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A few days ago, Tomato Jun saw such a post in a post bar:
It sounds a bit maddening to understand that this is the struggle that a low-budget film can do during the promotional period.
Nowadays, the film is no longer so sensational, and its name is gradually becoming known to more and more people.
It's just --
"The Middle Evil"
At the 10th Xining First Youth Film Festival last year, "Middle Evil" was highly acclaimed, won the Best Art Exploration Award, and was regarded as "a rare domestic horror genre masterpiece in ten years".
For a long time, domestic horror films have been the hardest hit areas of bad movies.
Horror film directors only play with the three axes of styling, plasma, and split personality, and even make horror movies into a farce that makes people laugh.
(The Douban score of domestic horror films rarely exceeds 3 points)
Mackay, who loves to watch horror movies, does not understand:
"Why don't they do more homework, you go to see some, watch more horror movies, you don't copy so badly." 」
Some people will say, "You go up, you go up"!
Hey, people are really on. And a masterpiece with a Douban score of 7.2 points was filmed.
The film is about a pair of newly graduated college students, Liu Meng and Ding Xin, who went to the countryside of Shandong to shoot a documentary on the subject of fortune telling.
A few street fortune tellers were interviewed first, which established the style of the entire film as a pseudo-documentary.
The true god they were looking for was the famous goddess Princess Wang, who was said to cure the evil in the middle of the world, and what evil diseases came to her to get rid of them.
After accepting the shooting requirements of the two college students, the queen mother received a job and went to the remote Gangzi Wang to exorcise a woman.
Wang Po and Uncle Wang took Liu Meng and Ding Xin to drive to Gangzi Wang, and there was only such a lonely house in this radius of dozens of miles.
The evil woman is called Chen Li, usually like a normal person, once crazy, it is like the devil possessed, opening her teeth and dancing claws. At night, he was walking around the corridor alone like a wandering ghost...
The younger brother Daqing had no choice but to invite the princess to "return the favor" to his sister (through a stand-in, to redeem the evil person).
In the process of "returning people", Chen Li once again fell ill and strangled the neck of the queen mother like crazy.
The queen mother was also frightened, saying that this little devil was not very good at collecting, and she had to find some rescuers.
But I can't go if I want to. The car did not drive for long before the tire burst, and the group had to turn around and return to Daqing's home to live temporarily.
But unexpectedly, a terrible thing appeared.
When the atmosphere is created to a strong point, the plot of the film also begins to exert force, and the rhythm of the second half immediately accelerates, and scary scenes emerge endlessly.
Chen Li hanged herself, and it didn't take long to "resurrect" again, this group of people was chased by ghosts in the house, Ding Xin broke his waist, and Liu Meng was also clamped by the clip on his leg...
In addition to the horror, the suspenseful atmosphere also draws the audience's curiosity, where do these strange phenomena come from? Are they human or ghost? The more suspenseful the more terrifying.
"Middle Evil" uses the technique of pseudo-documentary to give people an immersive thriller experience.
The originator of the horror genre of pseudo-documentaries should belong to the United States' "Blair the Witch", which is just the right way of network marketing, making it a model of small beats with an input-output ratio of 206 times.
After that, "Ghost Movie", with a budget of 15,000 US dollars, got 200 million US dollars at the box office, and the return on investment was as high as 6555 times! The record remains unbroken to this day.
(Blair the Witch, Ghost Shadow Video)
This form of domestic filmmakers has long begun to imitate the application.
2011's "Area B 32" and 2012's "Desperate Survival" are both attempts in this regard, but the effect is not good.
For example, "Area B No. 32" was complained about by "Tenth Screening Room" as "10,000 US dollars cost, 16 million box office evil flower of the year bad film miracle".
Compared with these movies, the story, narrative ability, and atmosphere rendering of "Middle Evil" are simply master-level.
In addition, the most wonderful thing about "Middle Evil" is not only horror, but also human thinking.
In the film, not only the sister is "evil", every character is hit by the negative evil of human nature.
When the suspense at the end is revealed, we find that the film is not just as simple as horror and scariness, and the most frightening thing about "Middle Evil" is not ghosts but people, the most evil and dark depths of human nature.
The crew of "Middle Evil" is very poor.
The filming cost was only 70,000 yuan, of which 30,000 yuan was the medical expenses of the crew to treat the male protagonist who broke his waist.
