In line with the principle of "not allowing the establishment of the country to become a fine" principle, "national terror" has always been a huge gap in the field of domestic genre films.
Whether it is the star-studded "Beijing 81" in the early years, "Far Cry" or the "Pen Immortal" and "Disc Immortal" series adapted from folklore, in fact, they are all under the banner of "horror films" to tell a low-energy story of "love and hate".
There are no real ghosts, no bizarre stories, no qualified logic.
The national fear has also gradually fallen into prison, into a dead cycle of shoddy and ridicule. Everyone watched with the lowest expectations, schadenfreude, how each so-called horror movie ended.
Until the 10th FIRST Youth Film Festival in 2016, a small-budget horror film called "Middle Evil" entered the public eye, causing a huge sensation and reshaping the image of domestic horror films.
This 70,000 yuan cost, only 18 days to complete the filming of the film, no stars, no special effects, but a blockbuster.
What is "Middle Evil"
"Middle evil" - traditional superstition refers to the situation in which people are invaded by evil qi and behave strangely when they are possessed by ghosts.
The story of the movie "Middle Evil" is relatively simple, telling the story of two college students, Ding Xin and Liu Meng, who come to a rural area in Linyi City, Shandong Province, to shoot a folklore documentary, and then get involved in a series of strange and terrifying events.
Director Ma Kai, because of his ugliness, let the film open in the standard pseudo-documentary form: shaky and out-of-focus shots, out-of-proportion composition, gloomy and dark tones, set off a strong sense of realism.
The dead trees in the fierce wind, the dappled yellow earthen walls, and the crowd crouching on the side of the road whispering reveal the shape of the ordinary Chinese village.
The two men and women entered in such an environment, they inquired all the way, inquired about strange people and strange things in the county, and learned about a famous exorcism called "Wang Po".
At this time, the princess was doing the ritual of "returning people" to people, and according to the family of the "middle evil" person, his daughter-in-law was suffering from a strange disease, was delirious, behaved strangely, and could not find a problem when she went to the hospital, so she could only find the princess to ask the "great immortal" to help.
The so-called "return of people" refers to a kind of Chinese folk witchcraft to exorcise evil spirits and exorcisms, that is, to transfer the patient's illness and suffering to others through some means of casting spells, and this other person is generally invited paper man.
Therefore, after communicating with Uncle Wang and his wife, the college student duo got permission to follow up closely, and the horror began, and some specious things slowly emerged if there was none.
As the queen mother received the invitation of a family in the mountain to drive away evil spirits, the four people sat on a small car and drove on the bumpy dirt road, the camera shook, the light and shadow gradually dimmed, and in the deep mountains of the dense forest, some mysterious force waited for the rabbit, waiting for the opportunity to move, dragging death.
There is a problem here, the film actually blurs the relationship between "evil in the middle" and "returning people".
The real "returning person" is also called "returning the stand-in".
In the early years, there was a saying that some people were the child servants of the celestial immortals in their previous lives, and because they made mistakes, they were sent down to the mortal world to suffer as human beings, and when the time came, the immortals would recall the fairy children who had been reincarnated as human beings, forgive the mistakes, and the original people would die because of this.
Such reincarnated people tend to have many physical or life irregularities as they age, and may not live to adulthood in serious cases.
Among the ways to crack the child's life is "returning people", which means to add a messenger to the immortal, instead of the child who has been reincarnated, it is generally a paper man or cloth person as a "stand-in" to end the suffering.
But the "middle evil" is completely different, and it is more commonly believed that it is haunted by evil things (various types of ghosts), causing mental and physical problems.
There are also many ways to solve it, and the godmother in the movie only uses the way of "returning people" to solve all the problems, burning paper people, drinking some spell water, it is really difficult to be convincing, and how can it deceive so many people in ten miles and eight townships.
From "false" to "true"
"Middle Evil" does not have a lot of violence and bloody elements in European and American horror films, nor does it have the redundant use of sound effects and makeup in traditional national terrors, and its essence is more close to a kind of documentary thriller and suspense.
The audience intervenes in the "middle evil" event in the first or third person through the camera in the hands of the protagonist, confronts the fear, and everything that happens in the movie has therefore has the nature of "first time".
When the protagonist 4 people came to the place where the helper was, it was already dark, and the person who came to greet him was called Daqing, and there was only him and his evil sister Chen Li in a hundred miles.
