I was due for an Asian horror ghost girl fix, and since Asian horror seems to be all the horror Netflix carries these days, finding three was easy. Let’s get into them.
SUMALA (2024)
This Indonesian film isn’t your usual vengeful ghost girl horror flick. As freaky as the entity Sumala is, this engrossing tale of family, prestige, and female subjugation actually has you siding with the “monster” instead of scared of her.
It opens with a creepy sequence of kids staying out too late and ending up in a cornfield, where one of them is gruesomely killed by Sumala, a ghost girl of legend.
We then go back in time for her story. The matriarch in a well-to-do family needs his wife to have a child in order to retain ownership of his home, but she has been unable to conceive.
She goes to a witch doctor woman for fertility help, which involves making a deal with the devil—she will have two children, one good and one evil, and must care for both of them until they are ten years old, when the devil will come to reclaim the evil one.
The horrific aspects of this movie start up right away. One of the twins is born deformed, so the father gruesomely kills it. The other twin, named Kumala, soon proves to be somewhat handicapped as she grows, so she isn’t perfect either.
A lot of this movie is hard to watch, for it involves torture and abuse of a child. The father hates his daughter, and the women in his life can only stand by and watch as he inflicts horrible punishments on Kumala.
The horror kicks in when the dead twin Sumala finally comes around and befriends Kumala, and this becomes somewhat of a supernatural slasher with loads of vicious kills.
The girl who plays both twins is great and sinister in both roles, but like I said, this isn’t exactly frightening, because you’re rooting for Sumala to get revenge for her sister. And even more satisfying is that almost all her victims are men and boys that have treated her badly.
With a near two-hour runtime, Sumala is a long flick, and while some of it is hard to witness, the slasher revenge portion is a lot of fun and makes this one worth a watch if you’re itching for some Asian ghost girl horror.
DEATH WHISPERER (2023)
This Thai film builds a great family dynamic, is loaded with ghost girl action, delivers cheap jump scares, and even has oodles of gore, but it runs too long and never gives you that stomach-turning feeling of dread like The Ring or The Grudge.
We meet a family with three sons and three daughters. The oldest son is just back from the military, and he is also a slice of Heaven. Actor Nadech Kugimiya is absolutely gorgeous, and the filmmakers even find an excuse to get him shirtless. Every time I look at him, I get a little gayer.
The trouble begins when the girls walk to school through the wilderness and pass an old, abandoned tree shrine. Soon after, one girl begins acting all weird and possessed. Mesh mosquito nets that surround everyone’s beds serve as the creepy novelty as a ghost girl starts to terrorize the family at night.
This film also delivers one line that, when translated in English in the subtitles, includes the words I always long to hear in horror…”shut the door and light all the lamps”. Finally someone says what I’m always thinking.
There’s also a witchy woman, and the family eventually calls in an exorcist. There’s a freaky scene in a cornfield of a woman running with her head hanging off her neck, and the film just goes all out and delivers a host of ghost girls blocking the road as the family tries to get to a hospital in the final act.
Aside from the 2-hour runtime, the biggest letdown is the climax, when there’s literally a gun battle with the ghost girl on the side of the road…and she’s the one wielding the gun. Ugh.
DEATH WHISPERER (2024)
Like the scripts for so many sequels, this one is a fucking mess as it tries to give a backstory. What does the backstory turn out to be? In 1854, the ghost girl spared a dying war soldier by sticking her tongue down his throat, so she’s been looking for her tongue ever since. W.T.F.?
Our family is back and still traumatized, our hottie is trying to hunt down the ghost girl to end her once and for all, and the runtime is again near two hours long.
So it’s three years later, and the hottie teams up with some other dudes that want revenge on the ghost girl for what she did to their families.
The group heads into a haunted forest to find her and is terrorized by other ghouls for a good chunk of the movie.
Eventually the ghost girl gets her tongue back and heads back home to take out the hottie’s family. Lots of horror chaos ensues, but the highlight is when the youngest daughter stabs the witch bitch from the first movie in the face with an umbrella.
The bigger highlight is that for the final battle, the hottie looks like a gay go-go boy doing Bruce Campbell Army of Darkness cosplay, earning this one a spot on the stud stalking page.
