A year ago, Ali Esther brought his debut feature film to Sundance with anxiety. He didn't know that after 127 minutes (the duration of the film), his debut feature film would receive such a welcome , Will receive such amazement and praise.
"He really captured the feeling of "The Shining"."
More than one film critic and media person on the front line put this view in the most prominent position of their film reviews (reports).
That is "The Shining", a compulsory course for every audience familiar with the history of horror movies. I have seen "The Shining" and was scared by "The Shining". Praise "The Shining" and marvel at the library. This guy Brick can shoot everything so well.
Since the beginning of "The Shining", "emotional horror" seems to have become a measure of the quality of horror films, and it is already the most boring and annoying "counter-terrorist film" element.
From the best new director to the best actress, this film took Ali Esther and his actor team to sweep the nominations of major American film awards in 2018.
This movie is "Genetic Doom", a horror genre of debut feature film that stunning the world.
A year later, Ali Esther produced the second horror film "Midsummer Night's Terror", also produced by a24, which drew everyone's appetite. Is the ghost director short-lived or talented?
01
Let's start with "Genetic Doom". Its English name is hereditary, which means hereditary in English.
In the movie, this inheritance is not congenital illness, but bad luck, a cult.
The main genre elements of "Genetic Doom" are family, cult, horror, and cult. Why is it called the feeling of shooting "The Shining" because of the portrayal of family alienation and the accumulation and rendering of horror .
From the perspective of family estrangement and indifference, the film uses a lot of pen and ink to portray (foreground) the family drama, why this family falls apart and provokes demons.
The heroine Anne has a happy and trivial life with her husband and two children, but bad luck has come quietly, and a dark cloud of horror is hanging over the family. The youngest daughter Charlie, who has been living with her grandmother before, behaves strangely and often commits bloody transgressions. Actions, such as cutting off the bird’s head.
At a party, elder brother Pete neglected to take care of his younger sister because he wanted to pursue the girl he likes. The younger sister “incorrectly” ingested the nut cake that made him allergic, breathing was not smooth, and finally stuck his head out of the car to breathe. He died with a broken neck. The state of death was very cruel, and it was consistent with the state of death of the bird.
Pete feels guilty, takes drugs all day, and looks in a trance. His mother becomes irritable and irritable. Participating in mutual aid clubs and finding friends to talk to each other has little effect.
In this way, an ordinary family fell apart, filled with the atmosphere of the Cold War all day long, indifferent and oppressive. Because of this,
succeeded more than half of the entire conspiracy.
02
Next, the cult appears on the scene. It turns out that all this is a conspiracy of grandma.
She sacrificed her family, in order to become a believer in Paimeng, to find a "container" for the evil god-Pete's body. In the end,
succeeded in ending the cult. His sister's father died, and his brother, who had blood and container value, became a new generation of folk "Saimeng God". The
movies are full of the gloomy and evil atmosphere peculiar to cults, and the soul-calling rituals and details are meticulously controlled, and the sense of reality blows to the face.
uses family issues as a reference and cult issues as an end. The precise portrayal of the indifference between people and the “cult” like brainwashing pyramid schemes keeps the audience’s emotions tense and horror spread everywhere. This can be described as an "advanced horror film".
became popular with the success of "Genetic Doom", and everyone's expectations for the second "Midsummer Nightmare" are infinitely high, and it is also a cult theme that Ali Esther is good at.
But this time, he shot the other side of "Genetic Doom", a genre film that relies more on horror emotions. Ali Esther is doing addition and subtraction for his own works.
03
starts with the "authority" passed down from the two works. "A Midsummer Night Before" still continues the director's unique audiovisual style of shooting horror genres: reversed shots, fast flashbacksSex editing, details that can be seen everywhere foreshadowing.
, especially the fast flashback editing, is here completely acting as a scary vanguard. In this way, the suicide clips of the sister and parents flashed before the audience, cooperating with the heroine's hysteria, to create a sense of despair and sadness.
also has an extremely important change in "Midsummer Nightmare". As a pure "cult" film, it tries its best to convey horror outside of the cult.
changed from "the horror of the night" to "the horror of the day", from the "gloomy hidden evil" to the "righteous evil". The
cult is inseparable from all kinds of sacrifice scenes, but here is more bold and bloody, suicide, head-smashing, self-immolation, and mating.
We witnessed a large-scale live performance of anthropological research. The subtraction of
"Midsummer’s Nightmare" is also extremely obvious. Since it is a pure cult, there is no need for a family drama to exist, but this effect is incomplete, because the heroine’s hysteria and family changes have to be explained. In the clouds and mists that make people look at it, forget it when you are scared.
How did the group of students from civilized cities witnessed one after another rituals with primitive disorder and no cause. They were shocked, angry, and terrified, and did not know that they were part of this grand sacrificial ceremony.
What we think of as a cult is nothing more than the normal activities of others. Different civilizations bring about conflicts of ideas. In such a small Swedish village, civilization and order are ignored and dismantled.
Is this evil? It represents the opposite of normal.
And, who is normal?
Ending
From "Genetic Doom" to "Midsummer Nightmare", Ali Esther has boldly and brilliantly presented the imagination about cults. In this type of element, he is by no means a flash in the pan.
But is it the height of the next "The Shining"? We still have to look at another addition and subtraction he brings next time.
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