Chen Li buried her husband and the child in her belly because of a car accident a few years ago, and since then, she has been abnormal, and she has been wandering around the building with a toy doll in her arms at night.
During the chat, The Princess said that Chen Li's evil was due to provoking the white immortals in the village, and mentioned the five immortals and the immortal dish.
The so-called five immortals refer to "yellow immortals, gray immortals, white immortals, willow immortals, and fox immortals, and the older generation in the countryside are basically clear."
"Three immortal dishes" refers to the tributes to the "immortals", which can also be regarded as "death feasts", which are dishes used to sacrifice the dead.
At noon the next day, in the so-called "treatment" of the queen mother, Chen Li broke out of madness for the first time, burst out of bed, and tried to strangle the queen mother, who had been winning the victory before, also showed timidity at this moment, catalyzed by fear, and wanted to escape.
The camera hidden in the room of the queen mother and wife found the root of the two people's fear - the queen mother would not do anything at all, it was a pair of god sticks that sought wealth and killed people.
At this point in the film, everything that happened before is not true, and the reality that appears in front of you becomes inexplicable.
Fictional exorcisms, deserted mountains and ancient buildings, swaying red lanterns, common sense lapses, fear of the unknown.
On the basis of the authenticity of the environment and character settings, the viewer is also dominated by a high-intensity sense of substitution, and naturally nervous.
In the subsequent story, the mixed use of many horror elements such as rag dolls, long-haired female corpses, red lanterns, dark corridors and so on will upgrade the oppressive touch again, and the sense of breathing and horror atmosphere of shoulder-held shooting is also very tacit.
Unfortunately, despite many careful arrangements, the final ending of the film is not attributed to the flow of ghosts and gods, but only a long-planned revenge.
The original core of fear has been replaced by a bright and popular "good and evil reward", which is a clear observation of the audit system, a self-abandonment of practitioners in desperation, and a legitimate reason for the ruthless ridicule of onlookers.
No matter how much "Middle Evil" has made great breakthroughs in form and how much progress has been made in content, the problem of difficult to change the subject matter directly turns a qualified or even high-profile horror movie into a slightly vulgar bad-fun revenge story.
The genre of "horror films" seems to never be able to take root in Chinese mainland, and "Middle Evil" is a very good and successful attempt, but it may be difficult to have a next time.
"Evil" outside the movie
In addition to the movie itself, "Middle Evil" also happened a lot of weird things during the filming process.
This crew, which adds up to only 11 people in total, has been unexpected since the beginning of the film:
First, the producer almost hit and killed someone while driving and got into a lawsuit, and the actor who made an appointment to shoot fell ill on the road and could not go to the appointment.
After a few days of shooting, the director found that the material for the first four days of shooting was unusable due to the failure of the radio equipment.
Immediately afterward, the actor who played the queen mother had nightmares for two consecutive days and dreamed that someone asked her for money, and the producer's uncle asked them to send the props in the play to burn paper for it, and the "queen mother" fell ill on the third night.
Later, the male protagonist fell off his feet while filming a night scene, broke his waist, and spent 20,000 yuan outside the budget plan, and the shooting cost of "Middle Evil" was 50,000 yuan, plus these 20,000 yuan, a total of 70,000 yuan.
So many things, there are many, under such harsh conditions, director Ma Kai still led the crew of the crowd, completed the shooting task, and let this "shoddy" film gain a good reputation.
The form of pseudo-documentaries is not new, and what is valuable is that the localization of horror themes is very successful, and at a time when many horror films are based in the city, such a grounded script background seems to be the first time.
The remote Chinese countryside is so poor that in every corner that modern science cannot cover, you can see the remnants of feudal superstitions, which with its inherent rationality, let all the horrors flow naturally.
Many of the elements mentioned in "Middle Evil" are based on reality, which are the wonders of the countryside that many people heard about in childhood, the ancient legends of the old people at the mouth of the village muttering to themselves, and the imaginary ideas of the castles in the air.
It is not so much the success of the script concept of "Middle Evil" that is the credit of the screenwriter, but rather the rich material provided by this old, vast continent.
Unfortunately, under various factors, our filmmakers cannot use these materials well to produce good products.
The emergence of "Middle Evil" is also like a "hope plum to quench thirst" for the audience, which can be solved for a while, but it cannot last long.