澎堤池

恐怖片在展现形式上分为好几种，一种是单纯的吓人，通过构建很多精彩的场景来实现视觉刺激的最大化，让观众看一眼就魂飞魄散。一种是利用心理刺激来渲染恐怖氛围。

观众们在观看的时候，通过片中给予的线索，不断地将自己代入进去，然后再结合一系列的心理刺激，幻想着自己是剧中人，应该会有什么样的反应，最终随着剧中人物的跌宕起伏，观众们的内心也会坐过山车。这是两种比较常见的恐怖片表现形式。

当一部恐怖片的预算可以无止境的时候，没有哪一个导演不会想将这样的两种形式结合起来，反之，做好一种就已经不错。如果你预算还是捉襟见肘，那就要考虑推陈出新了，比如说今天给大家推荐的这部小成本恐怖片《澎堤池》。

《澎堤池》的成本有多小，看完了的人们自然知道，固定演员只有两位，范围扩大点的话，演员也只有三位，中间还死了一位，不过后来补上了。场景更是简单的可怜，只有一个录音棚，除了后来对于视觉刺激的营造商，导演搭上了一些被稀释了的血浆之外，剩下的十几个群演，可能是最大的花销。

《澎堤池》是一部通过大量对白来彰显恐怖环境，最终有所讽刺的故事。一个小镇上，有一个小小的广播站，站上只有三两个人。广播站的日常就是播送一些小镇上鸡毛蒜皮的事情。然而这样的宁静很快就被打破了。

一场暴风雪使得广播站的日常有了变更，男主播在来的路上遇见了一个奇怪的女人，他起初没有当回事，后来在来到广播站后，接听热心听众的电话的时候，得知了镇上正在发生一些奇怪的事情，人们好像疯了一样地到处乱窜，且相互之间不断地啃食。

听到这个消息，主播还以为有人在恶作剧，但是很快，他就打消了这个念头，原因很简单，听众反应的情况正在上演。一位医生从广播站的窗口爬了进来，后来，广播站的一个小姑娘就发疯了。故事愈演愈烈，医生后来也发疯了。广播站就剩下了两个主播。

两个人在逃避追杀的时候，无意之间洞破了其中的秘密。于是，他们想到了利用自己的专业，拯救整个镇上的人。然而这个时候，绝望的消息一再传来。本片充分利用了小成本影片的特点，将一个原本很无聊的故事拍得不那么无聊了。

作为一部准末日题材的影片，本片并没有像很多恐怖片那样过度渲染外界场景，而是另辟蹊径的使用有限空间内的人们的猜疑来将这种大环境由内而外地进行了扩散。很明显，这种扩散的方式是成功的。

观众们很容易通过演员们传播的情绪，感受到那种恐怖的气息。但另一方面，本片又不完全是恐怖的，如果你深究其中的内涵，就会发现，本片从头到尾说的就是一件讽刺的事情。掌握了话语权的一方，对于各种各样的词语都有着解释权，通过曲解词语的意思，最终引发了混乱，这就是本片的另一层含义，其实也是本质含义。

通晓了这个含义之后，本片看上去就更加的不恐怖了，反而是有一种特别的趣味在里面。如果你按照严格的逻辑来衡量本片的话，《澎堤池》是一部非常不合格的作品。因为这个故事几乎是没头没尾的。这样的故事很大程度上会降低人们的专注度的。

但是本片还有一个比较好的点，那就是总会在你昏昏欲睡的时候，给你一些线索，然后激起你的好奇心的。比如说在渲染外界环境中的人们开始自相残杀的时候，窗户口就有一个医生爬了进来。

然后给大家描述外面的环境等等，这些新鲜的刺激被有目的的投放进影片中，最终没有让本片彻底的丧失趣味性。小成本电影的特点就是没钱，然而没钱的优点也是有的，那就是将既有的道具以及场景中的细节，最大程度地利用好。

