Pokémon's Lord of Fear

However, considering Thailand's respect for Buddhist temples and monks, Teng Shu was not surprised. If the monks came in and were useless, problems would easily arise, so it would be better not to let the characters have contact with them. This would naturally save a lot of effort. Thinking of this, Teng Shu did not continue to worry about this matter, but began to plan to continue writing the follow-up plot of "The Dead". Teng Shu planned to use this as his comeback work in filming movies, or his comeback work in horror movies. When the filming is almost done, the follow-up matters can be resolved. Thinking of this, Teng Shu was in a good mood, and then he continued to recall the plot and write the following story.

In the video, Mei finally realized that when the crew started filming, everyone was praying except Mei. When the prop master found Mei, she was dancing with a crown on her face and had wounds on her face. She looked very scary. It took several people to subdue Mei and take off the crown. After the crown was taken off, Mei returned to normal. The prop master recalled that the crown was originally given to Mei by a woman, but because they forgot, they put it in the warehouse, and then a series of events happened. At this time, Mei realized that the crown was the real culprit, so she planned to go to the third floor to destroy the crown, but she couldn't open the glass door. At this time, Mei also saw the female ghost through the reflection of the glass. She turned around and saw the female ghost appear at the end of the corridor, wearing traditional costumes, dancing and flashing towards her. Mei picked up something and broke the glass, and the female ghost seemed to be hurt, her body became unreal, and she kept screaming.

Mei took advantage of this time to pick up the crown and turned around to run, then drove to the temple to destroy it. In the car, Mei heard noise on the radio, and the crown on the passenger seat disappeared. Mei searched while driving, and then saw through the rearview mirror that a pair of hands picked up the crown. Mei turned around but there was nothing behind her, which made Mei very panicked. She looked at the rearview mirror again, and the hands had already put the crown on Mei's head. The moment the crown was put on, Mei fainted completely. When she woke up again, she came to a strange place. She took off the crown and looked around in confusion. Where is this place?
Mei heard the ringing sound, so she looked for the direction and found a dilapidated shantytown. She walked in, picked up the flashlight, and saw the densely packed photos inside, all related to her. It turned out that this was a fanatical fan of Mei. The other party liked and admired Mei very much and wanted to have a face like Mei. So she used all her savings to have plastic surgery, hoping to change her life, but her plastic surgery failed. The unwilling girl found a black market doctor to perform the surgery, but the poor environment and lack of disinfection caused the girl's face to bleed profusely. Before she died, the girl was still watching Mei's advertisement on TV, looking at the person she longed to be.

When the black market doctor discovered that someone had died, he called his assistant and sank the girl into the lake. It was then that Mei remembered this fan. The fan did visit her often, so Mei took a photo with her. However, Mei never dreamed that it was this girl who was harassing her, so she called the police and then fished the girl's body out of the lake. Everything had originally calmed down, but when Mei was putting on makeup, she heard the fan's bell ringing. Then the female ghost came to Mei, touched Mei's face, and said that she wanted to be Mei. After that, Mei was still putting on makeup, but Mei said, "I am Mei." At this time, Mei had been possessed and became the ghost's substitute, and the movie ended.

In fact, strictly speaking, the plot setting of Scary Ghost is very outrageous. The plot of Scary Ghost is actually a movie plot. In the movie, Mei plays Ting, who is possessed by a ghost. Even if the problem is solved in the end, she is still a person possessed by a ghost. From this perspective, this corresponds to the plot after Scary Ghost. As an actor, Mei was also possessed by a ghost afterwards, but the one who possessed her was not someone else, but Mei's admirer. Although from this point of view, Mei is actually quite unlucky. After all, this matter strictly speaking has nothing to do with Mei. Mei was not aware of the matter of the admirer, and she even took a photo with this fan enthusiastically. She is considered a star with business ethics, but who knew that after the admirer died, he did not pester the doctor who killed her, but chose to possess Mei instead, even if he was helped, he still did so.

From this point of view, this is actually quite different from the conventional routine of Thai horror. After all, the conventional routine of Thai horror is to do one's own thing, and then pay attention to cause and effect. This is also the first impression of most people about Thai horror. However, this movie does not follow the routine at all. It is not such a cause and effect. Mei and other members did not do anything wrong, nor did they kill the fanatical fan. It was completely an unprovoked disaster. Of course, the crew has a certain responsibility. If they had known that the crown was so dangerous and took it to the temple for purification, they might not have died. But unfortunately, there is no if, so three members of the crew died: the director, producer, and the prop master, and Mei ultimately could not escape the fate of being possessed and replaced.

So this is an unconventional film shooting process. Of course, there are still some differences afterwards. For example, the setting of the dream within a dream was quite good at the time. And the Thai lady who was laid out as a possible evil ghost at the beginning turned out to be someone else. This was a reversal, but the reversal was too abrupt. It was like a novel in which one person is the protagonist in the early stage, and then a person who has never appeared in the novel jumps out at the end. People would definitely be confused. After all, even if you lay out some plot for this person in the early stage, people would still accept it. The operation here is a bit similar to Naruto.

In Naruto, when the final antagonist Kaguya Otsutsuki appeared, she caused countless people to complain and curse. The reason was that people could not accept that a character like Kaguya Otsutsuki had almost no foreshadowing and no clues in the early stage, and then suddenly Black Zetsu jumped out and rebelled, and started to make trouble. Although some people may say that the readers were kept in the dark and that was the wonderful reversal, the problem is that what readers see is the God's perspective drawn by the author. If Kishimoto had some foreshadowing at the time, then this matter would not be so difficult to accept. That's why people were very dissatisfied after Kaguya appeared. But if you think about it carefully, Kishimoto might have been planning to introduce a new force to pave the way for the future Boruto.

