Film evaluation of horror stories

The film combines absurdity, horror, love, comedy, adventure, suspense and many other dramatic elements. The seemingly illogical plot is collaged with what happened in different time periods, and the temporal and spatial coherence in ordinary movies completely disappears. But the relationship between the parts can form a complete story perfectly and harmoniously, but there is a reversal or even a jump in the narrative structure. The director's exquisite design of the whole plot is absolutely wonderful. He tried to show the thinking process of a writer in pain with images. When Wacher was writing this novel, his wife had just died, and his heart was full of sadness. He conceived a love story and wrote a paragraph. Finally, when he finished the manuscript, he rearranged the fragments into a complete story. After making this process into a movie, it is our audience who finally arranges the order.

The film's image style is also unique, as if not only to commemorate the late different literary masters, but also to pay tribute to the early silent films. The director deliberately treated the picture as a silent film, and even accelerated the overall rhythm. Actors move faster than those in ordinary movies in order to imitate the movies of May Lea or Griffith. The absurd plot shows the sense of humor in early silent comedy, but it has a deep Gothic style in character modeling. Actors' costumes, makeup, and even the unique dark circles around their eyes are reminiscent of some famous German expressionist films, such as Dr. Carrigari's Cabin and The Mud Warrior. Even more amazing, many scenes in the film also use traditional Czech puppet animation, such as ants with huge butterfly wings, lightning, the sinking of a huge pirate ship and the Queen's finger being cut off. These scenes are all made of puppets and plaster.

Bo Rabic was one of the outstanding Czech photographers in 1980s. He has worked with famous film directors such as Vera Chytilova and Karel Szmicsek. His directorial debut won many awards in photography and editing, so it is naturally the most worth seeing. The photography used in the whole film wandered between the early and modern styles, from the earliest single-shot frame-by-frame shooting to the later omni-directional and multi-angle mobile shooting, even the wide-angle lens, which can be fully appreciated. The editing and sound design of the film are also quite wonderful. The first third imitates the silent film, presenting the dialogue of the characters completely with subtitles, adding the background music of the piano, and then slowly transitioning to the transition period from silence to sound, sometimes with subtitles, sometimes hearing the dialogue of the characters, and the second third abandons subtitles, completely showing the voices of the actors and the environment, representing the final production of the sound film. The scene switching between the main lines of colors is also very strange, and the characters are completely unrestricted by time and space. For example, the characters in the blue part push open a mysterious door and enter the green scene, and the characters in the pink part can come to purple through a mysterious cave, and so on. Such creative editing and montage are everywhere in the whole movie.

This film won the Best Photography of Polish Camerimage International Film Festival, Best Photography of Czech National Film Golden Lion Award, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Director of Italian Rome Fantasy Film Festival, Best Film Nomination of Porto Fantasy Film Festival, Best Director of Czech Bilsen Film Festival and Best Film of Stockholm International Film Festival in Sweden.