In recent years, domestic horror films have been limited by the style of the theme, and it is always difficult to have too many breakthroughs.
No matter how terrifying and mysterious the previous plot is, the screenwriter will eventually throw the "pot" to a certain character at the end, explaining that all ghost stories come from man-made.
Under the screenwriter's forced round field, the greater the horror atmosphere of the plot, the higher the difficulty of returning to the circle in the later stage.
This has led to the domestic horror films in recent years almost all the lines of the street, including Wu Zhenyu, Lin Xinru and other stars to participate in the "Beijing 81", its rating is only 4.8 points.
After accumulating disappointment, people are not looking forward to domestic horror films in recent years.
But in 2021, a movie called "The Legend of the Hunter of Xing'anling" did the opposite, where the minefield stepped on, landing on the platform under the banner of horror films.
Watching this head iron movie step on two thunder labels in a row, but it did not hit the street after it was launched, but achieved great market response.
A week after its launch, the film ranked in the top 3 of the cat-eye network popularity list, and many clips were also widely circulated on a certain tone, and the topic even appeared on the software's hot search, playing a beautiful battle on the heat.
The box office data is even more amazing, the film daily network big account are leading the same platform with a huge advantage, 1 day on the line is to refresh the highest record of the box office of the network industry, even director Wu Kyoto praised the film, in the micro-bo to promote the film.
Under the two-way rise in popularity and box office, some people even shouted out the slogan of "the first domestic thriller in 2021".
Judging from the market reputation, it seems that the network platform has been out of a small hit for a long time, let's see how this movie can get this praise? (Spoilers are included below for the sake of pleasure)
The film tells about a strange anecdote that took place during the Republic of China.
The plot unfolds from a massacre of the door, the family of Li Changfu in the northeast Xing'anling, 3 people died tragically in 5 days, and only one daughter was left at the door.
The three members of the Li family were extremely ugly, Li Langzhong was burned to death, and Lady Li was hanged on the beam, and their son also died in the well.
The villagers were talking about it, and they rumored that Li Langzhong had stained it with dirt.
Therefore, some villagers invited Liu Erye, the "imperial hunter" who guarded Xing'an Ridge in the ancestral town for generations, to come and catch ghosts.
As Second Master Liu's investigation deepened, the strange cause of death of Li Changfu's family was slowly removed, and people found that Li Langzhong's death was related to the depths of the old forest in Xing'anling.
As Second Master Liu's exploration deepens, ghostly figures such as the ghost of the woman in red and the old lady of the deserted village appear in the forest, and one strange event after another is also waiting for people...
The most intuitive advantage of the film creates a strong horror atmosphere, under the dim and gloomy tone, the spooky background sound bonus added at the right time, the director has only four words to say to the fans:
Timid and cautious
At the beginning of the film, it is not a virtual one, and the subtitles are directly frightened before they are finished.
Li Langzhong was invited by a mysterious stranger to the barren mountains and wild mountains to deliver the baby on the night of the dark and windy night, and he was carried to the palanquin by the bloodless sedan, and the guide in front of him was also a strange face.
Combined with the eerie and empty background sound and the faint sound of screaming, the tension of the audience continues to jolt up and down with the palanquin.
Such a strange picture lasted for a while, and the ghosts simply stopped pretending, and they all showed off.
Li Changfu was sent out of the palanquin with a hesitation, and when he turned back, the palanquin turned into a paper man...
The beginning of this rather similar to Lin Zhengying's film is only afraid to "scare away" many timid audiences, but this is only the beginning, and the subsequent horror scenes are more.
For example, the woman in red in the old temple of Xing'anling, she has been crazy and talking nonsense, and her bright red dress is particularly strange against the background of night.
The appearance of the Wild Mountain Ridge was already maddening, and the movements at her hands did not stop.
The woman in red didn't say a few words, and two ghost hands stretched out from the ground to catch the living person who had mistakenly entered the temple entrance.
And this is not the most terrifying, the most widely circulated in a certain sound platform is another horror scene scene.
Two men live in a deserted village late at night, and a mysterious old woman with a single man in the house takes them in.
