadako's lost sisters, these most terrifying elements have become the irrelevant background of the story. From the beginning to the end, the director is still the best at turning on and off the lights in the short film. Neither the director nor the screenwriter has enough ability to expand it into a feature film that is as interesting as the short film. Therefore, "After Turning Off the Lights" Basically a typical short-filled feature film - one bright idea, and a whole bunch of boring stuff left.
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