In this year's small-budget genre films, horror suspense has become a hit. The "Best Horror Film of the Year" has changed many times, from "A Quiet Place" to "Kunchi Rock" to the heat's "Network Mystery Trail" and "Unfriend 2", horror films once again use simple camera shooting methods to achieve the most direct viewing needs - to scare the audience, in order to get the joy of watching movies.
Whether it is South Korea's "Kunchi Rock" or North America's "Network Mystery Trace", there are a lot of pov lenses with camera lenses as the theme. This kind of direct "witnessing" of other people, things, and things in life, because it represents the subjective impression of the characters in the play on people or things, has obvious subjective colors, and in other genre films, it plays a "empathetic" effect.
At the same time, in order to show more reality, films such as "Kunchi Rock", "Witch Blair", and "Ghost Shadow Record" have introduced the concept of pseudo-documentaries, trying to make people feel real by "really witnessing a ghost". Subjective footage at this moment reduces the empathy of the recorder and adds a sense of realism and uncontrollability of mechanical shooting.
This sense of mechanics is bound to become more and more obvious in films that combine science fiction and horror genres: the audience sees the protagonist, sees the things shown by the camera, and realizes the process of "seeing", but does not know who is leading the audience to "see" these stories.
POV lens: You know who's watching and what's watching
Although the subjective shot is slightly behind the objective shot, it also appeared early in the birth of the film. There is no doubt that subjective lenses can create powerful effects. In most non-thriller films, subjective footage is used to show the vision of "people". In 1924, "The Meanest Man" had shaky shots to show the protagonist's drunken state. The subjective lens of "Napoleon" also allows people to experience the perception of a war on the spot.
No matter how the objective lens is shot, the guiding role of the scene size and color shape of the subject in the picture is determined by the photographer. From the role of traditional film lenses, the biggest advantage of film and television is the picture and sound. The subjective lens is born to show the inner world of the characters. Most of the time, the subjective lens becomes the eyes of the characters in the film, observing the life of a certain person, further revealing the inner activities of human beings.
However, in the suspense thriller genre, the perspective of the subjective shot is further expanded, and the subject slowly changes from "human" to "non-human", such as the underwater long shot of "Jaws", showing the perspective of the great white shark swaying underwater and looking for prey as a predator.
This subjective lens is the most widely used lens mode: taking the viewer to "see". Even in the whole subjective perspective of "Corpse on the Lake", the audience can clearly understand that it is humans watching through the naked eye, and most of the time the audience knows who is watching. Even if the sniper scope perspective and vr glasses perspective of the late action blockbuster are incorporated into the film, the subjective lens is still the process of viewing through the naked eye.
However, after dv perspective shooting was incorporated into the film, the perspective of viewing only through the naked eye changed, which is like the mobile phone's shooting mode suddenly has the opportunity to show the selfie mode, and the viewing subject and the subject are unified. Many horror films have also made a big fuss about it, such as "Blair the Witch" and other films, which have achieved a thriller effect by breaking this unity.
When there are channels other than the eye in the middle of the process of shooting and watching, there is more content that can be mixed in the process. For example, "Clover Files" is a film recorded from the perspective of DV, and what is more interesting is that even after the filmmaker is buried in the mouth of the monster, the subject of the film becomes DV, which truly and passively records the death process of the photographer.
Internet Pov Lens:
All you know is that you are being watched
In recent years, the Internet has provided a new perspective of the unknown, and has also given suspense films linked to technology a wider space to use subjective lenses. In the Internet world, both the observer and the observed can present a "third person" perspective, which is particularly evident in "Unfriend 2" and "Network Mystery Trace".
The "Unfriend 2" series and "Network Mystery Trail" are both reduced to "desktop movies" due to the characteristics of the carrier. Desktop movies are currently positioned as "films that are all presented on a computer screen." "But in fact, in both films, the perspective is not limited to the computer's camera. The audience can observe the perspective of mobile phones, tablets and other small screens from these two films.
This casts a layer of information age horror over the film "Unfriend 2": at first, the audience sees a narrow perspective, just the protagonist and a few of his friends, and the audience will subconsciously substitute themselves into the role of the protagonist. Both the photographer and the filmed person are the protagonists, and although there is a computer camera in the middle, there is no third person in the picture.
But what to do when the cold camera suddenly has an uncontrollable tendency? As the plot develops, the film begins to appear on the dark web, and the cold internet river not only flows on the screen, but also flows into the life of the protagonist - the protagonist gradually becomes the subject, and the unknown person begins to control the camera, and even dominates the fate of the characters. The audience is already forced to grasp the same perspective as the killer at the moment when the protagonist faces a collapse. The transformation of this shot not only excavates the atmosphere of horror, but also brings the possibility of satisfying human voyeurism.
The "Unfriend" series is more about switching between the shooter and the subject, and such a film itself is indeed easy to see as a small-cost trick film that plays with hacking techniques. The "Unfriend" series of movies is not highly rated, mainly because the theme of this film is completely structured on the Internet. Imagine that one day your WeChat video suddenly appeared the shadow of a stranger, and the circle of friends showed the message of non-concerned friends, and the audience would feel terrible for a while, but then they would question the authenticity of the film. And because there are indeed unexplainable bugs in the film, the movie rating has also dropped a lot.
After all, not everyone lives on the Internet, desktop movies as a means of expression, in order to get rid of the niche, still have to integrate elements of other types of films, so after the "Unfriend" series, the pseudo-documentary subjective shots are combined with empathetic subjective shots, and there is "Network Mystery Trace", which grafts multi-screen narratives into traditional suspense stories.
"Cyber Mystery Trail" is obviously a special movie in the Internet age. Even without Facebook, Twitter, tumbler, desktop movies could have been born in the era of non-smartphone desktop computers. But the story of "Network Mystery Trace" is entirely based on the proliferation of small screens.
In the present, the relationship between observation and observation, shooting and being photographed, has long been not limited to the field of cameras and the naked eye. You can observe a person's movements through mobile phone lenses, tablets, surveillance videos, and front-of-car GPS, and get information from them. The picture is no longer important, and the transmission of information is the main function.
At the same time, "Network Mystery Trail" also provides a new generation of audiences with more abundant information, not so much a visual language to appreciate the picture, but rather an electronic reading of the text observation. In addition to the part of the protagonist trying to show the search for his daughter, the film is also filled with a large amount of information such as images, email content, news article titles, text messages, and live bullet screens. The male protagonist shows his inner world by typing a line of words and then deleting it, which is not so much the movie that the audience "sees" as it is the information that the audience "reads".
It's a fragmented viewing, and audiences who are used to the composition and changes in light and shadow may feel great discomfort with the film, it is not aesthetic, just a large-capacity information jam, which is also a generation that has grown up with technology, facing digital media and electronic technology. When people are in such a daily life, the audience does not need to get aesthetics in the film, they just need information.
Movies that rely entirely on desktop perspectives are destined to be a niche perspective, but as multi-screens become more and more important in mass life, more subjective shots will inevitably appear more and more in movies. In short, the objects of seeing and being watched are people's real lives.
-end-