Starting with George Romero's "The Living Dead" series, zombies have been an important element of horror film culture. Although it does not have any super powers that go to heaven and earth, it is almost not different from our normal human beings. But from the perspective of the "uncanny valley" theory, it is this high similarity that has become the reason why humans fear zombies.
I think almost everyone who has seen a zombie movie has imagined what we would do if a zombie crisis broke out in our real world. It is estimated that what most people think of is similar to the common routine in the movie: pick up a weapon that is handy, carefully look for survival resources, and eat hard when encountering zombies (the first law of fighting zombies: only headshots will kill them ), and then met a few partners, everyone walked together, fighting against zombies and other ill-willed survivors in the apocalypse.
This kind of idea is beautiful. However, if you really encounter a zombie crisis, you will find that the routines in these movies are not easy to use, because for most people, let alone using weapons to chop zombies alive, even if you let you Take an axe and chop down a motionless tree, and chances are you won't be able to make a few cuts. So, what should we do with zombies in real situations? The French film "The Night Eats the World" gives us a good example.
When Sam came to his friend's apartment, he accidentally found that his friend was having a party. In order to hide himself, he stayed in a small room, and then fell asleep in a daze. When he woke up, suddenly It is found that the world outside the door has become an apocalypse full of zombies.
This is a classic zombie movie opening routine. According to the normal routine, Sam should start his own journey of fighting monsters and upgrading, but everyone knows that people with social phobia are cowards. As a result, Sam decisively followed the guideline of "don't let go of the wretched growth", sticking to the apartment building, and exploring the building, searching for survival resources, using various containers on the top of the building to catch rainwater, and locking all dangerous rooms. door marker.
It can be said that this is the approach that is closest to the real world, not only for zombies, but also for various sudden crises. It is not a wise choice to go out of the house rashly when there are emergencies in the external environment. Because in the early stages of a crisis, it is very dangerous to expose yourself to an open environment, and even if there are no fictional dangerous species like zombies, nervous passers-by will launch surprise attacks on you for transportation and survival resources.
Therefore, Sam's approach in the film is very correct, creating a closed and safe environment for himself, and then collecting survival resources as much as possible, and classifying all materials and using them in a planned way. When everything is ready, all you need to do is watch the changes in the outside world and pray that there will be a government and an army before the food runs out. Of course, the most important thing is to keep yourself from falling apart because of loneliness.
While watching this movie I kept thinking about a game I played, The Long Night. In that game, the player's character fell into the vast snow field in northern Canada due to a plane crash. In the icy world, players need to fight against the crazy attacks of various wild animals while collecting survival resources to survive. That game and this movie can be said to be very similar. Both need to create a foothold under conditions where the external environment has become extremely bad, and then work hard to survive, and both face a biggest enemy. The enemy is loneliness.
In fact, many times, the biggest enemy that human beings need to face is human beings, because we are emotional animals, and we need to meet our spiritual needs while satisfying our survival needs. If our spiritual needs cannot be met for a long time, then the depression caused by loneliness And madness will lead to their own destruction.
In the middle and second part of the film, Sam, who was very stable in the early stage, had several performances of suicide, such as going out to find a cat, talking with zombies, holding a concert on the balcony, hallucinations of resurrection, etc. The reasons for all these behaviors All because of being too lonely. The world suddenly changed overnight. The family, friends, and colleagues you met every day disappeared. The electricity supply that modern people depended on for survival was also interrupted. In order to protect yourself, you can't make a big noise. These are really hard for us. A huge torture.
Some people say that this movie allows us to see that the French are very artistic even if they make zombie movies. Indeed, as a film with the conflicting element of "zombies", "Dark Night Eats the World" seems too literary and artistic. There are not many scenes of wrestling with zombies and fighting to the death. It is a one-man show with the protagonist Sam alone. But for us ordinary people, isn't this the most realistic zombie movie?
I think what this movie wants to express is not the "observation" of zombies but the "observation" of people. We can resist the impact of the harsh external environment on us, but we cannot resist the attack of loneliness within ourselves. In this day and age, we have 10,000 ways to entertain, we have 10,000 ways to embrace the world, Weibo, WeChat, watching movies, listening to music, playing games, attending parties, participating in exhibitions... We can always connect ourselves with others and live in the collective, but we rarely have time to cut off all connections with the outside world and truly calm down and face ourselves and loneliness. When everything suddenly goes haywire, will we, who are used to sharing our emotions with others, have the courage to face our loneliness?
In "Dark Night Eats the World", this "dark night" is not the night after the sun goes down, but the "dark night" in the depths of one's heart when facing loneliness. I suggest that each of us should be alone on a regular basis, and leave all modern equipment to experience the loneliness in our hearts. This is not to hope that everyone will become the lonely one in the crowd, but to hope that everyone can be able to respond to emergencies when emergencies come. Broken heart later than others.
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