Horror Film's Wedding Scene Digitally Altered for Chinese Audiences (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0179519356
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/24/1718234/horror-films-wedding-scene-digitally-altered-for-chinese-audiences
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/24/horror-film-digitally-altered-china-gay-couple-straight-together
Chinese viewers are expressing outrage over the AI-powered modification, The Guardian reports, citing concerns about creative integrity and the difficulty of detecting such alterations compared to traditional scene cuts. The film's distributor halted the scheduled September 19 general release following the backlash. China's censorship authorities require all imported films to undergo approval before release.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/24/horror-film-digitally-altered-china-gay-couple-straight-together
Based (Score:1)
The CCP is accidentally based?
Re: (Score:2)
But I guess these days, with Dear Leader Trump, pretending Reality is not real is all the rage in certain (fascist) circles.
These are the same people who whined about [1]Netflix's Alexander: The Making of a God [reddit.com] devoting so much time, effort, and money to Alexander burying his "friend".
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hbomberguy/comments/1akn65t/looks_like_conservatives_are_mad_at_netflixs/
Rename it: Attack of the Alphabet People /s (Score:2, Funny)
Rename it: Attack of the Alphabet People /s
Lol (Score:3)
This is going to happen in red states soon enough.
The more oppressive a government gets (Score:2)
The more it goes after queer people. That's because for some reason queer people give a significant percentage of the population but can only be described as "the ick", and queer people are very clearly born that way because they exist in every single culture no matter how hard people try to stamp them out.
So if you're a dictator looking for a minority to oppress in order to distract from your incompetent leadership there is none better. They're just enough of them that you can scare people with them bu
I don't think that's what they wanted (Score:4, Insightful)
So let me get this right: it used to show a dude kissing a dude, but they altered it to be a *trans* person (female face, male body) kissing a dude?
"What about people who are just skin?" (Score:5, Interesting)
So the summary is dumb and weirdly evasive, so I skimmed the article. There's a shot of two dudes getting married to each other and whoever the censors are used AI to make one of the dudes a woman. Chinese viewers are, according to the article, actually increasingly tolerant of same-sex relationships, and so they are insulted by the switcheroo.
When I read "horror movie edited for Chinese audiences", I thought maybe they had put some skin back on a skeleton, because (and this may be outdated by now) skeletons are tantamount to blasphemy in mainstream Chinese culture.
Re: me chinese me make you centroship (Score:1)
Americans force way more censorship upon Hollywood than China.
For example, look at all the PG-13 adaptations of original works that should be rated R. Americans forced Hollywood to censor movies "for the children".
Re: (Score:2)
Their idea of morality is different for sure [1]especially on racial issues [abc.net.au]. They find Western cultural extremely immoral from their perspective, so none of this should be very surprising.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-18/china-big-on-censorship-unless-racist-content-beijing-hrw/102737360
Re: (Score:2)
This is someplace that the great melting pot of the USA could beat China. Particularly in places like Africa. If we were smart. Which, evidently we are not.
Re: (Score:2)
> This is someplace that the great melting pot of the USA could beat China. Particularly in places like Africa. If we were smart. Which, evidently we are not.
It turns our (US-ians) our diversity of morality causes some internal strife as well. China's iron fist over cultural issues isn't very helpful either.
Skeletons (Score:2)
I'm not sure about skeletons, but I know that ghosts are verboten. The Hong Kong Disneyland version of the haunted mansion doesn't have ghosts at all, it's scenes are mostly fantasy and magic based. Ghostbusters was banned, too.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know the details, but I recall it being an issue for the Chinese WoW client. Normally the spot you'd died and then resurrected from would get a skeleton of the appropriate race, but in the Chinese client it was a tombstone instead.
Re: (Score:2)
Kinda - the there's no real evidence they actually care about skeletons exactly, but they have historically regularly reject foreign media with 'occult' visuals or that 'promoted superstition', and rather than figure out the actual boundaries, importers would self-censor skeletons and ghosts rather than risk needing to go through revisions or being outright banned.
Re: (Score:2)
When Hu Jintao was president, they objected to depictions of skeletons. That was when WoW was trying to get into the Chinese market.
Re: (Score:3)
> whoever the censors are used AI to make one of the dudes a woman
I don't think the article specified who altered the film. Was it the Chinese censors - panty-twisting apparatchiks who declare yes or no, often for specious or capricious reasons? Or was it the studio, who have the masters and a host of VFX people at their disposal, hoping to score some Chinese box office returns? And who should we be more mad at?
Re: (Score:2)
Probably the company that bought distribution rights for China.
Made it too Progressive (Score:2)
> There's a shot of two dudes getting married to each other and whoever the censors are used AI to make one of the dudes a woman.
Well there's the problem: they turned it from a gay wedding into a trans wedding and I'm guessing Chinese audiences are just not ready for that yet.