In the middle of the night, one of the men got up to go to the toilet, but found the old lady eating with her back, and the old woman asked with a trembling voice:
Hungry at night, pad some turnips, you come a little no?
Then the picture flashed by, and the old lady with blood stains on her mouth looked back at the man, and the "carrot" in her hand was a finger.
Good guys, this old lady this scare, these two weeks the market carrots are only afraid to sell slowly... Under the creation of this scene of gloomy pictures, I have to admit that the horror effect of the film is quite good.
However, we also mentioned that in recent years, the more terrible the domestic film is in front of the head, the more difficult it is to come back logically in order to wash out the "murderer".
The "Legend of the Hunter of Xing'anling" has done a good job in this regard, and the screenwriter did not deliberately "make up" a murderer, but explained the "principle" of the existence of ghosts with a relatively clever setting.
In fact, these ghosts are "ghosts" living in ghost stories compiled by people, and the actual stories are somewhat skewed.
The film is divided into three chapters, namely Demon, Love, and Cause and Effect.
The first is the demon, at the beginning of the film, Li Langzhong was tragically destroyed, and from the villagers' very mysterious small talk, Li Changfu was a thick and honest Langzhong appearance.
Five years ago, Li Changfu, who was too poor to open the pot, was invited out to deliver in the middle of the night, and the real identity of the other party was actually a fox demon, and the fox demon also gave Li Changfu back with a bag of gold.
As for the tragic case that li Changfu suffered five years later, people vaguely believe that it is related to the fox demon.
But then the screenwriter revealed the other side of the story for us, after the arrival of Liu Erye, with the traces of the scene, directly concluded that Li Changfu died at the hands of the horse monkey in the deep mountains, and he also designed to catch the horse monkey.
In the plot projected from the perspective of the horse monkey, Li Changfu is a different look, and it turns out that Li Changfu's development is stepping on the corpses of others.
When he delivered a child to a family in the deep mountains, he had no intention of learning that the other party had been guarding the dragon vein of the royal family for generations.
However, Li Changfu, who was interested in wealth, acted as a leading party, reporting the treasure to the local warlords.
A group of evil people wiped out this innocent mountain family, and Li Changfu became the richest man in the village from the former poor acid man.
All this was witnessed by the big horse monkey who had been fed many times by the Dragon Vein descendants, and it recognized these hypocritical faces, and the doom of Li Changfu's family has since laid the foundation for the curse...
The second chapter, titled Love, begins with Second Master Liu's quest for a large horse monkey who has escaped into the mountains.
On the way, they encountered a group of tomb robbers who came to dig for treasures in the mountains, and in order to prevent Second Master Liu from robbing the treasure, they made up a story in front of them about the ghost of a woman dressed in red.
In the ghost stories they tell, they repeatedly provide food relief to the women, but this strange female ghost kills them fiercely.
But in fact, the truth of the story is the other side.
These tomb robbers were entrusted to come to Xing'anLing to steal the treasure, and during the stay at the Wilderness Mountain Temple, they met this crazy woman who had been waiting for her lover for a long time, and they not only violated each other, but also killed her.
The third story is called cause and effect, and the lover of the woman in red, who has been waiting for a long time, finally appears.
In the mouth of this man named Chunsheng, it is learned that he and his friends met a terrible old lady during their overnight stay in a mountain village, and after a terrible catastrophe, the friend was eaten, and he himself escaped by chance.
Chunsheng's ghost story is told in a big way, but the flawed rhetoric is immediately punctured, and Chunsheng is the fiercest and worst character in the whole movie.
He caused the woman in red to become pregnant before marriage, and then abandoned her in a disorderly manner, which led to the woman being driven crazy.
The incident of the old lady of the mountain village shows the evil of her human nature, and Haruhi is invited to a friend's house and accidentally discovers that the other party is actually the bastard son of a warlord.
He brutally murdered his friend and his mother, and used his identity to defect to the warlords. After a few years, the old warlord gradually became seriously ill, and Chunsheng became a new warlord who did nothing wrong.
From the Li Changfu massacre to the woman in red to the old woman in the deserted village, behind one terrible ghost story after another, there is another realistic story that is extremely frightening.
