Tag: horror

Salmokji: Whispering Water (살목지, Lee Sang-min, 2026)

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Is there something a little bit uncanny about a manmade lake? Despite the sign warning of deep water and potential loss of life, the area surrounding the Salmokji reservoir is otherwise idyllic, its ominous “dead tree lake” name not withstanding. You wouldn’t necessarily know that it was only created in 1982 for the purpose of storing water for agricultural use. Its modernity seems slightly incongruous with the presence of a ghost.

Perhaps this is why it has become a tourist hotspot following the surprising success of Lee Sang-min’s low-budget indie horror Salmokji: Whispering Water (살목지), having previously mentioned on late-night TV show Midnight Horror Story. The location’s sense of eeriness ironically seems to stems from its disconnection from the modern world. A physicist who claimed not to believe in the supernatural reported that she nearly drove into the reservoir after her car’s GPS malfunctioned and subsequently suffered misfortune after visiting the area. The inability to get a phone signal or connect to cloud networks etc may of course be due to the fact that is surrounded by mountains and rocky terrain rather than the presence of a malevolent spiritual entity who is actively blocking digital signals. Yet its also true that the natural silence of this tranquil environment can be disquieting to those used to the ambient noise of a city.

In any case, within the world of the film the lake is a popular fishing destination as demonstrated by the couple visiting it in the opening sequence who are on what seems to be quite an early date in their relationship. The woman’s aversion to the worms used bait is also reflective of a new squeamishness regarding the natural environment that is also echoed when producer Su-in drops a box bait brought by her cameramen who were planning on staying behind once their job is done. Su-in’s irritation stems from a different source. They’re supposed to be here to work, and in fact to fix an urgent problem, though no one is taking it seriously and the team are largely behaving as if they’re here on a day trip. Junior producer Seong-bin has brought an intern with him he is clearly pursuing romantically, while she secretly plans to moonlight by filming footage for her personal horror vlog.

They’ve come to Salmokji because a ghostly figure has been spotted in a photo they uploaded, though it does not appear to have been one that was taken by them. As such, they urgently need to replace with a photo that is not cursed, because they’ve been getting complaints from the locals. It’s not really explained why they can’t just stop with deleting the original photo, but for some reason Su-in’s boss insists the image must replaced immediately. He even insists they stay overnight when it turns out further equipment is required and won’t reach them until after dark. This perhaps bears out another lingering horror in contemporary urban life with the pressure of workplace heirarchy and exploitative employment environments. The cameramen immediately resent Su-in for telling them off for bringing the fishing gear and subsequently reject her authority by disobeying her commands and belittling the idea of their actually being a ghost even when strange things start happening.

Su-in is also exposed as having tried to palm this job off on a colleague after visiting the area herself previously and deciding it was too creepy. Some suggest this is all then her fault, that the lake did this to make her come back and now she’s dragged all of them into it. She meanwhile seems to have been dealing with a potential crush on her team manager, a widower who may have been attracted to the lake by the rumours of it being somewhere that the worlds of the living and the dead intersect. The lake then also becomes a metaphor for a more literal drowning in grief, as if her co-worker willing embraced oblivion by walking into it in order to be reunited with his wife if in death rather than in life. The creepy old lady living nearby tells them to place a stone on a cairn and make a wish, but in reality this seals their fate just as getting even a toe wet later will. The real horror is that once marked by whatever is in the lake, there is no real possibility of escape and even if you think you’ve made it out, in reality you may not have. Incorporating some elements of food footage horror, Lee piled on the sense of supernatural dread right until the ambiguous ending that suggests all this has happened before and will happen again.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese & English subtitles)

The Last Footage (Arkar Soe Oo, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

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“Show some respect for things you don’t understand,” a creepy which intones, admonishing a group of city slickers fetching up in the forest with a dangerous disrespect for the natural world and what lies beyond in Arkar Soe Oo’s creepy found footage folk horror, The Last Footage. The first found footage films from Myanmar though apparently made for the international market rather than the purely domestic, the film is entirely shot with 4K camera-equipped glasses neatly juxtaposing an entirely new technology with ancient folk beliefs and ritual practices.