这些细节本身不具有什么太大的意义，如果你的预算非常多的话，但事实上在预算紧张的情况下，这些细节却可以成为一部影片的亮点，就比如说那个隔音效果非常好的播音室。

比如说大量运用的第二人称视角可以有效地削减预算，只通过声音传递不对称信息最终可以让外部环境更加的扑朔迷离等等。这些细节的铺陈使得本片一定程度上并没有因为预算而有太多的限制，反而是形成了自己的特色。同时让观众们忽视了本片的逻辑硬伤。

这就是认真带给一部本不是很出色的电影的回馈。一方面让导演很好地完成了自己的作品，另一方面，观众们在观看的时候，又不会显得那么无聊乏味。没有血浆，也不会有大量的僵尸来袭，然而本片借助一种似是而非的声音，让观众们自觉地沉浸在了一探究竟当中，这一点，声音功不可没。

然而就是这一点，我们才真正地看到了恐怖片的希望，有限的预算内，无限的放大细节加上想象，未必不是一种好方法，你看，本片也能吓到你，不是吗？

……

你好，再见

小成本惊悚片，甚至算不上恐怖片，因为丧尸的画面很少，血腥程度不够。整体沉闷，4个人，一个广播站，几间房，演了一个半小时，其实前半小时完全没有意义，都是对话，删去也不影响全片。澎堤池是讲法语的一个加拿大村庄，村子里很多人变丧尸袭击别人。在后面第4个人出现后，气氛开始有点紧张，引出主题：病毒感染人类发狂，病毒是靠某个英语单词复制、传播的，感染源是英语单词，他们开始说很多话试图找出致病的单词以及解药。最后找到了解药——“Kill is kiss.”男主持人亲吻并用这句话救了女导播，他们试图通过大喇叭传播，拯救更多人时，突然听到法语倒计时，接着一颗炸弹的声音传来。村庄应该是被毁灭了，这个表现方式还是挺含蓄的。爆炸前最后一幕女导播去亲吻男主持人，有点浪漫。

彩蛋是男女主角坐在一起耍酷。

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声明：本文为个人作业，非授权任何人不得截取、转载、剽窃、或用于商业用途。

As a low-budget film, Pontypool (2008) presents a zombie crisis within a radio station and explores the topics around communication: how does language work, how do people define insiders and outsiders, and how do the ideologies behind words enclose different communities. Deshane and Morton (2018) pay attention the “haunting” history and significance of the marginalized people in Canada, and interpret the movie as an apocalypse of isolating ourselves or reaching seeking out the strangers. Kirsch and Stancliff (2018) analyze the movie with a focus on the semiotic natures of languages.

By introducing a “word virus,” Pontypool first and foremost demonstrates the fact that people can hardly understand the world without utilizing languages. While more and more people are infected by the “word transmission” disease, languages as symbolic systems invade and penetrate in every aspects of our life. People are introduced to an incomplete and inaccurate reality that constructed by languages and can no longer rationalize the Real. Kirsch and Stancliff (2018) points out that the frequently used “ready” terms of (familial) intimacy, such as “honey” and “I love you,” have the greatest potential of violence and contagion in the movie. Deshane and Morton (2018) also suggest that intimate people are more easily infected in the film, since they share the same worldview, sense of community, ideology, and thus discourse.

Indeed, the film introduces audiences with an experience through which understandable words becomes more and more ambiguous in meanings. In the opening scene, Grant’s voice is broadcasting a local gossip about a lost cat. At first, the story is straightforward; however when Grant connects young woman’s name, the bridge and the town together, the information becomes confusing, especially when the aural description is our only source. “Pont de Pool, Pontypool, Panty pool, Pont de Flaque (1:28)” Those similar sounds becomes cognitively meaningless. This “sounds of words become meaningless” process is even more intense in the obituary program (49:20), when Grant introduces a dozen of local residents’ names, their ages, their relationship and way of death. Since the audiences could hardly follow these information as Grant speaks, and understanding these information does help the main plot of the film, the sounds of words, the linguistic essence of words, and the meanings of words dissolve from the Symbolic which we know.

