Dressed to Kill--Taiwan's New Wave of Horror Films

In years past, people tended to think of Taiwanese film as stressing the director's personal vision, focusing on local history, and having a "message." The international film community has long recognized the artistic achievements of well known directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang, but their work has never been considered "entertainment." In fact, it's been pure poison at the domestic box office, forcing producers to rely on the sale of international rights to generate revenues.

When the US's Columbia Pictures backed Double Vision in 2002, it drew together talent from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US and Australia to make the picture. The film went on to become the most popular Taiwanese release of recent years, grossing more than NT$80 million domestically and disproving the notion that all Taiwanese films are obtuse and emotionally detached. In this sense, the film may represent a turning point for Taiwanese cinema.

Genre films go commercial

A number of factors contributed to Double Vision's success, but the main one was that the film drew on folk religion. The film depicts a series of bizarre murders carried out by cult members at the behest of their leader, a figure neither quite alive nor quite dead who is attempting to make himself immortal.

Double Vision was the first commercial horror film to be produced in Taiwan in many years, and its success offered encouragement to many Taiwanese filmmakers, among them the creators of 2005's popular The Heirloom. In that film, which continued the supernatural trend, the heroine becomes engaged to the son of a wealthy family only to discover that they depend upon a child-ghost to protect their wealth. The family's only concern is its money; it will even harm its own younger members to hold onto it. The film interweaves material and supernatural forces to depict the dark side of Chinese tradition--its emphasis on the sacrifice of the individual to the group.

The Heirloom was produced by Three Dots Entertainment, a company known for its savvy sales and promotions. Three Dots is a young company, established by two children of the 1970s--Michelle Yeh and Aileen Li. Both women had previously worked for movie company Spring International, where they had spent many years involved with the buying and selling of movie rights. Their experience there taught them that to make a popular film, neither the director nor the producer can be allowed to run the project unilaterally. On the contrary, filmmakers must coordinate their production and marketing efforts, and must explicitly target an audience even before filming begins.

Li and Yeh also realized that genre films have an established audience that guarantees ticket sales. They therefore decided that the best way to make Three Dots profitable would be to produce genre films exclusively. After extensive research and discussion, they narrowed their focus to a few genres that they believed had market potential and would be relatively easy to produce. Their first film, Formula 17, was a "queer" film starring a teen idol that they believed would appeal to young urban women, as well as to the gay community. The accuracy of their market intuition, the precision of their audience targeting, and their non-stop efforts to generate media buzz led to an enthusiastic reception at the box office once the film was released. Formula 17, which had had a production budget of about NT$4 million and a promotion budget of about NT$1 million, ultimately grossed nearly NT$8 million at the domestic box office.

For their second film, The Heirloom, Three Dots delved into the horror genre. Yeh says that horror films don't require a very well known cast because "whether the audience is scared doesn't really depend on who the actors are." She believes that all you need to set an audience trembling are a frightening story and a spooky atmosphere. Moreover, the box office receipts of monster movies have long been the most reliable in the genre-film market. Traditions about the supernatural may vary from nation to nation, but people's fear of and fascination with the supernatural world are a constant. "No matter how bad a monster movie is," says Yeh, "there's a base audience of thrill-seekers who are going to see it."

More importantly, as long as you have an interesting script built around a fresh concept, and you spend a little extra time on the cinematography and sound effects, making a monster movie needn't cost very much. There have been a series of international horror hits in recent years. Movies such as The Kingdom (Denmark), The Blair Witch Project (US), and 28 Days Later... (UK) all succeeded in creating spooky visuals on the cheap by filming in inexpensive digital video, and are now seen as case studies in how to make low-cost horror films.

The Heirloom cost about NT$16.5 million to make. Though the budget wasn't small by domestic production standards, it was tight for a horror film. Li and Yeh had no money for special effects, so they poured their resources into lighting, props and the film's art direction. They also brought in noted Hong Kong cinematographer Kwan Pun-leong to man the cameras. Li and Yeh's objective was to make the heirloom of the story, which symbolizes the dark side of the personality, both alluring and eerie.

The producers also spent some NT$6 million on an intensive promotional campaign, which helped push the film's domestic box office to more than NT$20 million. Yeh and Li marketed the film overseas as a story about keeping a child-ghost, which piqued distributors' curiosity and enabled them to sell the film's foreign rights even before it was completed.

Producer as driving force

In the past, Taiwanese film was centered around the director. But within the world of genre film, the prime mover is the producer, who tracks market trends, plans the production, and raises the capital. In the wake of the success of Double Vision and The Heirloom, producer and distributor Patrick Huang's Flash Forward Entertainment has been aggressively prepping and filming its own domestically produced horror films.