The opening sequence, however, seems to hint at the variety of uses these glasses can be put to from a young man taking a picture of his parents to another who surreptitiously Googles “how to talk to girls” while staring at an attractive woman in a coffee shop. A group of ghost hunters uses them to capture footage while walking around a former conference centre where large numbers of people died in an explosion before apparently meeting a sticky end after running into a weird cult. The ID numbers given suggest this footage is being stored somewhere else and is therefore somehow accessible externally.

Aung Khant seems to have bought the glasses just because they’re the cool new thing rather than a desire to capture something in particular. His friends describe him as being “obsessed with strange stuff” and recall a fairly disastrous trip they picked to a destination he picked, but don’t particularly seem to mind him documenting their every move through his glasses which, he points out, have excellent battery life. That comes in handy because the electricity’s been out at the strange little hut they eventually make it to after the coach they were travelling on breaks down right outside the forest.

Thu Ya has been left a sizeable amount of land on a former rubber plantation owned by his late grandfather. He plans to open a resort there, and suggests the group’s latest trip be to go check it out. In a way Thu Ya has received a toxic inheritance that he is ill-equipped to deal with, never really considering that his grandfather may have abandoned this place for a reason or that there really may be something dark and ancient lurking in the woods. They are all fairly affluent, educated urbanites who only joke about supernatural threats and are flippant about folk beliefs. Despite being urged not to do anything to disrupt the balance of the forest, two of the group engage in some black magic rituals as a joke using cow’s blood and candles they brought from home.

Stepping into the witch’s cottage, they may as well have entered another world as she makes cryptic pronouncements that “it has awakened” and there’s nothing to be done now except accept one’s fate. Obsessed with black magic rituals herself in an effort to resurrect her late son, the witch isn’t really interested in helping the gang or saving their lives. Beginning to realise they probably should have listened to Thu Ya’s uncle Ko Nyo who warned them that the forest was not a safe place, Aung Khant and his friends have little choice other than to do battle with the evil they’ve awakened in the hope of rescuing a missing child even if they themselves may not survive.

As the wearer of the glasses, Aung Khant is there to be an audience stand-in providing an immersive POV that gives the impression of actually being present. As such he is a fairly passive presence following those who take part in the action so he can witness and recored it through his glasses. In a sense, he embodies the camera and the fact that it is mounted in his glasses means that it can continue capturing images without his involvement. All he can really do, however, is watch as his friends desperately try to come up with solutions after deciding that they can’t run from this particular beast and will have to their best to fight it. As the witch had said, however, there are some things that cannot be understood but must be respected. They will pay a heavy price for their lack of respect for traditional folk practices and an ancient past from which they have become entirely disconnected. 

The Last Footage screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Curse (ザ・カース, Kenichi Ugana, 2025)

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Could it be fair to say that sometimes we curse ourselves, or perhaps more accurately that the only true curse is morbid curiosity? Those at the centre of Kenichi Ugana’s J-horror inspired The Curse (ザ・カース) have the option to simply stay off social media, but they find themselves unable to do so. Be careful what you post about yourself online, the film seems to say, as if an Instagram profile were basically opening a portal to your soul through which any evil entity pass.

But at the same time, a priest cautions that one may do harm to others without even realising it and it transpires that even the most innocuous of posts can be enough to push someone over the edge. The versions of their lives that people post online are obviously idealised or perhaps aspirational, but they can still provoke a sense of jealousy or envy to the extent that saying “I am having a lovely day” can upset someone who is not and perhaps has not for a long time but continues to hate follow these kinds of accounts. This in itself is a kind of curse, the film argues, as a deepening sense of self-loathing is projected outward towards those apparently living better lives the unhappy obsessive feels they may not deserve.

Still, there is an extent to which the curse is also “real”. When Riko (Yukino Kaizu) spots a creepy photo posted by a friend, Shufen, which is accompanied by the caption “Drop dead already, all of you” and seems to contain the image of a malevolent entity, she is of course immediately concerned. Her anxiety is compounded by the fact that her friend is Taiwanese and posts in Mandarin, so she uses the auto translate feature but has no way of knowing if the translation is accurate. When Shufen fails to reply to messages, Riko decides to get over her sense of awkwardness and contact her ex in Taiwan, a mutual friend. Confused, Jiahao (Yan Yu Teng) tells her Shufen died six months previously in circumstances so strange and disturbing her family preferred to keep it quiet. “Curses are very real, in Taiwan at least,” he tells her. People die from them. 

