01
For a horror film, "internal fear" is always scarier than "external fear".
How do you say this?
Take recent works for example.
What "Kunchiyan" creates is foreign fear.
Despite its fancy surface, the core is a traditional "haunted house" story. That is, a house is haunted, people enter and die one after another, and in the end no one survives.
This kind of fear is actually very superficial. It only destroys the body and cannot endanger the mind.
Even more frightening is the " inside-out " fear.
Such as "The Clown's Soul".
It's about a group of traumatized teenagers, unable to get out of their inner demons, so the clown turns into something they fear and tries to devour them.
The scariest thing in the whole movie is not the clown, but the demon. The clown is nothing but an externalized manifestation of the demon.
This really captures the essence of terror.
The most terrifying thing in the world is never the external threat, but the unease hidden deep inside.
02
The two-part "Joker's Soul" series, adapted from Stephen King's novel "Dead Light (IT)".
Comparing the two, the first is significantly better, and the second is even a little bit worse.
The reason is also very simple.
The first one hits a really good concept, and the concept consists of two parts.
One, the clown .
Clowns are a product of Western culture and have a history of hundreds of years.
From court clowns, circus performances, street performances, to family birthday parties, children's coming-of-age ceremonies, to comics, film and television, it has gradually become a symbolic image.
Acting on the clown is effective for Americans.
It's not just an image design issue, it's actually a cultural issue behind it, even a part of the collective subconscious.
The clown has the dual attributes of entertainment and horror, as well as the connotations of loneliness, alienation, and masks, and is a very rich image carrier.
Sometimes I wonder if our domestic films can find such an image, which comes from our culture and can be seen everywhere, and then subverts it with horror films to create a terrifying effect.
That kind of effect must be good, just see if we can find it.
Second, the devil .
"Joker's Soul 1" firmly grasped this keyword and did not relax for a moment.
The film tells the story of a group of teenagers being targeted by clowns in the small town of Derry, Maine, USA.
This clown comes out every 27 years, haunts ghosts, and eats children.
Of course, it's not picking targets at random, but taking advantage of the opportunity to jump in.
when?
When a child suffers severe psychological trauma.
Several teenagers in the film, without exception, have serious psychological trauma.
Bill once coaxed his brother George to go out alone in order to hide the peace. I don't want George to be taken away by the clown and disappear from the world. Bill was in deep pain.
Little fat Ben is a new transfer student. Because of his obesity, he is often bullied by senior students. He felt deeply ashamed of it.
Eddie is a sick boy. His weakness is not due to the disease, but due to his mother's excessive love for him, which makes him develop a cowardly character.
Mike, a black boy, was in a fire as a child and watched his parents burn to death, their charred hands hopelessly sticking out of the cracks in the door.
Beverly is a beautiful girl, her mother died because of her dystocia, her father hates her, and because she resembles her mother, she has a perverted love for her.
These traumas, become the children's weaknesses, but also allow the clown to take advantage of the opportunity.
It feeds on "fear," and it becomes what children fear the most, driving out their inner fears and then consuming them.
Yes, the horror design of the entire movie revolves around this logic.
In Bill's presence, the Joker will take on the appearance of George, constantly awakening his inner guilt.
In front of Eddie, the Joker turns into a rotting person, the image that the frail Eddie fears the most.
In front of Mike, the Joker repeatedly showed him the most terrifying scene - a pair of charred hands sticking out from the crack of the door.
Among them, I think the most amazing piece of design is for Beverly.
On the one hand, she had to bear the perverted love of her father, and on the other hand, she was ostracized and cursed by other girls because of her beautiful appearance. This made Beverly deeply disgusted with his "feminine" qualities.
So she cut her long hair short in front of the mirror.
Just then, there was a sound from the drain hole in the bathroom, and she looked inside, but was caught in the long hair sticking out from the drain hole.
After that, it was an even more frightening scene.
Bright red blood spurted out from the drain hole, staining the whole house red.
Why spray blood?
Combined with a previous episode, Beverly went to the supermarket alone to buy sanitary pads, and told us implicitly that it was the moment when the girl ushered in "menarche".
But Beverly was deeply disturbed by her disgust with her female identity.
So the clown wanted her to see "long thin hair" and "spouting blood" to intensify her fear.
This is where Joker 1 really shines.
It firmly grasps the "inner demon" of each character, then externalizes it and presents it exaggeratedly.
From this perspective, the horror it creates is extremely realistic.
Although there are plenty of paranormal phenomena in the film, they are essentially based on real trauma.
This also makes the horror sections of the film have a basis for existence, rather than coming out of thin air.
At the same time, the subsequent logic of the film also came into being.
How to beat the clown?
In other words, how to defeat the demons?
It's very simple, when you convince yourself not to be afraid first and face it bravely, in fact, half of the inner demon has been eliminated.
At the end of the film, a few friends bravely stood in front of the clown and watched it constantly changing into a terrifying appearance. Everyone did not flinch, but slammed it with the weapons in their hands.
They kept shouting at the clown: "You are very small, I am not afraid of you!"
So the clown really got smaller and smaller, until it finally collapsed into a soft ball.
Yes, for the "inner demon", the more you fear it and avoid it, the more rampant and powerful it will be.
As long as you face it bravely, you will find that it is not that powerful, it is just a bluffing "clown".
Look how clear and wonderful the construction of this whole set of logic is.
This is what I said in the previous article, precisely because "Joker's Soul 1" is aimed at an endogenous fear, and this kind of fear is the core of the whole film. It advances the narrative, swayes the characters, creates horror, and finally, because of the protagonist their awakening was eliminated.
At the same time, this fear is persistent. Because it is invisible, it is everywhere, always looking for a chance to make a comeback.
27 years is the cycle for the clown to return to his soul.
03
Thus, we enter the second part.
"The Clown's Soul 2" tells the story that 27 years later, the clown came to Delhi again, and the little friends who had grown up and dispersed, returned to their hometown and fought the clown again.
I had high expectations for this part before watching it.
Why?
Because in my imagination, the core of the whole series is the "inner demon" of people, that is, the childhood trauma of the protagonists.
It's a deep trauma that can't be resolved once and will haunt them for life.
Therefore, "The Clown's Soul 2" actually has an excellent entry point, that is , after 27 years, the clown who thought he had been defeated is back, and these people have to face their own demons and then fight against them. .
From this perspective, what I am most looking forward to seeing is how this "inner demon" breaks into the current lives of the protagonists again after many years, bringing them new fears.
This is also a realistic basis for "The Clown Returns to the Soul".
But unfortunately, the film is not constructed according to this logic.
On the contrary, it has completely become a "group to fight monsters" adventure mode.
The protagonists return to their hometowns, use their brains to retrieve the tokens, and then gather together to perform a ritual to defeat the clown.
This is all wrong.
Doing this is equivalent to pushing the "clown", which was originally an "internal fear", directly to the outside, and it has become an "external threat".
Everyone beat it and everything will be fine.
This also shifted the placement of the entire series.
The final spot even falls on teenage friendship, like another Stephen King adaptation of "Walk With Me".
I'm not saying that it can't be like this, but the most special part of "The Clown's Soul" is actually the "externalization of inner demons" and the dissolution of trauma. It would be a pity if it falls on "youth friendship" Yes, it is equivalent to stewing a pair of good medicine into a pot of chicken soup.
It wasted the amazingness of the first part and the essence of the entire series.
04
I still recommend you to watch the "Joker's Soul" series.
It's better than most of the shoddy, stagnant horror films out there today.
I also hope that more horror films will continue this line in the future, creating inner fear from the inside out.
As for "Kunchiyan", there is no need to shoot it again.
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