After all, in Naruto, almost everything that should be written and done has been done. Naruto and Sasuke's strength has exceeded that of their predecessors by too much. If there is no alien enemy, there is really no good way to solve this problem. So it has become the current situation, which is actually quite normal. At least Teng Shu himself can understand it. However, the subsequent Boruto also determined that this work is a rubbish work, which is completely different from the original work, and even hurt countless Naruto fans. At this moment, Teng Shu feels that this scary ghost has some similar problems. The biggest problem with this movie is that there is almost no foreshadowing for the real ghost, and it was only at the end that it was explained that it was the fan's evil ghost that caused trouble. It is normal for the score to be low.

Of course, although the score is a little low, it is actually not weak in terms of scariness. Although it is not very good in Teng Shu's opinion, Teng Shu's aesthetic is the latest aesthetic. At that time, horror movies had developed to the point where they could hardly develop further. All horror movies could not escape a vicious circle, that is, the issue of how to scare people. The earliest ones were jump-face scares, then psychological horror, and then pseudo-documentary, but later they returned to jump-face scares. The reason is that jump-face scares can give people the most horror. This horror instinct rooted in the subconscious of biological beings is difficult to replace, so people still like to use jump-face scares, but this also leads to the fact that the scores of subsequent horror movies are often not very high.

Teng Shu felt a little sad, so he decided to write a horror movie survival report and then publish it to discuss this issue.

In recent years, horror films, as one of the important genres in the film market, have fallen into an unprecedented development dilemma. Audiences' evaluation of horror films has generally declined, and many new films have been labeled "bad films" before they were even released. Behind this phenomenon are the multiple crises that horror film creation has fallen into - single means of scaring people, weak narrative, and lack of cultural connotation, which ultimately led to audience aesthetic fatigue and both box office and word of mouth failure. The core competitiveness of horror films lies in creating a sense of fear, but today's horror films have fallen into the quagmire of "routine scares". The most common techniques include: suddenly jumping ghost faces, harsh sound effects, and suddenly appearing black shadows under dim lights. These methods may still work in early horror films, but in today's highly circulated information, audiences have long been immune to such routines.

What's more serious is that many horror films are too lazy to innovate and directly copy and paste the scare mode of classic horror films. For example, the classic scenes of "Sadako crawling out of the TV" in "The Ring" and "Kayako crawling down the stairs" in "The Grudge" that I shot before have been imitated by countless later generations, but rarely surpassed. When the audience can accurately predict the next scare point, the sense of horror disappears, replaced by helplessness and boredom. If horror films are supported only by scares, they are doomed to be unsustainable. Excellent horror films can often build a sense of fear through solid narratives, such as "Shutter Island" exploring human nature through closed spaces and mental breakdown. The "Conjuring" series under my company's name previously relied on real events to enhance the sense of substitution. However, many current horror films have fallen into the misunderstanding of "scare for the sake of scaring people", with fragmented narratives and numerous logical loopholes.

For example, in order to circumvent censorship, horror films in some regions interpret ghosts as "hallucinations" or "psychological illnesses", causing the horror elements to lose their foundation; other works rely on the clichéd plot of "the protagonist group committing suicide", the characters' behavior lacks rationality, and the audience finds it difficult to empathize. When the narrative cannot support the sense of fear, the audience will only feel "inexplicable" rather than "creepy". The highest level of horror films is to use fear to explore human nature, society or philosophical issues, such as the "Alien" series' metaphor for human evolution and loneliness, and "Doll House"'s analysis of family ties and religious fanaticism. However, many horror films today only provide superficial scares and lack cultural depth.

Horror films in some regions have even fallen into the rut of "feudal superstition", simply attributing horror to "ghosts". This can neither provide a reasonable worldview construction nor trigger the audience's thinking about real problems. In contrast, horror films in the Kalos region, such as "Pain", explore the crisis of faith through the conflict between traditional religious culture and modern science, and horror films in the Alola region, such as "Alola Rosemary Nights", use the fear of the deep sea to scare people. These all show the importance of cultural depth to horror films. In addition to problems at the creative level, horror films also face the dual challenges of the market and the audience. On the one hand, after the rise of streaming platforms, the audience's viewing choices have become more diverse, and horror films are no longer the only choice for "must-sees late at night"; on the other hand, the rise of short video platforms has made the audience accustomed to the stimulation of "short, flat and fast", and the rhythm and foreshadowing of traditional horror films seem lengthy.

What is even more fatal is that the audience of horror movies is shrinking. Young audiences prefer comedies or science fiction films that can help relieve stress, while veteran horror movie fans turn to niche cult films or classic old films due to "aesthetic fatigue". When horror movies can neither attract new audiences nor retain old fans, their market performance will naturally deteriorate. The dilemma of horror movies is not unsolvable, but creators need to jump out of their comfort zone and comprehensively upgrade their means of scaring, narrative logic and cultural connotations. Perhaps they can learn from works such as "Hereditary" and "Midsummer Night's Terror" to combine horror with human nature and social issues; or learn from the realistic style of horror movies in the Kalos region to make the sense of fear closer to contemporary life. 】

Teng Shu had some sighs.

"But why do I feel like I have contributed to these things?" Teng Shu thought, but it seems to be true. After all, strictly speaking, these things all have Teng Shu's contribution. Teng Shu has brought the current horror films to a higher level. How to break through is indeed a problem. The only good news is that the fear threshold of people in this world is not that high. Teng Shu's filming can still go on, although the future is destined to become what Teng Shu mentioned now, which will be very troublesome at that time. (End of this chapter)