Riko then faces another barrier in trying to navigate her away around the ritual beliefs of another culture. When her friend Airi began exhibiting strange symptoms after watching a video online, she took her to a doctor who was unable to help. After her Taiwanese friends recommend an exorcism, she begins to feel guilty. Perhaps if she’d contacted a priest instead of a doctor, she could have been more help to Airi. The Japanese-speaking priest in Taiwan isn’t necessarily that much help either, though. He demands payment up front, which reduces his credibility and opens the door to the suggestion that the rituals he provides are more placebo effect than anything else. Nevertheless, it seems he really does have the power to intervene with spirits, only this one is a little beyond his capabilities.  

There’s an essential irony in the fact that Riko is only able to detect the ghostly presence through its reflection in images while otherwise unable to see it lurking in the shadows or under her bed. This embodiment of resentment seems to affect her offline life too as the manager of the upscale hair salon where she works begins to act strangely towards her and a homeless man he warns her about arrives to advise she deal with her ghost problem before it gets out of hand. Ugana frequently cuts back to the ranks of disembodied mannequin heads that line the salon as a kind of foreshadowing lending the place an ominous quality and perhaps playing into the anxieties of the antagonist with its elitist vibes and unwelcoming atmosphere. Perhaps the real villains are unfair female beauty standards, ageism, and lookism, or equally perhaps we’re back at the figure of a witch who doesn’t want to grow old and is cursed with vanity, resentful of those who possess a beauty she believes herself to have lost. Turning unexpectedly bloody in final moments, the film suggests that this particular curse will never be lifted in part because it has become its own reward as this this particular malevolent entity dances cheerfully in her garden, secure in the knowledge that no one is watching.

The Curse is on UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand digital platforms 13 July

Trailer (English subtitles)

Invisible 2: Chasing The Ghost Sound (귀신소리 찾기, Yoo Jun-suk, 2011)

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After hearing ghostly voices in her guest house, a middle-aged woman calls in a famous paranormal investigator but is put out when he arrives with a film crew in tow in Yoo Jun-suk’s eerie fake documentary footage horror movie, Invisible 2: Chasing The Ghost Sound (귀신소리 찾기, Gwisin Soli Chajgi). As might be assumed, nothing is quite as it seems, but as the relations between Geum-ja (Jeong Eui-soon), ghost hunter Pil-woo, and the few crew begin to  decline, the ghost may be the least of their worries.

Geum-ja’s guest house is a traditional-style villa out in the country and at this time of year all but cut off by snow which is why it proves so hard for the team to reach. However, if the place is haunted, it’s by someone much more recently deceased than the Joseon-era past. Geum-ja suspects it may be her late sister and that she may have a message for her. That’s apparently why she contacted Pil-woo, hoping he would be able to record the ghostly voices and tell her what they say. 

Pil-woo, however, is suspicious of Geum-ja and suspects she may have been somehow involved with her sister’s death. Unable to find any sings of the paranormal activity, he thinks the ghost is probably a manifestation of Geum-ja’s guilt. He’s not particularly bothered about the potential crime, but is quite irritated that she’s wasted his time. She had indeed been reluctant to key him in on the facts of the case and may also have misled him. It seems Geum-ja’s sister Geum-seon may have been having an affair with Geum-ja’s husband, who has apparently not returned to haunt Geum-ja, or at least not in this form. 

But just as the crew are leaving, Geum-ja begins screaming and claims she can hear a voice that no one else can. Pil-woo too picks up five fragments of a ghostly voice from around the villa but struggles to assemble them into a coherent whole. This sudden reversal, however, only raises suspicion with the director of the TV crew who find Pil-woo’s discovery a little too convenient. He suggests that Pil-woo and Geum-ja may be in it together to cook up a ghost show. Pil-woo sees himself a genuine investigator and seems unhappy about working with the TV crew in the first place. He thinks of them as charlatans who regularly stage paranormal investigations to make the show entertaining. 

Geum-ja didn’t want to be on TV, either, though perhaps as Pil-woo suspects that she doesn’t really want to draw attention to herself or risk other things she might not want exposed coming to light. Pil-woo had suggested it was all a manifestation of her guilt, but never stopped to consider that both things could be true. Geum-ja and Geum-seon were twins, which means she is essentially haunted and confronting herself as expressed through the lengthy mirror shot in which Geum-ja converses with Geum-seon though her own reflection. Geum-seon plays a kind of game with her as if they were children, turning the sounds into a puzzle that must be solved in order to unlock the truth of her message. 