The Symbolic is not only endangered through a linguistic experience, but also challenged by the collapse of orders and meanings. On one hand, the Other per se is in crisis, since the capacity of the state to safeguard the stability is often questioned in post-apocalyptic zombie films; on the other hand, Zombies as non-subjective existence between living and dying, between human and monster, between being an acquaintance and being a stranger directly invalidate the Symbolic which both contains order and chaos (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018). The repressive state force in the end of the film also signals a failure of ideological apparatuses to maintain order (ibid). Through a fluid division of insiders and outsiders, Pontypool also points out the reality in which people’s identities and meanings are fictionally assigned by the Other. Deshane and Morton (2018) suggest that zombies as a horde are inherent metaphor of foreign invasion, and the film believes that both isolation and insider’s language, which labels and marginalizes outsiders, are infectious and even destructive. The division between insider and outsider is questioned more when survivors and zombies are drawn to the same camp against the state force (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018).

The zombie experience further emphasizes that a community is neither defined by people’s physical appearance nor geographical boundary. Firstly, social connections and bonds, instead of bodily differences, are the criteria of being an insider or an outsider (Deshane and Morton, 2018). Becoming zombies is a process of becoming strangers, and Laurel-Ann’s infection demonstrates. Despite being a beloved college, she is considered a stranger and a dangerous threat as soon as she is infected; when she failed to join the zombie community, Laurel-Ann as a stranger on both survivors’ and zombies’ sides vomits herself to death. Secondly, different from nationality, which is empowered by national boundaries as colonial and artificial outcomes, the sense of community is generated through shared ideology, recognition on the unwritten rules, and labels. Transmitting through English language, the word virus in Pontypool cannot be confined by locations or physical barricades (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018). In real life, the widespread of the coronavirus also proves nationalists’ wrong impression on the concept of community and commonality.

Instead, what contagious is the ideologies which are articulated within words and coded in languages, and it is through people’s silent or expressive agreement on certain ideologies that they fuse into a community. On one hand, different meanings derive from the same signified under different Master Signifiers; on the other hand, by changing the meanings of words, people can question and modify the ideologies behind. While English language and whiteness is symbolic of vicious infections and invasion, the nature and significance of this “Pontypool Massacre” can be considered in at least three perspectives. In a Master Signifier of reflective decolonization, such as the article by Deshane and Morton (2018), the infection through English words only is a clear sarcasm on a hegemonic worldview. This narrative is emphasized through the brown-face Lawrence of Arabia performance, signaling exoticism, racism, and other colonial legacies in Canadian small towns (ibid.). BBC Word broadcaster Nigel Healing, nevertheless, insists to describe the whole incident as a separationist riot, demonstrating his late colonial Master Signifier (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018). For most of the audiences, English language is perhaps a neutral design for the plot and doesn’t carry significant meaning. To disrupt the relations between signifiers and signified in English and the embedded ideologies, Grant and Sydney abandon linguistic common sense and thus remove the division of insiders and outsiders. As Deshane and Morton (2018) put, “All forms of strangeness are removed in this act; there is no outsider; and for a moment, there is no language.” For a moment, a signifier cannot and doesn’t have to find a signified, and speaking and listening English no longer provides meanings to the receivers, just like Grant’s obituary program, like a song by incomprehensible language, and like chatter-chanting music such as Balinese kecak. Although people can no longer understand the reality through the previous symbolic system, they encounter the Real, the realm where word virus not only is incapable of attacking, but also aims to protect. When a pianist gives up pianos as a rationalizing and documenting tool of “music,” he or she may lose 88 pitches, but gains the potentiality to recognize all sounds in the world.

Work Cited:

Deshane, Evelyn, and R. Travis Morton. "The Words Change Everything: Haunting, Contagion And The Stranger In Tony Burgess’S Pontypool". London Journal Of Canadian Studies, 2018. UCL Press, doi:10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.005.

Kirsch, Sharon J., and Michael Stancliff. ""How Do You Not Understand A Word?": Language As Contagion And Cure In Pontypool". Journal Of Narrative Theory, vol 48, no. 2, 2018, pp. 252-278. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/jnt.2018.0010.