It can be said that the public has always loved watching "suspense dramas". In the forties and fifties of last century, Hitchcock's series of suspense films, such as Rear Window, Butterfly Dream and Ecstasy, had already achieved great success in Hollywood. In 1990s, Conan, a famous Japanese detective, conquered the global audience, which has been broadcast continuously for more than 20 years, and has also become a classic template of suspense drama. Many classic reasoning bridges in the play have been quoted many times by other film and television works. Classic suspense films such as no one lives, Murder on the Orient Express and Nocturnal Travel have been adapted many times, which can be described as enduring.
In China, the peak of "mystery drama" has been opened. From the 1990s to the early 20th century, there appeared many popular suspense dramas, such as Young Bao Qingtian, Six Groups of Felony and Detective Dee Renjie, which became people's childhood memories. Most of the cases in these plays are carefully designed, reversed layer by layer, and unexpected, not only with their meticulous reasoning techniques, but also with a cold atmosphere. For example, in the classic astrological killing method in The Secret of the Hermit Village in Young Bao Qingtian, the murderer spliced a part of six bodies into a seventh body, creating the illusion of death, which is still considered as a "childhood shadow" by many viewers.
However, China's suspense drama is much bigger. They were not satisfied with just solving the case and finding the murderer, but also focused on the darkness of human nature, such as how childhood and times affected a person, thus producing a number of high-quality suspense dramas at that time.
The most classic works are Jiang Wei's Silent Witness and Mist. The Silent Witness is the earliest interpretation of psychological crime in domestic dramas, which creates a charming "serial murderer". The play did not deliberately create suspense. Instead, tell the audience directly that the protagonist is the murderer. The most attractive thing about it is how this man became a murderer, because his childhood mother committed suicide by cheating and grew up alone, which made him full of hatred for "self-indulgent" women.
The fog is getting deeper and deeper. Firstly, the meaning of "fear in daily life" is explained. Terror does not come from ghosts, but from everyday camouflage. A friend who has known you for decades knows your weakness clearly, but misleads you with it, which will make you doubt yourself and even go crazy.
At the same time, it has also been brought into the vision of sociology and philosophy. The so-called murderer is not heterogeneous, but shows the madness hidden in human heart. In the end, the audience will not be happy because the criminals are caught, but will feel sad, because revenge and resistance to unfair fate are eternal complexes imprinted in human hearts. In fact, this perspective is also the reason why American suspense dramas such as Detective and The List of Gods can be regarded as "divine dramas". It appeared in China more than ten years ago, but it didn't attract much attention at that time.