Yoo finally returns to make ionic usage of the eerie shot through a glass coffee table that opened the film as the malevolent presence eventually makes itself known.The villa becomes a more literal kind of haunted space, but as Pil-woo discovers its melancholy secret may be of a more ordinary kind, Geum-ja seeks a kind of reverse retribution, comforting the ghost of her sister but also asking for an apology as if she had the upper hand in this situation while wandering around in the team’s “stupid helmet” trying to root Geum-seon out. The dread only deepens as she comes closer to solving the puzzle and receiving its chilling message. Then again, perhaps the message is that Geum-ja should have just ignored the nagging voices in her head rather than chasing after ghostly echoes or seeking absolution from spirits rather than reckon with a painful reality. Though Geum-ja may see herself as the victim, so too may Geum-seon as the pair chase each other through the eerie space of the darkened villa with seemingly no escape for either.

Kokkuri (こっくりさん, Takahisa Zeze, 1997)

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The tensions between a trio of young women are brought to the fore by an ill-advised consultation with Kokkuri-san in Takahisa Zeze’s atmospheric horror movie. Some more than others, these girls are all haunted if only by adolescent confusion and suppressed desire. Looking for answers with no one turn to in the absence of parental authority, they rely doubly on a late-night radio show, Midnight Blue Bird,  hosted by a girl their age calling herself “Michiru”.

“Michiru” is the heroine of the Japanese version of Blue Bird fairytale about a brother and sister who leave in search of the blue bird of happiness only to return and realise that it was waiting for them at home all along. While the moral of the fairytale might be that happiness is all around us if only you know how to look, there is precious little surrounding the girls outside of their friendship which is already beginning to fracture under the weight of adolescence, not to mention a series of overlapping love triangles.

What neither of the other girls know, is that Michiru is actually a persona constructed by Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu) who is actually the host of the radio show. As Michiru she claims to be sexually experienced and rebellious, answering the questions that come from other young women though, in reality, a regular high schooler and romantically naive. As we gradually become aware, she is in love with her friend Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada), but Hiroko has a crush on Masami’s fickle boyfriend Akira. It was Mio who suggested the Kokkuri-san game on her radio show, a Ouija board style means of divination, but it quickly turns dark with Masami (Moe Ishikawa) manipulating the board to needle Hiroko after realising she’s after her boyfriend.

The resulting fallout pushes Hiroko and Mio towards a confrontation with their shared traumas as survivors of a drowning. Hiroko is haunted by a little girl in red, ironically named “Midori” which means “green”, and struggles to get over the guilt she feels over a childhood friend who drowned in a public bath. Mio, meanwhile, gives contradictory biographical information on her show, but it seems that Mio’s mother intended to take her own life with Mio in tow after she caught her with her new husband to be following the death of Mio’s father. Echoing the central motivation of the film, Mio’s mother suggests the “go together” to where her father is, but later saves Mio alone.

But while Hiroko becomes preoccupied with the notion of sex, vowing to become more like Michiru, she tells Michiro that thanks losing her virginity will change her though she later laments that it’s changed nothing at all. Mio, meanwhile seems to have a hangup having caught her mother with another man. In disgust, she rubs at her libs in the same way that the older Mio later does after finally finding the courage to kiss Hiroko who lips have, by then, been coated in striking red lipstick. The colour red seems to represent the curse of Kokkuri-san and with it repressed guilt, regret, and forbidden desire. Though it seems that by learning to accept herself, publicly unmasking herself on her radio show and confessing her love for Hiroko live on air, Mio alone is able to overcome the curse. The kiss she gives Hiroko is one of life that seems to break the spell and free them both from Kokkuri-san’s trap, though all may not be as it first seems. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Hiroko does not remember makes this something of a private evolution for Mio even as voices from the past resurface and encourage them “go together” toward whatever fate awaits them in the film’s ambiguous conclusion that echoes that of Zeze’s earlier pink tale of frustrated same-sex desire, Angel of September, which shares many of the same themes. Even so, in finally accepting her sister, who is impressed and supportive of her coming out live on air even if she cynically adds it can be her new gimmick, Mio has undergone a transformation into adulthood and symbolically been reborn, emerging from the cleansing waters with greater clarity and self-assurance if perhaps no more certain of what the future may hold.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Mudborn (泥娃娃, Shieh Meng-ju, 2025)

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Poor old Hsu-Chuan is stuck making a scary VR horror game based on a grisly real-life crime, while his own wholesome proposal to create one about spending time with your family gets shuts down for having no clear path to monetisation. There is, however, something a little bit ironic in Hsu-Chuan’s abstraction in creating a separate space to share with those close to him rather just going home and spending time with them instead.

