When it comes to terror, five words can't help but fly in the sky - "domestic horror film",
For a long time, there can be no ghosts, no sperm, it seems to be a fig leaf that is worse than one domestic horror film,
It's not scary, and pornography comes together, whether it's posters or announcements, domestic terrorists invariably use crooked brains and take crooked paths.
But without ghosts, is it really bad to make a horror movie?
Not necessarily, today Time will tell you about a ghost-free-
ghost story
Ghost Stories
It's not hype or black, the title of the film is indeed called "Ghost Story", and it is also a ghost story.
It comes from the rotten country we are familiar with and is adapted from the well-known British stage play "Ghost Story". The movie follows the advantages of stage play, eliminating the "ghosts" produced by computer CG special effects, and there is no particularly eerie set, and there is no real ghost town such as "Kunchiyan" and "Jingcheng No. 81" as support.
To put it bluntly, its horror is all about skill.
Several leading actors are all too familiar-
Peanut Martin Freeman , who has always followed behind Cuan Fu , this time alone plays the role of a Shinto suicide widower,
Alex Lawther, who has a dazzling performance in "To His World", is even more talented, playing an adolescent boy who accidentally hits a ghost.
The story is actually quite simple. Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a staunch atheist who only believes what he sees with his eyes, vows to fight all monsters, and hosts a show called "Psychic Cheating" , dedicated to exposing those who cheat people out of money under the guise of psychics.
As a result, while exposing the conspiracy, he was also "gently" invited to step down again and again.
Strange things happen from a package,
The owner of this package is Cameron, his idol when he was a child, and also his enlightenment teacher who debunked the psychic.
Before receiving the letter, Cameron disappeared mysteriously, so Goodman who received the letter was surprised, why did Cameron want to see himself?
With full of curiosity, Goodman and Cameron met, and the result was a venomous scolding,
After scolding, Cameron still gave Goodman three supernatural events that he could not explain, and let him find out the truth.
The first case, about Night Watchman Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse).
Tony's job is to be on duty in an abandoned women's mental hospital (I don't know why this place is on duty), and at 3:45 in the morning, the duty room suddenly lost power.
When I got closer, I saw that the wire was pulled. After returning to the office for a while, the power went out again.
When I went to plug it in this time, Tony saw Wolverine's scratches on the generator——
This time he didn't go back, but patrolled the whole building with the lights on. During the inspection process, I stumbled into a compartment full of dolls. The scary thing was that something covered with a floral cloth was moving.
Just when Tony turned around and wanted to run, the door was suddenly locked from the outside, and a yellow child figure shouted "Dad" and staggered towards him.
Then hug him and slowly put rotting fingers into his mouth...
The second case concerns the boy Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawson).
The child was a little nervous, the door was locked six or seven times, and the parents stood sullenly by the sink, motionless,
During the process of entering the room, Goodman heard that there were other people in the attic, but Simon assured him that no one was there and let him go out to see,
The room was covered with various portraits of the devil Satan. It was obviously hot, but the boy was still shivering from the cold.
It turns out that Simon was frightened like this because of an incident a long time ago. Once he failed an exam, he didn't dare to tell his parents that he played until late at night without a driver's license, and didn't want to bump into a strange thing in the deep mountains and forests.
That's right, the head of the sheep looks like a god of death. The key point is that this thing was not killed, but came alive and got into the car.
The next day, Goodman went to investigate the incident, but found nothing. He took it for granted that Simon was under too much pressure and had hallucinations.
As a result, when I got into the car, I saw my dying self in the reflection of the car window...
The third case is Mike Pridel (Peanuts), a super-rich widower,
He and his wife Maria have never had children. After many tests of IVF, they finally became pregnant with a child, but they were accidentally admitted to the hospital at the age of seven months.
At this time, Mike was at home alone, and strange things always happened, such as the folded diaper suddenly flying out,
Or some bottles and jars suddenly stand up by themselves,
The most incredible thing is that the career was smooth sailing, but Mike, who lost his wife and daughter, suddenly committed suicide after calmly describing all this to Goodman.
The stunned and confused Goodman was left at a loss.
This is the end of the three cases, but a look at the progress bar: WTF? !
The story is far from over.
As a film adaptation of a stage play, "Ghost Story" almost maintains all the advantages of stage play. You will easily find that the whole film uses a very neat three-act play, with a very strong sense of stage play.
A certain amount of plot advancement is completed in each scene, especially the scene transition that is revealed at the end. You can almost imagine the transition of several layers of curtains and backgrounds when it is used as a stage play.
This actually results in the relative linearity of the three stories. If the director intends to show off his skills, it is obvious that he can narrate in multiple lines, disrupt the composition, and tell a "Memento"-style story, but instead of doing this, the director uses a textbook-style shooting method, which shows that he is very concerned about his directing method. confidence,
To a certain extent, such narrative logic places the audience in a fixed-point viewing position. All audiences will have the illusion of watching the stage play, and will not be "burned" by the messy clues. After the story is deconstructed, it is very It is easy to understand the director's intentions and the ingenuity of the whole story. For domestic horror films, it is simply a template.
Although the film is shot in the style of a stage play, it does not mean that it is not a "movie". On the contrary, the wonderful photography techniques in the film play a crucial role in the creation of the artistry and horror atmosphere of the film itself.
The whole movie has a very textured British sense of lens, needless to say, just a few pictures can be seen,
What I want to say is the conveyance of the horror atmosphere in the film.
The director only used two methods to completely bring the audience into the horror situation set by the movie. The first one is the close-up .
In the case of Tony the Night's Watch, just after the shot was cut out, it was his yellowed fingers and the dial of his watch, which almost occupied the entire frame of the scene, with a full sense of crampedness.
