Face to face with death

The earliest fear of death in my childhood came from the experience of watching death come on TV one night. Even though I now think of it as downright bad, it caused a deep sense of panic in me that was palpable when I watched the first film in the series recently.

As the evergreen tree of American horror FILM IP (the sixth installment is in preparation), Death is here is a household name in China. The first reason may be the simplistic title, which is more straightforward than the Original English title and perfectly sums up the film's content. In addition, the bloody and imaginative style of death has accumulated a steady b-movie audience. But for a horror film with no suspense, how to scare the audience becomes a problem. Since the sequel follows almost the same concept, it can only be gradually changed in the way of death. Watching this first novel in 2000, I feel quite new.

First, of course, is the idea of the story itself. There are numerous horror images in American films and even western films, but they are often visualized monsters. Even psychological thrillers are no exception, whether it is the expressionist Dr. Caligari more than a hundred years ago, or the aliens and oddities in Hollywood movies. There is only one scene that seems to show the "face" of death, but it is still abstract. Death is Magffin, a pure idea, something in each of our experiences. And that's why we can't isolate it on screen. What happens in the movie can happen in life at any time and anywhere, such as plane accident, fire, car accident and various security risks, but the movie arranges them together by the hand of "Death".

There is a saying that the moment you recognize death, you are already dead. I think there are two ways to understand this sentence. One is that due to the death too much fear, leading to the normal life, just like the female teacher in the film, the more afraid the more panic, the result can only accelerate the collapse; The other is to realize the inevitability of death, so that they succumb to the control of fate, thus ignoring the initiative of the subject, living is equal to dead. The latter is a bit fatalistic, with more mature ideas probably going back to ancient Greece. In ancient times, people had no scientific knowledge of natural disasters, so it was easy to blindly believe in fate. Especially in the East, a similar idea is deeply rooted: "Death and life have a life, wealth in heaven." Even now, accidents are inevitable. Is this really, as the film puts it, "god's joke"? In the Eastern saying, "The king of the underworld calls you to die in the third watch, who dares to stay until the fifth watch". As a Chinese-American director, Huang yiyu certainly knows this saying well, and it's an interesting fusion to bring this concept to an American teen movie.

The film opens with a montage of the interior of a room whose contents look eerie in the dark, creating a standard horror movie tone. This also underlines that the film is a horror film that takes atmosphere seriously, which we can feel in some of the later passages. For example, the female teacher alone at home, this is a horror film used by the bridge, so that the dark night surrounded the house, at this time the doors and Windows are extremely dangerous, the spread of fear is similar to Carpenter's Moonlight light Heart Panic and other films. But the Grim Reaper has no form, lurking as a more supernatural force in the breeze that blows the curtains and the eerie liquid that seeps from the bottom of the toilet (here reminiscent of Hopper's morgue). The rest of the film focuses on the teen's reaction to this power, with the heroes and actresses, who are calmer because they are given psychic powers, actually playing idealized bystander roles -- prediction, puzzle solving, analysis -- while others are more horror-like: The hero's best gay friend, the school bully and his girlfriend, and a slow-witted loser. The four-man race on the wrong side of the road near the end also brings us back almost to the pure tone of a Hooper horror movie, which is why Marvel Studios is, in my opinion, one of the best horror movies ever made.