In fact, Hsu-Chuan (Tony Yang) is often physically separated from his heavily pregnant wife whom he somewhat creepily watches through a surveillance camera so he can “keep her company”. He does seem to want to play the role of a good father, constantly fussing over a doll as a way of training himself to look after their baby, but at the same time his wife Mu-Hua (Cecilia Choi Sze-wan) is irritated when he says he’s taking parental leave to “keep them company,” rather than spend time with them together as a family and contribute equally to raising this child. It’s as if Hsu-Chuan sees himself as separate from the main family unit, more like a helpful guest than a devoted father. Then again, his boss tells him he was much the same. When his wife was pregnant, he’d “relax” by doing overtime at the office. When he got home, his wife cried and pointed out she had someone living inside her and it would be nice if they could face this together, as a family.

After all, pregnancy itself is a kind of possession. At the end of the day, the men can go off and escape their responsibilities if they want to, but the woman can’t separate herself from the child inside her. When Hsu-Chuan unwittingly brings the haunted doll from the murder scene home, he implants it in the womb of their domestic space where Mu-hua cares for it by restoring it like one of her statues. But what neither of them know is that the doll was made with grave soil and baked with maternal grief, so it contains the vengeful souls of those buried nearby. Another sculptor, Liu Hsin (Tracy Chou Tsai-shih), used grave soil precisely because she believed that all return to the earth in the end and so it contains the remnants of those now gone.

But perhaps there’s something not quite right about using the echoes of the dead without their consent. Liu Hsin may have known that, which is why she put esoteric talismans on her creations to seal in whatever might be in there. The same could be said of the game Hsu-chuan’s company is making. Is it really alright to exploit a horrific real life crime for entertainment? An employee takes an acquaintance to scan the still abandoned crime scene, capturing the eerie atmosphere along with everything the murdered family left behind. It wouldn’t be surprising if they picked up a ghost or two, and probably they should have listened when a mysterious voice told them to put that doll back where it came from.

To that extent, Hsu-chuan becomes a kind of mirror for Liu Hsin carrying around an actual doll meant for children that’s supposed to represent his unborn child. Its possessive qualities might also echo his paternal anxiety and the fear that this baby will take his wife away from him. For her part, Mu-hua has apparently decided to give up on a cherished opportunity to work on a restoration project in Rome because she doesn’t want to miss her baby growing up, but Hsu-Chuan still only wants to keep them company while making his VR family space instead as if they lived in a fantasy land he could enter and leave at will. Perhaps ironically, the doll will turn him into an inverse mother, carrying the spirit inside himself though unable to birth it. He demonstrates his commitment to his family by sacrificing himself to protect it, removing himself from the family unit and exiling himself to his own other space as an AI avatar in his VR world. Teaming up with an esoteric Taoist priest who seems like he has an ulterior motive in wanting to unlock the secret of these unusual talismans, Hsu-Chuan is, in effect, another ghost, haunting his family home rather than inhabiting it “together as a family” and only ever hanging out to keep them company.

Mudborn screens in Chicago March 21st as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Shock Labyrinth (戦慄迷宮3D, Takashi Shimizu, 2009)

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Is it a good idea to advertise your haunted a house attraction by making a movie in which people get trapped inside haunted house? Whether or not Shock Labyrinth (戦慄迷宮3D, Senritsu Meikyu 3D) had the desired effect of luring more guests to Fuji-Q Highland’s Labyrinth of Horrors is probably lost to time, though Takashi Shimizu’s 2009 ghostly drama is also a strange curio produced during the short-lived resurgence of 3D in the late 2000s though this, of course, also means that it was shot with the flattened aesthetics of early digital technology.

In essence, the film casts traumatic memory as a haunted space of the brain in which the protagonist is plagued by the disappearance of a friend inside the fairground attraction he and his friends snuck into as children. Yuki (Misako Renbutsu) makes a sudden reappearance when Ken returns to his hometown. She claims to have been trapped for a very long time, but has grown along with the others and her clothes have somehow grown with her so that she has the appearance of a ghostly adult woman who behaves like a child. When the gang try to take her to a hospital, they unwittingly end up back at the fake one from the fairground attraction and are forced to face their unresolved guilt and trauma.