And the audience is especially easy to take the close-up objects in the movie as the main body and bring in their own emotions. For example, when they see Tony's distorted face because of fear,
Or seeing Simon's horrified expression after hitting a monster,
Sometimes the sight of a human face twitching with fear is more terrifying to the viewer than the sight of a CG monster.
The second is out of focus . The out of focus is used to the extreme in the film. When Goodman first approached Cameron, he was sitting on a bench by the sea when he received the case. implying the truth of the story,
And Peanut's out-of-focus back view after his wife was admitted to the hospital shows that all this will develop in a strange direction.
Of course, good photography techniques are auxiliary,
"Ghost Story" is good because of its extremely sophisticated story structure.
Seemingly three unrelated cases are actually linked together by many small details.
These details are like a scavenger hunt in a horror story. While the audience experiences the thrill of adrenaline rush, they have to use their brains to arrange and combine these details.
It will be discovered at the end that these three stories are actually one person and one thing.
Time may wish to take everyone to sort out the strange details of each story, so as to deconstruct the story after sorting out.
First, look at the time .
It is not difficult for a careful audience to find that the three stories take place at 3:45, whether it is in the early morning or in the afternoon.
The time in the Tony case was clearly informed by the parties,
In Simon's case, you need to look for it. Let's take a look at the clock on the wall opposite his parents.
In Mike's case, it's easier to find, whether it's his own words,
Or a luxurious clock that occupies half of the frame,
Different cases, different spaces, the same time, obviously, this is either a dream story like Inception, or a terrifying memory of a certain party.
Second, looking at the numbers ,
In the prologue at the beginning of the film, a series of numbers appear,
The three cases are also full of numbers without any regularity. Goodman looked for Cameron for the first time and stopped in front of several aluminum shutter doors.
Comparing these two pictures, do you see anything?
And Cameron's house, a small single room like an RV, has a house number——
In Tony's case, Tony was walking through the abandoned corridor with electric lights on, and these numbers were also where the light could reach. The worst thing is that the cubicle where he was finally trapped and damned, the house number was exactly 92.
In the Simon case, the house number of Simon's house is obviously also deliberate.
Then there is the character , or rather, a hooded shadow.
This dark shadow appeared behind Cameron from the very beginning——
Then, in the painting on the wall of Simon's house,
After that, in the wilderness where Mike and Goodman met,
Finally, there are some details that are unclear and unclear.
For example, in the Tony case, Tony claimed that his daughter had "locked in syndrome", and only the eyes could move all over the body.
But there is a shot below, Goodman stares at his father, who seems to be suffering from this disease-
For example, in the first case, the ghost who harassed Tony was a child in yellow,
In the third case, there happened to be an identical toy in the cradle that Mike prepared for his daughter.
For another example, in the photo that Goodman found in Simon's Corridor, a boy in red was holding a dead bird in his hand.
In the first case, the little girl in yellow was on her right hand...
These explicit details can be found by watching the movie carefully.
In fact, there are hidden ones, such as the protagonists of the three cases, the family has problems, the daughter is ill, the parents are not in harmony, and the marriage fails .
Did you find it? These three stories are actually about one person, the protagonist Good Man.
The whole film is actually a near-death experience when Goodman attempted suicide. The so-called near-death experience is the illusion of projecting life events and real experiences together when dying, especially when the characters around him will appear in these life fragments.
So all the stories are connected, it's Goodman's own story, the curtains in front of me from time to time,
Or the nurses who walked past the third floor of the attic of Simon's house,
This is real.
Guess the story should be like this-
Goodman was bullied as a child because he was Jewish, and killed a low-minded friend.
This friend was the hooded shadow , and the cause of his death was an asthma attack in search of a string of numbers in the sewer.
At that time, it was the same person who bullied Goodman, the boy in red with the dead bird who forced this low-minded boy into the sewers.
Goodman's marriage failed, and his daughter died before she was born. The little girl in yellow was actually his dead daughter. The same soul was the one who caused trouble in Mike's case. "Dad".
Goodman was young and weak. While being bullied, he was beaten and scolded by his parents, which caused a long-term psychological barrier. The Simon case is actually his growth process.
In the end, unable to bear the fact that his daughter died and the self-blame that indirectly killed the low-minded boy, the professor chose to commit suicide at 3:45 .
The professor who attempted suicide has only his eyes to move, so he linked the doctor (Mike), the nurse (Simon) and the cleaner (Tony) around him, and the three stories of the whole film were generated in the dying.
If you have the patience to see here, and go back to watch the movie again, you will feel very delicate and cool.
This is also the attraction of "Ghost Story". The three split stories are presented in the form of three-act dramas, and finally converge on the protagonist through the details. This is already a very good screenwriting work.
But what's even more powerful is that "Ghost Story" doesn't stop there. It actually uses three stories to accuse the influence of the family of origin on personal growth .
Even a professor had psychological barriers due to the beatings and scoldings of his parents when he was growing up. Later marriage and career difficulties, as well as his cowardly personality, were all related to this influence.
Even if he is a little stronger and braver, the tragedy of the low-minded boy may not happen, and he may not be bullied frequently, but as a spectator in the process of criminal violence.
From beginning to end, he was not the executioner, nor did he do anything wrong. It's just because of his character, under the tyranny of people and the chaos of social order, he blames his own weakness for the death of his friend.
This is both a human tragedy, a family tragedy, and a social tragedy.
Among the metaphors of deceit and delusion, there is all the sadness of human nature.
This is a good horror story, although from beginning to end, it really has no ghosts.
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