Chapter 107: Video
Once back to the theatre, Su Min opened his eyes.
He took off his helmet and heard the male half of the couple sitting near him sleeping soundly. His snores were rather loud.
He didn’t appear to be afraid of getting beaten up by his girlfriend.
There was still the last part left in the movie and the lights would only turn on once it reached the end. Following that, the cleaners would come in.
Su Min watched the rest and then got up.
This time, the staff didn’t show up. He left his helmet in his seat and moved over to the aisle to leave.
A female reprimanding voice could be heard through the commotion: “I didn’t take you to the movies to sleep.”
The man quickly begged for mercy: “I was wrong, I was wrong…..But I couldn’t go back after dying.”
“Don’t ask me out to the movies anymore.” The woman added: “It’s no fun watching movies with you.”
He not only died before her, he even fell asleep.
There were no Easter eggs in this movie, only some behind the scene snippets.
Su Min wasn’t interested in these.
As soon as he reached the cinema hall, he saw Xiao He outside. He looked like he was getting ready to go in.
Seeing him, Xiao He hurriedly said: “Mr. Su.”
Su Min walked next to him, “Do you need something?”
Xiao He revealed a smile and said: “It’s nothing important. I just wanted to let you know that there will be a new movie released next month and I wanted to see if you will be interested watching it.”
Su Min: “It’s still too early to tell.”
He didn’t know what his schedule would be like next month. It would depend on how busy he is to determine whether or not he could come.
Xiao He said: “That’s true. Sorry about bothering you.”
All the staff here wanted to know about Su Min and establish some sort of connection with him. They had watched every rereleased movie he had starred in.
It was a first for them to have someone who could attract the attention of ghosts.
There were audiences who could clear through the movie until the end but there were usually tough men, completely different to someone soft and gentle like him.
And their attractiveness also couldn’t compare with Su Min’s.
To put it bluntly, more people are willing to watch something starring someone who is good-looking and smart. This was particularly the case once Su Min’s private details were exposed. His status as a study G.o.d gave the audiences an even more favourable impression.
Xiao He finally understood why the cinema kept making him follow Su Min around. An audience like him was hard to find.
More importantly, he definitely wasn’t anyone ordinary.
Although he wasn’t too clear about it, he could tell through his actions.
Su Min made a sound of acknowledgement and asked: “Did anyone else clear the movie this time?”
“Yes.” Xiao He said: “In this session there was another one. There will probably be more in the sessions after this.”
Su Min internally felt that the ratio seemed quite okay.
He was just curious how they managed to escape.
But he would have to wait until they are rereleased to be able to watch it. Maybe some won’t even be screened. The number of rereleases of a movie is usually limited to a maximum of three. Because the s.p.a.ces in cinemas are limited, they couldn’t let it compete with the other movies.
Xiao He and Su Min exchanged a few more words before separating.
Su Min went out the door and stopped before the posters. He took a quick look at all the movies that were recently rereleased.
The posters were all beautiful but one of them was for a movie which received poor reviews online.
As he was thinking this, his phone vibrated.
Su Min opened it and saw that Li Wenxin had called him multiple times with half an hour interval between each call. Now, he was calling him again.
As soon as the call connected, he heard his voice: “Su Min, you’ve finally answered my call. Were you watching a movie?”
Su Min made a sound of affirmation as he walked out from the cinema, “Just came out.”
“I knew you weren’t picking up because of a movie.” Li Wenxin blabbed on. “I thought you would come out early, but I didn’t expect you to stay in there for so long. It goes without saying that you must have reached the movie finale.”
Su Min: “I guess.”
Li Wenxin asked: “Was the last part of the movie good?”
As someone who was killed shortly after entering, he was very curious.
Su Min said: “How fun could it be staying in prison? The ending is also the same. You should already be able to guess what the ending would be like.”
Li Wenxin said: “That’s true. Anyway, I hope your rerelease is screened sooner.”
Su Min: “We will need to wait three days until I’m notified.”
At this moment, someone just happened to pa.s.s by. Hearing his words, he immediately sneered.
Did you really think that it was easy to get a rerelease?
Su Min heard the noise and looked over at the man.
The man glanced at him and called someone with his phone: “…..I just met someone bragging at the cinema saying that their movie would be rereleased. Does he even think……….”
Su Min remained silent. He calmly walked past him.
Whenever he encountered something like this, he had a strange feeling. It was probably something the netizens online referred to as silently smiling as you wait for the moment to slap their face.
But he also thought that, in the situation where his movie really didn’t get rereleased, it would be too embarra.s.sing.
Su Min this time wanted to know what happened in the original movie, so he directly moved to buy the next screening ticket.
He didn’t need to wait long. Within a few minutes, he was back inside the theatre.
There were much more people watching the movie normally compared to those willing to watch the holographic movie. There were also many couples and the theatre were filled with sounds of popcorn being chewed on.
This persisted until the lights in the theatre dimmed.
***
The movie at most would play for two hours.
When Su Min came out from the theatre, he sighed again.
In the movie, Fang Shu Juan and Yin Ze stayed in the same room rather late. They had also tried to investigate but they didn’t have many chances to do so.
Eventually, they were caught.
Chen Su said that at the end of the movie, “Everything was gone” but this didn’t necessarily mean that everyone one would die. It could also mean something different, that is, the two of them dying.
But after dying, rescue came.
Su Min didn’t understand this kind of setting. Those people are definitely not real prison guards. The real prison guards had long met their miserable ends.
So from the beginning to the end of the movie, there were not many prison guards. More importantly, the work that they had allocated to the prisoners were also very casually decided.
Moreover, the laboratory was only built recently. Although it was just a few years, numerous people had died. That man in the white coat was an expect in diseases and had studied abroad and won many awards.