Indeed, it seems most of them had completely forgotten about Yuki and got on with their lives. Gradually recovering his memories, Ken (Yuya Yagira) blames himself for Yuki’s death while Motoki, who denies all responsibility, becomes convinced that Yuki’s vengeful ghost brought them back here deliberately to get her revenge for them leaving her there. It’s true enough that the others all ran off after becoming frightened without thinking about Yuki and made no attempt to rescue her, and that they went into the haunted house while knowing they weren’t supposed to, but, on the other hand, they were all children and acted in ways children do. Then again, there were already ructions and petty jealousies dividing the group as it appears Ken was the more popular member liked by both Rin and Yuki, provoking a series of jealousies and resentment from Motoki who declares that he’s not going to bother save Rin because she didn’t love him anyway. Ironically, she’s just told Ken that Motoki was the only one who really cared about her when Ken only helped her out of a sense of pity because she is blind. Miyu, Yuki’s younger sister, had also been jealous of her for being so “perfect and nice” when she was always the “bad” one who got into trouble. 

This shock labyrinth is really the space of repressed memories that Ken talks about. What it seems Yuki wants, like many similar ghosts, is company and to trap her friends with her within this space, or at least as much as she’s a manifestation of Ken’s buried guilt, to prevent him from ever really forgetting her and going on with his life. Ken and the others desperately search for an exit, but are ultimately unable to overcome their traumatic memories. Yuki comes for them as soon as they remember what they did to her, as if they were really being stalked by their own repressed guilt and shame. Still never having dealt with the death of his mother, Ken dreams of her telling him not to go into the haunted hospital or Yuki will him as if she wanted to protect him from this harmful memory though repressing it is evidently as damaging as confronting the truth of the past.

The detectives meanwhile adopt the more rational view that Ken is responsible for everything having taken revenge on his friends for abandoning Yuki when they were children. Perhaps this is all really going on in the shock corridors of Ken’s mind as his traumatic memories have begun to leak out and distort his sense of reality. Then again, perhaps Yuki has found a way to come back for deadly game of hide and seek to keep her occupied in the between space of the fake haunted hospital with its creepy, decomposing mannequins and the unexpectedly gruesome plush rabbit backpack the young Yuki was forever carrying around and refused to let others touch. Either way, it seems Yuki will not let them go but will always be there in the dark corners of their minds to remind them what they’ve done.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo (山忌 黃衣小飛俠, Tsai Chia-Ying, (2025) [Fantasia 2025]

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There are some things you aren’t meant to see. Or at least, should you come across them, you should think better of it and be quietly on your way minding your own business. But unfortunately, curiosity got the better of the three hikers at the centre of Tsai Chia-Ying’s timeloop horror, Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo (山忌 黃衣小飛俠, shān jì huáng yì xiǎo fēi xiá) and now one of them’s trapped, forever living the same day over again and forced to watch his fiancée die in increasingly bizarre ways knowing he is unable to save her. 

To that extent, Tsai uses the time loop as a metaphor for grief in which the guilt-ridden Chia-ming (Jasper Liu) is psychologically unable to escape the mountain on which his friend, An-wei (Tsao Yu-ning), died. Five years later, he’s in a relationship with An-wei’s old girlfriend Yu-hsin (Angela Yuen)who was also on the mountain that day, but he can’t help feeling haunted by the spectre of An-wei and convinced that Yu-hsin would never have chosen him if An-wei were still alive. He worries that perhaps he didn’t try hard enough to save him knowing that he’d never have a shot at Yu-hsin with An-wei in the picture. He promised he’d get An-wei of the mountain, but in the end he left him there and in a way he’s still there too. 

This trip to the mountains seems to have been for closure. They’re still looking for An-wei’s body, but Chia-ming has a ring in his pocket and a question he’s too afraid to ask. He’s asked Yu-hsin to marry him before and she said no. He thinks it’s because she’s still hung up on An-wei, but in reality he’s the one who can’t let go and his insecurity is killing his current relationship. Repeatedly watching Yu-hsin die is a manifestation of his anxiety that she’ll never really be his, that he can’t keep or protect her, and that the only reason they’re together is because he betrayed An-wei. Yet the looping is also an expression of the way that his grief roots him in time. He literally can’t move forward and is forced to remember every day that his friend is gone. During his journey he eventually meets an older woman in a smilier position who says that she too finds each day repeating as she struggles to process the loss not only of her son who also went missing on the mountain, but of her husband, who was swallowed by his grief and ended up abandoning her in the same way that Chia-ming is unwittingly abandoning Yu-hsin.

