After more than forty years, the peak of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is rare. After seven versions, can this world's most famous horror film series have any new tricks?
Recently, the latest version of " The Texas ChainSaw Massacre " ( The Texas ChainSaw Massacre ) has entered the production process. The remake of the film is from the 1974 horror classic "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The story is based on the American murderer Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin in 1957.
Since 1974, the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" series has been released in seven versions. However, the 74 version of the classic can never be surpassed.
What is it that made this 74 version of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" cost less than 300,000 US dollars to win people's hearts? What caused the sequel to lose its brilliance, and was even denounced by IMDB as "complete rubbish"?
classic work
Create the violent aesthetics of horror movies
Today, when you mention "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", you must think of the cruel and ruthless leather face with rotten teeth and beastly screaming dancing in the sun. From this classic scene, we will find that director Tobe Hooper (Tobe Hooper) has already taken horror film elements into his heart. For most of the film, he did not choose to let the crime happen on a dark and windy night. Instead, he made the leather face slash and slash under the blazing Texas sun with a chainsaw. The uncovered crime was just like that. It happened naked, forming a kind of violent aesthetics under the day.
In addition to the successful construction of the leather face, the construction of movie images is also very characteristic. In terms of image style, the rough texture adds realism to the movie. In the form of image shooting, it is full of film author's ideas.
At the beginning of the movie, five young people came to the wilderness of Texas for vacation in a relaxed atmosphere similar to that of a road movie. They don't know the danger but are gradually approaching. They even took the initiative to approach the hut of the leather-faced family. At this time, the camera acted as the perspective of God, moving slowly, sometimes watching from a distance, as if expecting something, and sometimes approaching and following the characters, when the characters gradually approached dangerously. At that time, the camera again acts as the subjective perspective of the character, allowing the audience and the character to perceive the cruelty and horror of the leather face together. At the same time, the processing of the shots also makes the rhythm of the film full of suspense.
Throughout the whole film, this horror film does not contain much blood, but it is enough to frighten the audience. The cleverness lies in the processing of editing. When the bloody components are immediately displayed to reach the climax of the paragraph and frighten the audience, the camera will edit it early. For example, when the leather face hangs a woman on a hook, the camera does not show the moment when the hook pierces the woman, but jumps to the woman already hung on the hook. Although there is no bloody scene, the moment the hook pierces the woman has already occurred in the imagination of the audience.
Curious pervert
Cult film concentration camp refreshing the three views
In 1986, director Toby Hopper invested more in the production of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2". The input of capital allowed the director to finally let the blood flow and no longer need to cover it with editing. However, the intuitive display of the bloody scene makes the audience lose the joy of intracranial orgasm while gaining a visual impact.
This film succeeded the first in the plot. In the character setting, the leather face removed the violent role. The film evenly distributed the horror scenes in the leather face family. At the same time, this film also added the leather face to the beauties. In a seductive scene, he licked his fangs with his tongue to show his desire for beauty. These changes greatly reduced the impact of the horror image of the leather face on the audience.
What is even more controversial is that the heroine's screams flooded the film, and the suspense and horror atmosphere in the first part was diluted.
From the comparison of the two films, it can be seen that the capital cost of the film is not directly proportional to the film quality.
Entering the 90s, Jeff Burr and Kim Henkel directed "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4" respectively, these two films The quality can no longer be the same as the previous one. In these two films, the plot is full of loopholes. The atmosphere of the film is only the noise of the heroine. The leather face family is becoming more and more abnormal, and the pictures are more curious and bloody. This kind of movie effect only brings more to the audience. Of discomfort and nausea.
In the first part, the cold-blooded metamorphosis of the leather face and its family shocked the audience because it created a ruthless reality-no matter how you run and escape, the sound of the chainsaw will follow you from beginning to end, even if you rush to any place. A "point of help", you will find that this is just futile and useless. All people are brutal and ruthless, and all places are on the verge of danger. More importantly, such a disturbing movie atmosphere actually reflects the turbulent social situation in the United States in the 70s after the Watergate Incident and the Vietnam War. The sense of morality disappeared among the people, and fear and anxiety drove people to doubt and violence. Opposing.
Going back to the third and fourth parts, the atmosphere of fear and anxiety disappeared, making the metamorphosis of the leather face family unfounded, metamorphosis purely for metamorphosis, and nausea for nausea. In the fourth part, the leather face even becomes a transvestite female lady. Even the addition of Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey would not help. And if we simply talk about the curiosity effect, the imagination of these two films is far inferior to other classic horror films in the 80s, such as " The Thing " ( 1982) and " A Nightmare On Elm Street " ( 1984). Wait.
In "Strange Shape", in addition to the extraordinary imagination of the "fit head", its creation of an atmosphere of suspicion makes the horror index soar to five stars. And in "Ghost Street", which belongs to the same hack and slash movie genre as the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" series, besides the absurd and perverted method of death, the atmosphere implied by dreams is the focus of horror. This shows that in contrast to other horror films, the two sequels of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" are nothing special at all.
Bloody upgrade
Can the plot of a dog's blood bring forth the new?
Entering 2003, the latest version of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", directed by Marcus Nispel and written by original director Toby Hopper, turned out. With the innovation of film technology, the picture quality of this movie is far superior to the previous ones. The improvement of picture technology makes the bloody scenes change from the crudeness of the past, and the scene atmosphere is more realistic. The addition of the pseudo-documentary form at the end of the film made the audience confused between the real and the fiction, and was deeply trapped in horror.
This was followed by "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" directed by Jonathan Liebesman in 2006 and "Texas Chainsaw" directed by John Luessenhop in 13 years. Murderer 3D "goes farther and farther on the road of bloody murder. Although the blood level continues to rise, the outrageous plot is always fascinating. In the hack and slash setting, several sequels of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" have always followed the classic axis of the series. The scene of young people who are playing things in the world is ruthlessly chased by the chainsaw family is repeatedly staged, which inevitably makes the audience visually fatigued.
Evolving to the 00s, horror film types have been almost completely developed, especially American horror films with a bloody style. If you want to stand out, you must play the bloody tricks and play out the ranks, and whether this is ingenious with the plot setting It is closely related to whether the movie atmosphere is in place. In the same genre in the same period, "Saw" ( Saw , 2004) has played a different height. The death game full of human torture makes the suspenseful advancement without any dog-blood plots. It is enough to make the audience's creeps.
Nowadays, the latest version of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" will continue to use the classic logo of leather face, but the plot setting is still unknown. Regardless of whether it can surpass the original problem, in the current horror movie constantly innovating, if it can To stand out in a crowd of horror movies is a good answer.
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