Fire Buddha Xiuyi, Heart Sa Moo: The Movie "Curse"​

Director Ke Mengrong's five-year-old film "The Curse" has finally been officially released in Taiwan. The film attempts to be the most terrifying film in Taiwan's film history, which makes me, who don't usually watch horror films very much, look forward to it. I thought, how terrifying could it be? And The Curse didn't disappoint. During the nearly two-hour movie viewing process, most of the time, I almost covered my eyes with both hands and watched the entire movie through my fingers, which shows how terrifying "The Curse" is!​

blessing is curse​

Words are powerful, and so are thoughts. So when words are combined with thoughts, you can be an angel who brings blessings or a devil who brings curses. The most thought-provoking thing about "The Curse" is to use the guidance of words and the hint of ideas to let the audience enter this story with a pseudo-record perspective. I remember Lao Gao once mentioned at the end of an episode about "Gu": "Cursing is actually part of prayer." Don't go. People usually only think about the good, so they fail to perceive the good side, which is always accompanied by the bad.​

​And the incantation that runs through the "Curse", "Fire Buddha cultivate one, heart Sa Moo", well embodies both blessings and curses, which are in essence one and two sides: "Fortune and misfortune depend on each other, death and life are famous." . The movie is also at the end, giving a beautiful reversal, when the heroine Ruo Nan (played by Cai Genyan) said to the camera that chanting that spell would not protect her daughter from disaster, but the person who chanted the spell would share the burden of her daughter. When the disaster happened, it turned out that from the very beginning of the film, director Ke Mengrong gave the audience a hidden collective hypnosis. "Fire Buddha Xiuyi, Heart Sa Moo" is the command to start hypnosis. We have already become the strange cult in the film. Christian.​

Big Black Buddha​

​Ruonan and her boyfriend (played by Lin Jinglun) and friends form a team to go to the legendary haunted and forbidden places to shoot videos. Six years ago, they came to their boyfriend's uncle's house in the mountains. Legend has it that the family has worshipped a mysterious religion for generations, and they also broke into a tunnel that is said to be absolutely inaccessible. As a result, not only did the evil spirits anger, but her boyfriend and friends died on the spot; after Ruo Nan fled, everyone who had seen the authentic images died one after another.​

​The main belief of the cultists is a god/demon named "Big Black Buddha". Looking closely at the image of the big black Buddha in the film, one can't help but think of the Hindu goddess "Kali". Legend has it that Kali is one of the incarnations of the blackened/demonized version of Shiva's wife, the Snow Goddess. It can be understood in this way that Kali is a demon born from the body of a god. This image seems to form some kind of closed circle of belief together with "Fire Buddha cultivates oneness, heart samsara moo". Whether it is spells or gods, they are all showing the central idea of ​​"fortune and misfortune depend on each other, life and death are famous".​

mother's malice

​I previously wrote an article discussing how horror movies arouse the psychological fear of audiences. In addition to evil spirits and curses, which have always been the main themes of horror movies, the maliciousness of human nature makes people shudder. The most exciting thing about "The Curse" is that it uses the universal emotion of maternal love and family affection to pack the terrible malice of human nature. When we followed the eyes of our mother Ruonan, we tracked down the strange events that happened to our daughter Duoduo, and after witnessing the restored authentic film, the ending was reversed, and we all fell into the curse of this mother.​

​Rethink the beginning of the movie, the spinning Ferris wheel and the moving train; Ruonan told us that people can change the direction of rotation and travel with their thoughts. It was not until the end of the movie that we suddenly realized that the Ferris wheel and the train were simply hypnotic objects like crystals or pocket watches used by hypnotists. While we thought we were all sober all the time, it wasn't. When people are plagued by malice, they are also spreading malice to more people. We are all in evil, and this is the creepiest part of "The Curse".​

Finally, I would like to say that since watching the movie, whenever I am emptying my mind, I will automatically recite "Fire Buddha Xiuyi, Heart Sa Moo"! It seems that the power of "curse" cannot be underestimated! Everyone is welcome to watch "The Curse" together, hold the curse together, and both you and I will be blessed/cursed.

"The fire Buddha cultivates one, and the heart is humming. The fire Buddha cultivates one, and the heart is humming. The fire Buddha cultivates one, and the mind is humming..."

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