But there are also ancient and arcane forces at work. All of this seems to have happened because An-wei broke a taboo and opened the door to the vengeful spirits of those who were killed by nature and claimed by the mountain. The mountain then becomes a place of death into which people disappear and leave those who love them lonely on the other side. The woman’s husband also felt that souls had become trapped here and wanted to free them while searching for his missing son, but as Chia-ming later discovers, though it may be possible to change the reality, it will come at a great cost and at least one sort of loss will have be to accepted before the mountain will release its grip.

Chia-ming makes his decision, but the outcome does rather have the effect of making his present life seem like a dream or thought experiment in which he imagined a future for himself in which his friend was no longer a romantic obstacle and then felt bad about it. He doesn’t really give Yu-hsin much of a say and makes (almost) all her decisions for her, never really knowing if one day she might have tired of An-wei and chosen him instead or if he could have resigned himself to loving her from afar. In the end, the only way he can free himself from this loop is to face the past with emotional honesty and reckon with his feelings along with his guilt and jealousy. The question is how much he really wants to leave the mountain or whether his obsession will eventually trap him there as just another “missing person” swallowed by grief and led astray by despair. 

Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles )

Kakashi (案山子, Norio Tsuruta, 2001)

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There’s a village in Japan that’s mostly inhabited by scarecrows. One of the last remaining residents began creating them to replace something that had been lost, fashioning effigies of those who had passed away and immortalising them as if clinging to a distant past long before the shadows of rural depopulation were cast over the village. In a way, it’s an expression of grief or at least a lament for a loss of community and a sense of increasing loneliness and isolation. 

Adapted from Junji Ito’s manga, Norio Tsuruta’s Kakashi is also in its way about grief and the way in which it can consume those left behind so that they too have no more desire to live. Dr Miyamori (Kenzo Kawarasaki) later explains that in the village they co-exist with death and he returned to his home town in the hope that he could save his daughter, Izumi (Ko Shibasaki), through its peculiar magic of resurrecting the deceased as human scarecrows. As he freely admits, he could not accept his daughter’s death and so has chosen to stay here in the village though alive himself rather than attempt to remake his life without her.

The village itself appears to exist slightly outside of the mortal realm as Kaoru (Maho Nonami) discovers on encountering the long tunnel that leads to its entrance. Her car breaks down half-way through signalling her liminal status as one who does not yet belong on either side. It’s not quite grief that’s brought her here but still a nagging sense of foreboding in that she’s come in search of her missing brother, Tsuyoshi, after discovering a letter from an old school friend, Izumi, next to his telephone. Kaoru appears confused as to why the letter should be there and travels to the village hoping for answers, assuming that Tsuyoshi (Shunsuke Matsuoka) may have travelled there in search of Izumi.

As the landlady lets her into his empty flat, Kaoru explains that she is his only family and there’s a suggestion that her attachment to him is unnatural, bordering on the incestuous. A policeman taking a look at the photo Kaoru hands him remarks that they look like a couple, which they do, leading her to stuff the photo back in her pocket as if she were embarrassed. To that extent, she’s come to reclaim Tsuyoshi, not just from death, loneliness, grief, and depression, but from Izumi or at least the spectre of her. In life, she feared that Izumi would take him away from her and at least in Izumi’s mind frustrated their romance out of romantic jealously. Dr Miyamori implies it was this sense of despair that contributed to her death and it’s clear that Izumi’s mother also blames Kaoru while Izumi accuses Kaoru of being forever in her way.

But then again, she did not bring Kaoru to the village and is not targeting her personally out of vengeance. Rather, she has moved beyond that as she finally’s about to become “herself” thanks to the village’s dark magic and the following day’s scarecrow festival, and therefore no longer needs to care about the resentments of her mortal life even if her father says that her evil spirit has empowered the town. There is definitely something quite creepy in this weird village with its shades of the Wicker Man in its strange ritual and humanoid effigies where improbable numbers of children softly blow pinwheels under a large windmill that seems to be moving time itself. Tsuruta even borrows a particularly eerie shot from Don’t Look Now and emphasises the liminal qualities of the village in Dr Miyamori’s advice that Kaoru leave as soon as her car is fixed otherwise she may no longer wish to.