In the three ghost stories, the screenwriter is unrestricted to "strange power chaos", and there is no risk of collapse logically.
Another plot point worth affirming is that the three short stories seem to be detached, but they are actually closely linked.
From Li Changfu being destroyed to lure out the real murderer of the big horse monkey, then by the absconding of the big horse monkey to discover the truth of the tragic death of the woman in red, and then to the return of the lover to unlock all the truth.
These three stories are essentially interconnected, and these three tragedies stem from the covetousness of the three groups of people for the dragon vein of Xing'anling.
Another highlight of the plot design is that the end of the film and the beginning of the film form a closed-loop structure that echoes back and forth.
The woman in red went mad due to Chunsheng's abandonment, and she eventually died tragically in the mountains away from her family, when in fact her family was the guardian of Longmai Town who was killed by Li Langzhong in the first chapter.
After the mysterious disappearance of their daughter, the parents chose to give birth to another child in order to avoid no one to send them to the end, and found Li Changfu in childbirth during the delivery process, which led to a series of subsequent stories.
There are not too many wasted footage fragments in the film, and many plots have hidden meanings.
At the end of the film, through the final retribution of one evil person after another, the screenwriter sublimates the theme by means of this, which has the feeling of the Republic of China version of "Liaozhai Zhiyi".
The ghosts in the film are not real ghosts, they are actually innocent people who died at the hands of others. And the big horse monkey who was regarded as a bad animal was not a vicious beast, and after being fed by the dragon vein town keeper, the big horse monkey still knew how to be grateful to avenge it.
Ghosts are not ghosts, and people are not people. Li Langzhong, Chunsheng, tomb robbers, and others breed evil thoughts from greedy thoughts, kill people and goods under blindfolding, and eventually eat their own consequences one by one.
With the ghost story as the shell, the screenwriter uses this to achieve the purpose of persuading people to be good.
Turning over the cast list of this film, we will find that the lineup team is actually not too famous, and even compared to other big online movies, there are disadvantages.
But in fact, the director team invited the right person, the lead actor Shang Tielong is not only a national first-class director, but also an old drama bone with rich filming experience.
He once played a supporting role in "A Generation of Grandmasters" "Old Ginger", and also performed in last year's hit Chinese drama "Mountains and Seas", and there is no doubt about his acting skills.
In the film, Liu Erye, played by Shang Tielong, does not talk much, and the 67-year-old Shang Tielong plays the image of a spiritual hunter who is sloppy but has a strong eye.
In terms of screenwriting, the film side invited Cui Zhaozhao, a writer known for his supernatural literature, to be a screenwriter.
His work "The Years I Was Mr. Yin and Yang" has a wide online audience, and by 2010, the work had reached 800,000 online hits.
This time to start filming "The Legend of the Hunter of Xing'anling", Cui Wenzhao showed his excellent screenwriting skills for Cui Wenzhao, who was captured by the supernatural theme.
However, the film also has more obvious shortcomings, such as relatively general special effects standards, but fortunately, there are not many special effects shots, and we do not need to be overly harsh on the production cost of the net movie.
Overall, this movie can be regarded as a rare masterpiece on the internet platform.
It does not have the time to inject water in the script like other network universities, nor does it have the problem of hanging sheep's head on the cover to sell dog meat, but it says that to scare you is to scare you, and it is not a virtual thing at all.
As a domestic horror film, "The Legend of the Hunter of Xing'anling" is even more surprising, and the screenwriter explains the "principle" of the existence of ghosts with clever design, which makes "ghosts" in the film wanton and scary without worrying about the plot collapse.
So far, the film's 6.1 score film is also an extremely rare network blockbuster that can pass the passing line (the current rating seems to be rising), even if it is placed in domestic horror films, it is also a rare "high score" in recent years.
Although due to the low budget and short production cycle, it does have some common problems of online movies, but the flaws are not hidden, and the audience finally buys the film plot and the actual horror effect.
From these two aspects, this movie does a very good job.
Perhaps, starting from "The Legend of the Hunter of Xing'anling", the outside world will re-examine the network movies and domestic horror films, as long as the creators are careful to produce, even in the minefield can produce good films.
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