But he was a psychopath. He always wondered why some people would excel more in something compared to another and he began to research this.
At first, it was using the bodies in the hospital but later he grew unsatisfied and wanted to continue his research on live humans. How could dead specimens be compared to live ones? But the hospital definitely wouldn’t allow it and he couldn’t be discovered by the hospital.
So he went out and found a lot of people to work for him.
Those screams were the result of unbearable pain from his living human specimens. And the coding of them represented how many people he had worked on.
For example, the subject no. 156 that Su Min heard earlier meant that 156 people had met their ends.
Because this old prison was about to be abandoned, there weren’t many prisoners in it. They were all prisoners with only a few years of sentence. The idea was that they could be released before the prison closed down.
No one expected something like this.
Every room there were occupied previously by other prisoners. Just as Su Min speculated, the ghosts were indeed looking for their replacements.
The incident with the scissor as also caused by ghosts.
The remaining incidents with the sewers and so on were all related to the ghosts. That was the reason why everything was so strange, and the prison guards knew to treat it as nothing serious.
It was because they had not met their retribution, nor had they seen those ghosts.
In the movie, brother Hao died from being decapitated. It happened similarly to that incident Su Min saw but no one pulled him out and he lost his head.
As for the person who died in the river, because that river used to lead to the laboratory, there would often be research waste products coming out from it. This resulted in the river becoming abandoned and blocked up.
Those wastes were also products of their research. Organisms in the water that were exposed to this would naturally grow and mutate.
That man had died in the mouths of those mutated creatures.
The scenes shown in the movie revealed that there were strange fish and bugs in the water. In an instant, you could tell that they were mutant creatures.
This prison was also indeed built over a ma.s.s grave.
A long time ago, this place just happened to be a battlefield and many people had died. They were later buried in the ground. Decades pa.s.sed and not many people remembered this so a prison was erected over it.
This was the reason why there were ghosts everywhere. It was because it was completely bones underground.
Probably because they were good natured people before their deaths, they didn’t turn evil after death.
Su Min could still vividly remember those bony hands scrambling to help him weed. He didn’t know what the owner of those cute hands were like.
He stood against the railing in the mall for a while and then searched online for movie related comments.
“I originally thought I would see a pair of husbands escaping prison hand in hand but they actually gave me that ending. Why did rescue come after their deaths………”
“Did they director film tragedy before???”
“Never again am I going to watch this director’s movies. After avoiding deaths from all those ghosts, why did they have to die in those people’s hands.”
“I just wanted to peacefully watch a horror movie, but I found myself watching a romance movie instead. If it was just a normal romance movie, I wouldn’t have mind, but I can’t believe I was given such an ending. So angry.”
“So pitiful before they died. Many girls cried at that scene in my session.”
“…………”
Su Min read through them for a while. Most of them were discussions about the director. He clicked into the director’s Weibo and took a look. Although there weren’t many comments, the ones he saw were basically hate comments.
“The director must be here to take revenge on society.”
“I would rather all of them dying. That would make things more acceptable for me instead of just the two of them dying.”
“Today is once again a day where I will be punching the director.”
“So angry, so angry. I even need to remind myself not to get too emotional about it. [Smile] Director, you filmed it very well. It was so good, I wanted to hit you.”
He felt that it wasn’t strange for him to receive hate comments like these.
Comparatively speaking, the Weibo’s of the two relatively unknown actors who played the protagonists in the movie was filled with comforting. There were rows of crying emoticons. Despite clearly used to indicate grief, it made people want to laugh.
It couldn’t be denied that an ending like this was more profound, but no one liked a movie with a tragic ending.
Even the ending of “Murder Island” wasn’t as difficult to accept as this one. It was probably because he had spent too much time with the two protagonists.
The finale of the movie was naturally filled with hope.
Su Min could still remember the bright light on the big screen, the blue sky and the expressions of the surviving prisoners.
He casually clicked into another forum thread.
Many film critics have posted something on Weibo but he didn’t like these kinds of film reviews, so he just skipped through it and read real time comments.
This continued until he saw a post linked with a video.
【I Ate Three Donuts: “I only went to watch it because of my best friend. After watching it, my only thought was, is this brotherhood? That director is really too cruel. Both cruel and harsh. Let’s cook the director #video”】
Su Min clicked play.
The video was shot using a phone. It was a little fuzzy and it shook a little, but you could still see that it was depicting a scene in the movie.
He remembered that this scene appeared in the latter part of the movie.
At that time, brother Hao had already died. Many people in the prison had become aware of the situation but they couldn’t fight back. Fang Shu Juan and Yin Ze’s attempt at escaping also failed.
There were no other sounds in the darkness, only the breathing of the two people and the sound of dripping blood.
Fang Shu Juan didn’t know Yin Ze before.
But every week there would be someone coming to him to confess and then it would be followed by a man glaring hatefully at him. He was very confused.
After asking around, he found out that those girls were Yin Ze’s girlfriends.
Fang Shu Juan was also at a loss. He did indeed receive many confessions from girls who took a liking to his face and personality, but he had rejected them all.
The two of them just happened to be in the same year and they also lived in dormitory rooms opposite each other. Following this incident, he started to pay more attention to Yin Ze and he realised that, although he had a bit of a temper, he was actually quite cute.
He never gave him any good looks and would occasionally speak harshly to him.
Now that they were about to die, Fang Shu Juan said: “Don’t hate me.”
Following that, Yin Ze said slowly with a ragged breath: “I didn’t hate you……..”
He just didn’t like the fact that his girlfriends always ended up liking him. He didn’t know what was so good about him.
But now he realised, he really is quite good.