The village is apparently full of those like him who are trapped but wilfully so because they no longer desire to leave. Kaoru attempts to help one of them, a young living woman from Hong Kong unable to let go of the memory of her late father whose scarecrow eventually tells her to go. It’s a place for those who have no other place to go to because they cannot let go of their grief and despair. Thus Kaoru is pulled towards the edge of the tunnel, not so much to free her brother as, in a way, herself by allowing her grief to consume her and consenting to live this empty life alongside death rather than allow herself to accept her loss.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Soul Reaper (Malam Pencabut Nyawa, AKA Respati, Sidharta Tata, 2024)

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A young man finds himself haunted by the spectres of his trauma, but also, as it turns out, by a not so ancient evil in Sidharta Tata’s eerie horror film Soul Reaper (Malam Pencabut Nyawa AKA Respati). Plagued alternately by nightmares and insomnia, he discovers an ability to enter a hidden world of dreams while simultaneously noticing a connection with an ongoing spate of mysterious deaths along with that to a traditional village and its ancient beliefs. 

Suffering with a kind of survivor’s guilt, Respati (Devano Danendra) blames himself for the death of his parents and is haunted by visions of their vengeful ghosts. A new girl at his school, Wulan (Keisya Levronka), is ostracised by the others who hear that the reason she left her last school was that she has a tendency to get possessed by ghosts which upset the other students. Like Respati, she is also haunted by bad dreams and desperately misses an absent parent, in her case her mother. The fact that so many seem to be connected by violent robbery hints at a generalised anxiety within the wider community that is only exacerbated by the series of mysterious deaths hitting the news. 

What Respati eventually realises is that he’s witnessing real deaths in his dreams though taking place in the dream realm. Others who’ve suffered loss and trauma such as a man who recently lost his young daughter are led away towards a bright light where they think they see their loved ones but are actually consumed by a dark force. In the midst of his own grief, Respati is forced to face a secondary trauma that relates to his grandfather’s hometown where the villagers believe in the power of an ancient god. A powerful witch, Sikma, convinced herself that she was the inheritor of the witch’s power and in her zeal to learn more about the dream world began sacrificing her patients. The other villagers shunned her until she too ended up dying a mysterious death after which her body disappeared.

Sikma maybe feeding on grief, but she also had a child who viewed her as a mother and is now bereft in the same way as Respati and Wulan are having lost their parents. Respati refuses to talk about his trauma with the doctor his grandfather takes him to about his insomnia but discovers a new way to face it through the dream realm as if by overcoming his nightmares he could learn to sleep peacefully again while simultaneously ending the series of mysterious deaths by taking care of Sikma. In the dream realm, he is able to manifest his own desires by virtue of his lineage that makes him a descendent of the mountain goddess and imbued with her power which means that he is able to make peace with the past by envisioning a different outcome for a painful event which, though it cannot change what really happened, allows him to let go of his guilt while realising what’s really important. As a young man his grandfather brought from the country advises him, you never really know how much time you have left, so it’s important to cherish your loved ones while there’s still time.

The irony is that everyone wants the same thing and has been hurt in the same way, though they have different ways of dealing with their grief in their inability to let go of the past. The dream world appears as an eerie forest in which it is the grieving who are called towards the light as if like Respati they blame themselves for not going with those they loved, though it also echoes an ancient horror in the natural world. The grieving are pinned in the mortal realm by tree roots which seem to encircle and constrain them until they break free, called towards the light by a comforting lullaby which offers them one way to escape their grief, whereas Respati can only leave by violent means. Ejecting oneself from the dream realm involves physical pain rather than simply the emotional, but allows him to literally “wake up” from the inertia of his grief to find a new purpose in life and overcome his trauma. Bringing traditional folk horror with its witches and ancient gods together with a more overtly modern tale of psychological haunting lends an additional edge to Respati’s quest to solve the mysterious deaths but even if his own trauma has been exorcised it seems this particular strand of evil may not quite be done with him yet.

Soul Reaper is released Digitally in the US 17th June courtesy of Well Go USA

Trailer (English subtitles)