by Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Screenshot
THERE IS A moment in Dead Talents Society (鬼才之道, 2024) when its young ghost protagonist, desperate to establish herself in the afterlife, finally discovers how to frighten an audience. She throws herself from a haunted hotel, crashes spectacularly into a neon sign, and produces an explosion of sparks, blood and screaming.
In a recent podcast interview, film scholar Corrado Neri recounts his experience of watching this scene in a packed cinema in Taiwan when something unexpected happened: the audience laughed.
The combination of horror and comedy is hardly new. But for Neri, the moment crystallised something important about contemporary Taiwanese horror. Here was a film confident enough not simply to deploy the conventions of the genre but to play with them, parody them and refer back to Taiwan’s own growing repertoire of horror cinema. Rather than looking primarily towards Hollywood or Japanese horror for its reference points, Dead Talents Society could assume that its audience already knew the ghosts that had populated Taiwanese screens.
Neri recalls this experience in discussing his recent book, Taiwanese Horror Cinema in the 21st Century: Spectral Narratives and Screen Culture (2026). The book is concerned with horror, but its larger subject is Taiwan. Its ghosts lead us into questions of historical trauma and democratisation, religion and folklore, digital culture, gender and sexuality, and Taiwan’s uncertain position in the international system.
Perhaps most importantly, they suggest that the resurgence of Taiwanese horror is not simply a successful turn towards genre filmmaking. It tells us something about the society that has become capable of imagining—and laughing at—its own ghosts.
Democracy and the Return of the Repressed
ONE OF THE most internationally recognised examples is Detention (返校, 2019), adapted from Red Candle Games’ enormously successful videogame. Set during the White Terror, the film transforms authoritarian surveillance, political persecution and suppressed memory into supernatural horror.
Taiwanese cinema had, of course, confronted the legacies of authoritarianism long before Detention. Films associated with Taiwan New Cinema and its aftermath approached the island’s difficult history with seriousness and formal ambition. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (悲情城市, 1989) remains the obvious landmark.
What changed was not simply the willingness to remember. Historical trauma gradually became available to different kinds of cultural production.
As Neri points out, a film such as Detention would have been impossible under martial law and difficult to imagine immediately after its lifting in 1987. It required a longer process of democratisation before the White Terror could migrate from prestigious historical and art cinema into videogames and popular genre filmmaking.
That transition matters. When a society can transform authoritarian trauma into a horror film—or a videogame—it does not necessarily trivialise the past. Instead, historical memory has become sufficiently embedded in public culture to circulate through different genres, audiences and media.
Other films take democratic irreverence considerably further. The zombie comedy Get the Hell Out (逃出立法院, 2020) turns Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan into a site of carnage, gleefully parodying the parliamentary brawls for which Taiwanese politics has periodically become internationally famous. Its opening joke makes the political analogy explicit: a bad movie makes you suffer for ninety minutes; a bad government makes you suffer for four years.
Such satire requires precisely the political environment it mocks. Taiwanese horror is therefore, in one sense, a product of democratisation. The monsters have become possible because filmmakers are increasingly free to decide what—or whom—they want to haunt.
Ghosts in the Machine
YET THE GHOSTS themselves have also changed.
Haunted houses, schools, hospitals and hotels remain dependable locations for horror. As Neri insists, haunted houses are ‘evergreen’. But twenty-first-century ghosts no longer need to wait patiently inside old buildings. They travel through smartphones, social media, CCTV, videogames, found footage and increasingly immersive technologies.
This is particularly evident in films such as Incantation (咒, 2022), where religious taboo and folk belief are inseparable from the technologies through which images circulate. The film’s found-footage aesthetics implicate viewers themselves in the transmission of its curse. Watching, recording and sharing are no longer neutral acts.
This is one reason contemporary Taiwanese horror feels simultaneously intensely local and recognisably global. Taiwan shares the anxieties generated by digital culture elsewhere: surveillance, viral images, technological mediation and the unsettling instability between physical and virtual worlds. At the same time, these technologies circulate stories rooted in particular Taiwanese religious practices and cultural memories. The old ghost and the new screen therefore coexist remarkably well.
This relationship may become even more important as Taiwan invests in VR, XR and immersive storytelling. Horror has always adapted readily to new technologies because new media create new possibilities for uncertainty: Who is watching? What is real? Where does the image end and the spectator begin?
Taiwanese filmmakers are exploring those questions while carrying their ghosts with them.
A Ghost Nation?
THE MOST PROVOCATIVE implication of Neri’s book, however, lies beyond individual horror films. What happens if we think about Taiwan itself through the figure of the ghost?
Taiwan has repeatedly been made to occupy uncertain positions in other people’s political and geographical imaginations. Under different regimes it has been imagined as frontier, colony, provincial periphery, temporary refuge, ‘Free China’, and an incomplete or disputed nation. Today it possesses the institutions, elections, military, currency, passport and everyday political life of a state while being denied diplomatic recognition by most of the international community.
Taiwan is present, yet routinely made absent.
This is why the language of ghosts and invisibility has acquired such resonance. Chris Horton’s recent publication Ghost Nation (2025), like Vanessa Hope’s documentary Invisible Nation (2023), uses apparent absence to describe a political entity whose material existence is difficult to deny.