Huang, a graduate of the production division of Columbia University's film school, runs one of Taiwan's most important independent studios and has been distributing Western films for many years. "Asian horror movies have been around for a very long time," he says. "Now they're a market trend." Actually, Masaki Kobayashi's 1960s classic Kwaiden, the Hong Kong zombie films of the 1980s, and the Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong and Thai films that have swept the globe in more recent years all amply demonstrate the long-term existence of a sizeable market for Asian horror films. Every time Huang travels abroad for film festivals, foreign film distributors eagerly ask him whether he has any Asian horror films worth buying.

Huang says that kung fu and horror are the Asian film genres in which international distributors have been most interested. But kung fu films require complicated martial arts choreography and numerous special effects, making them very difficult projects to pull off in Taiwan's fading film industry. Ghost films, on the other hand, are inexpensive to make and have a dependable audience. In addition, the genre provides filmmakers with space to be creative, to take a fresh approach. From a producer's perspective, all of this makes horror films a relatively low-risk venture.

Flash Forward currently has two supernatural horror flicks in preproduction. The first, Resurrection, is being helmed by Leste Chen, director of The Heirloom. The second, The Voice, is being directed by Ko Meng-jung, who made a splash with his student film The Print. Both directors are youngsters who have established a place for themselves in Taiwan's directorial circles in spite of not yet having finished university, and who have used horror films to create a vision of Taiwanese film quite different from that of the previous generation of Taiwanese directors.

Some people think the children of the 1980s are fragile creatures who cannot endure hardship, but Huang has a different view. He says that in addition to being unburdened by history, today's young people are well educated, tolerant and malleable. "They aren't like the middle generation of directors," says Huang, "most of whom are set in their ways. You can't ask those guys to mute their personalities for genre films, even though such films have market potential." Huang refers to his 1980s-born young directors as the 7-Up Generation for their non-stop drive to move up forward in their field.

The supernatural in East Asia

Taiwanese horror films are becoming a trend. In the wake of the popular Double Vision and The Heirloom, several new ones are now in production. These include The Voice, Resurrection and the high-budget sci-fi/horror film Silk. Silk is especially interesting in that it is being helmed by Su Chao-pin, who wrote Double Vision, and draws on the talents of Japanese leading man Eguchi Yosuke. The interesting thing is that the only Taiwanese film from the 1990s that fell remotely within the horror genre was Wang Siu-di's animated Grandma and Her Ghosts. This lack of recent genre-film experience has complicated matters.

When Chen Kuo-fu was filming Double Vision, Taiwan's lack of explosives, special-effects and make-up technicians forced him to bring in large numbers of people from Hong Kong, the US and Australia. But the domestic industry's Hollywood moment soon passed and did little to foster the development of local talent. In one of the key scenes in The Heirloom, the child-ghost curses the entire family, who then collectively hang themselves. But, when it came time to shoot the scene, no one on the film's crew knew how to make the hangings look real because it had been so long since anyone had made a horror film in Taiwan.

Three Dots' Yeh says that genre film is just finding its footing again in Taiwan, and that a lot of technical know-how has yet to be developed. Fortunately, the key to making a good horror film is having a good story, one that offers something new to what is an established genre. East Asian monster movies come out of a very different cultural system than their European and American counterparts, which gives them their own distinctive style.

In general, Western monsters tend to have tangible forms, and Western films favor typical monsters and demons, like vampires or freaks created by mad scientists. Consequently, Western horror films are often battles between good and evil waged by the protagonist and the monster. Within East Asian cultures, on the other hand, movie monsters usually manifest as an ethereal spirit whose physical whereabouts are a mystery. Most are ordinary people who became ghosts after their death. From that perspective, East Asia's "monsters" are typically just humans in another form, though their reasons for being involved with living people are usually unclear. East Asian monster movies therefore don't focus on heroic characters as much as their Western counterparts do. Instead, they focus on the thin line separating the living from the dead, and on the importance of folk religious beliefs and traditions such as karma, reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul.

The Hong Kong film industry has been mining China's rich tradition of the supernatural for many years. Surprisingly, the mainland Chinese industry has done very little with it because supernatural subject matter is officially taboo. In Taiwan, where the local industry is just beginning to explore the horror genre, the biggest challenges these devoted monster-movie makers are facing are: How do you put a modern face on the abundant ghostly resources that our folk tradition provides? And how can Taiwan bring the unique character of its monster films to the international market?