After Defying the System, I Became a Genius Director

Although she had decided on the film genre, Shao Yichen believed that merely deciding to make a horror film was far from enough. What she needed was to ensure that the horror film she made would definitely lose money! Preferably lose everything, a complete financial disaster, which would actually yield an even larger dividend!

But how to make a horror film lose money was, upon careful consideration, a technical challenge. While there were many horror films in the world, not all of them lost money, which indicated there was a certain art to losing money. Shao Yichen chewed on her pen cap, racking her brains, and finally came up with several ideas that could potentially turn the film into a flop.

First, it couldn’t be genuinely scary. Since it was called a horror film, audiences who went to see horror films presumably went for the thrill. Couples hoped to create a tense atmosphere to reduce physical distance, timid people hoped to be frightened to build courage, and brave people wanted more stimulation to challenge themselves. In this case, if they discovered the horror film didn’t live up to its name, wasn’t actually scary, and even contained inappropriate humor at times, how would they feel?

Of course they would feel deceived!

This way, the horror film’s reputation would certainly be poor. With poor word-of-mouth, naturally no one would watch it, and wouldn’t that successfully lead to financial loss?

Second, the actors needed to have poor acting skills. When asked what determines a film’s quality, the script was certainly one aspect, but the actors’ performances were another. If the actors performed well, sometimes it could magically transform what would have been a terrible film into something tolerable, or turn an ordinary work into something outstanding. Therefore, to lose money, she couldn’t allow good actors to perform at their true level—no, she should eliminate any possibility of good performances from the start by selecting actors with no acting skills!

At this thought, Shao Yichen had a flash of inspiration: Why not act herself? She had no acting skills whatsoever, would definitely not perform exceptionally well, and by acting herself she could also collect a salary, plucking a bit of wool from the stingy system! After all, although the system’s funds couldn’t be used by the host for anything other than filmmaking, wages were normal expenses for film production! The more Shao Yichen thought about it, the more feasible it seemed, and she quickly jotted down this idea on her draft paper.

Third, the script needed to be terrible. This could be said to be the decisive factor in a film losing money. Generally speaking, a film with poor post-production, bad actors, or bad editing could still be salvaged, but if the script was terrible from the beginning, even if all other factors were excellent, it would still most likely be a money-losing flop!

With this in mind, Shao Yichen made a bold decision, similar to her choice of actors—she would write the script herself! Such an important factor for losing money could only be entrusted to herself to ensure success!

No sooner said than done, she grabbed another draft paper and began to conceptualize the script.

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Three hours later.

Shao Yichen looked at the thin few pages of script with a satisfied smile.

She could be certain that this logically chaotic, plot-poisoned script would absolutely create a terrible film!

To minimize expenses, the script had most of its content taking place in the protagonist’s house, with the remaining portions set in a park that would suffice, essentially writing “low-budget film” on the cover. The specific content of the film was: A young couple rented an old house. One day, the male protagonist returned to the rental as usual but found something strange about it, as if the positions of items were subtly off.

At that moment, he suddenly saw a notification on his phone reporting that the bus line his girlfriend had taken had been involved in a major accident, and he saw a photo of his girlfriend lying bloody at the accident scene. Anxious to rush to the accident site, he saw his girlfriend enter as usual, wearing the outfit he had bought her—the same blood-stained outfit from the accident scene—yet she greeted him as if nothing was wrong.

The boyfriend therefore believed his girlfriend had unfortunately died at the accident scene, and the girlfriend before him now was a ghost, appearing in their shared rental because of unfinished wishes. So he tried everything to help her fulfill her wishes without letting her discover she was a ghost, encountering various coincidences and complications along the way.

Unexpectedly, at the end, the male protagonist discovered that it was actually his girlfriend who had been fulfilling his wishes all along—he was the one who had been in the accident. It turned out that the day of the accident was his girlfriend’s birthday. He happened not to have overtime work that day and took the bus to pick up his girlfriend after work, but encountered an accident. He died protecting his girlfriend, so she only sustained minor injuries while he died, and the blood on her clothes was his. After his death, his girlfriend couldn’t forget him, so she bought an identical outfit and continued living in their rental apartment.

Now it had been a year since the accident, and he returned to the human world on his girlfriend’s birthday just to celebrate her birthday with her once more. At the end of the story, the male and female leads blew out the candles on the belated birthday cake together, and he disappeared amid tears and smiles.

Shao Yichen looked at the script and felt that the script she had written in a flash of inspiration was both absurd and precisely avoided all the appealing factors of horror films. You couldn’t say it wasn’t a horror film—it did have ghosts and blood—but if you asked whether it was scary, it probably couldn’t be frightening no matter how it was filmed.

Especially to achieve the goal of not being scary, Shao Yichen had deliberately interspersed plenty of jokes in the dialogue between the male protagonist and his girlfriend, ensuring humor at moments that should be frightening, reducing the horror effect by one hundred percent.

Shao Yichen was very satisfied, feeling that this script looked like a failure at first glance.

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With the script prepared, what remained was the selection of filming equipment and the lead actors. For this film, Shao Yichen estimated it would only take a week to shoot, and she had already decided on the female lead—herself—for which she had set a price as high as 20,000 yuan, equivalent to one-fifth of the entire film’s budget.

The system didn’t give her too much trouble, easily approving Shao Yichen’s salary application, only stipulating that the lead actor, the male protagonist, couldn’t be paid less than her, and adding a clause: before completing the film, she could only withdraw half of the 20,000 yuan salary, and could withdraw the other half after filming was finished.

Shao Yichen naturally agreed without hesitation—10,000 yuan was enough to keep her alive for the next week, considering she currently had nothing.

As for the question of who to choose for the other lead role, Shao Yichen wasn’t rushed at all. After all, she just needed to find a male lead who obviously couldn’t act, and have him perform as poorly as possible. Top actors with superb acting skills were hard to find, but men with terrible acting skills were all over the streets. If worst came to worst, she could set up a sign at the labor market saying “Film crew recruiting, excellent compensation,” and there would be no shortage of applicants.

Therefore, the urgent matter now was the equipment needed for filming—even with all costs compressed, a filming location and a camera were non-compressible necessities.

But setting aside the filming location, Shao Yichen had already thought of a way to get a camera.

She opened the original owner’s phone, raised her hand to dial a string of numbers, then put the phone to her ear, cleared her throat, and patiently waited for the moment the call connected.

“—Hello?”

Author’s Note: The male lead is about to appear!

There will be another update tonight~