But ghostliness need not mean powerlessness.
One of the most interesting ideas emerging from Neri’s discussion is that an identity imposed negatively can be reappropriated. The ghost can speak back. Instead of accepting invisibility as erasure, ghostliness can become plural, mobile and resistant.
Taiwanese horror offers a particularly fertile cultural space for this manoeuvre because ghosts are rarely simply absent. On screen, as in folk religion, the dead have agency. They make demands upon the living. They return because something has been forgotten, concealed or left unresolved.
Seen this way, the ghost becomes an unusually suggestive figure for thinking about Taiwan.
Coming Back to the Soil
YET IT WOULD be a mistake to interpret Taiwanese horror entirely through geopolitics. One of its richest resources is far more everyday: Taiwan’s dense landscape of temples, rituals, gods, ghosts and folk beliefs.
During Neri’s interview in August 2026, Ghost Month happened to be taking place. Outside his home in Taipei, a temporary religious structure had appeared in a nearby park. People made offerings and participated in religious activities, but the same space was also simply part of neighbourhood life: people met one another, walked dogs and played games.
This coexistence matters.
The supernatural in Taiwanese horror does not have to be invented as an exotic alternative universe. Ritual practices, stories about ghosts, temple cultures and memories of what parents and grandparents believed remain embedded—although continually changing—within ordinary life.
Films can therefore draw upon a cultural archive that is simultaneously religious, historical and intimate.
The Tag-Along (紅衣小女孩, 2015), for example, helped demonstrate the commercial potential of building horror around locally recognisable supernatural traditions. Neri describes an impulse within such filmmaking as a return to the ‘soil’: looking towards Taiwan itself for stories and allowing local ghosts to acquire cinematic voices.
But returning to the soil does not mean sealing Taiwan off from the world. The Rope Curse (粽邪) franchise provides an intriguing example. Drawing upon local ritual and supernatural traditions, the series has expanded across borders, with its latest instalment developing connections with Indonesia. Taiwanese ghosts, like Taiwanese people and Taiwanese popular culture, travel.
Queer Ghosts and Other Ways of Belonging
HORROR CAN ALSO provide room for people who do not fit comfortably within conventional social categories.
Taiwan’s transformation in debates around gender and sexuality—most visibly becoming the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage—has created another cultural context in which older conventions can be reworked.
Marry My Dead Body (關於我和鬼變成家人的那件事, 2022) is perhaps the most playful example. It takes the traditional idea of ghost marriage and queers it by placing a homophobic policeman in a supernatural marriage with a dead gay man.
The result is comedy, crime story, ghost film and queer romance at once.
The significance extends beyond explicitly LGBTQ characters. Horror has always been fascinated by monsters, freaks and outsiders. It can punish difference, but it can also reverse the audience’s sympathies, asking whether the supposedly monstrous figure might be more humane than the society that excludes it.
In that sense, the monster becomes another way of imagining belonging.
What Makes Taiwanese Horror Taiwanese?
THERE IS AN obvious danger in all this. The more successful Taiwanese horror becomes internationally, the easier it is to search for a checklist of characteristics that supposedly makes it uniquely ‘Taiwanese’: temples, Ghost Month, White Terror, red-clothed spirits, Taoist rituals.
That would miss what is perhaps most interesting about the genre.
Taiwanese horror has never developed in cultural isolation. Its filmmakers are perfectly familiar with Japanese and Korean cinema, Hollywood conventions and European traditions. Increasingly, Southeast Asian connections are visible too.
What makes the resulting films Taiwanese is therefore not purity but negotiation.
They take internationally circulating genres and technologies and bring them into contact with Taiwanese histories, landscapes, religions, political arguments and everyday life. Foreign influences are borrowed, reshuffled and transformed.
This may be one reason Dead Talents Society feels significant. Taiwanese horror has developed far enough that a new film can parody not only generic conventions inherited from elsewhere but Taiwan’s own cinematic ghosts. A local genealogy has become recognisable enough to become the object of affectionate mockery.
The genre is also moving beyond cinema. Games, television series, multimedia intellectual property, VR, XR and other immersive forms offer new places for ghosts to inhabit. At the same time, greater commercial confidence need not mean abandoning artistic or political ambition. If anything, the history of Taiwanese horror suggests that entertainment and seriousness are a false opposition.
Horror works precisely because it can do both.
Taiwan’s ghosts can frighten us, make us laugh and entertain us. But they can also return us to authoritarian violence, suppressed memories, religious practices, changing ideas of sexuality, technological anxiety and the peculiar experience of living in a country whose existence is simultaneously obvious and internationally disputed.
Perhaps this is why the ghost has become such a compelling figure in contemporary Taiwanese screen culture.
Ghosts inhabit the boundary between presence and absence, past and present, the familiar and the strange. They return when something remains unresolved. Yet they also survive. They adapt to new environments, occupy new media and acquire new meanings.
In twenty-first-century Taiwanese horror, the ghosts are no longer simply coming back to haunt Taiwan. Increasingly, they are helping Taiwan tell its own stories.