Seventy thousand, for those large productions that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is not even a dime, but it is such a simple film that can no longer be simple, and it has been praised by many film critics as "China's most conscientious" thriller.
Many viewers couldn't help but sigh after watching it:
"Now there are tens of millions of movies in China that are making what kind of ghosts!"
Director Ma Kai is not from a science class, he is just a movie fan.
(Director Ma Kai on-site guidance)
He was an ordinary extra in Hengdian before, commonly known as the Dead Runner.
After watching so many botched shooting scenes, he felt he could try making a movie too.
He forced himself to watch some literary films, especially Japanese celebrities. For example, the works of big directors like Akira Kurosawa, although sometimes bored, he knows that the true scriptures are in them, so the subtle influence makes him quickly accumulate film creation skills.
"Middle Evil" is more influenced by another Japanese director, Takashi Shimizu, with a slow pace and a gloomy atmosphere. In addition, some Japanese psychic variety shows have also brought him a lot of inspiration.
("The Grudge" directed by Takashi Shimizu)
The young director, who claims that he has never even studied in college, basically relies on intuition during the shooting process, and if you want to talk to Ma Kai about specific camera scheduling, depth of field and other technical terms, Ma Kai will sometimes show a confused face.
He looked for non-professional actors because Makay felt they "had a texture that wasn't in the academic school."
This seemingly grass-like crew can make such a standard of film, which has to make people reflect on whether there is a fundamental connection between the cost of the film and the film.
In recent years, large-cost bad films have emerged in an endless stream, but some small and medium-cost masterpieces are not uncommon.
"The Piano of Steel" cost less than 5 million, "Ten Thousand Arrows Through the Heart" and "Biluo Snow Mountain" cost 4 million, "Crazy Stone" and "Glorious Rage" cost 3 million, "Tharlo" and "August" cost 2 million, "Labyrinth of Hearts" 1.7 million.
(Steel Piano, Tharlo, Labyrinth of Hearts)
Hao Jie's "Beautiful Sister" is 1.2 million, while his debut film "Singles" is only 300,000.
Li Ruijun used 6 million yuan to shoot four movies, such as "Tell Them, I Went by White Crane" and "Home in a Place with Lush Water and Grass", while he himself still lives in a rental house of 500 yuan per month.
His first film, The Old Donkey's Head, cost only $180,000, and he didn't even have to pay the actors, starring his uncle.
These films show us the fact that the lower the investment, the better the film.
Recently, the film market has been booming, and all kinds of hot money have poured in, and even third- and fourth-line filmmakers are hot.
However, the bottom line of film quality is constantly being broken, and high-cost bad films are constantly innovating. Horror films were originally the type that capital did not want to touch.
Until 2011, a "Far Cry", with a cost of 5 million yuan to win nearly 100 million yuan at the box office, achieved a phenomenon-level movie, which made many investors who are eager to make quick profits want to dig a bucket of gold in the field of horror films.
(Chen Xiaochun starred in "Far Cry")
In this way, domestic horror films are sold with small cost, no stars, and bad films that make quick money, and have become the object of many people's retreat.
There have also been directors who innocently defended that because domestic horror films will be subject to such restrictions, shooting domestic horror films is "dancing in shackles".
The implication is that it is not that we are not scary, but that the conditions do not allow us to be scary!
But they may have overlooked the fact that dancing in shackles is also divided into square dancing and ballet!
In fact, "Middle Evil" can be solid and "scare" the audience, not because "Middle Evil" breaks through some taboos that cannot be said explicitly, on the contrary, the ending of "Middle Evil" is simply like a main theme of the law propaganda film.
The advantages of "Middle Evil" are exactly what the majority of domestic thrillers do not have, and they have at least respect for the plot and the audience.
Of course, as far as the film itself is concerned, there are still huge flaws. Compared with foreign classic horror films, there is still a distance.
On the one hand, the rough ending of the film is because the lead actor was injured and had to revise the script, on the other hand, it is also related to the lack of deeper analysis and understanding of human nature and society by the entire crew.
The plot that could have risen to the level of human nature discussion finally stopped abruptly at the level of "breaking the law and punishing".
After watching it, some film critics said that "Middle Evil" is just an excellent student's work. But if you can tell the story round and look good, you have already done what 90% of domestic films can't do.
This phenomenon is both surprising and frightening.
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