Phobia 2 (Ha phraeng)

Phobia 2 (Ha phraeng) (Directors: Banjong Pisanthanakun, Paween Purikitpanya, Songyos Sugmakanan, Parkpoom Wongpoom ): From Thailand comes this omnibus of 5 short horror tales. I never saw the ori­ginal Phobia (or 4bia as it was clev­erly titled in some places), but the idea of a col­lec­tion of shorter horror stories appeals to me, mostly because I’m a big fraidy-cat and knowing that we’ll be moving on to a new story every 20 minutes or so makes me less afraid.

That being said, it’s a truism that most antho­logy films are wildly uneven. So part of the overall sur­prise of Phobia 2 is not only that it’s fresh and innov­ative, but that each seg­ment is equally fresh and innov­ative, with very high pro­duc­tion values throughout. As a late­comer to the Thai horror scene, I was very pleas­antly sur­prised, but I needn’t have been. The film­makers are some of the same people who are behind some very pol­ished and pop­ular horror films (Alone, Shutter, and of course, Phobia). Here is a brief sum­mary of each story:

• Novice: a young man is packed off to a rural mon­as­tery after a teen­aged prank goes hor­ribly wrong. In the forest, he comes upon a shrine where people have made offer­ings to the “hungry ghost.” Soon he’ll be pur­sued by the ghost leading him to a true sense of remorse and a ter­rible tranformation.
• Ward: con­fined to a hos­pital bed after a motor­cycle acci­dent, Arthit is dis­turbed to dis­cover that the old man covered in tat­toos in the next bed is on life sup­port and the leader of a strange cult. In the morning, his fol­lowers will make the decision to pull the plug. Arthit just has to spend a very creepy night next to him.
• Backpackers: Two Japanese tour­ists are picked up hitch­hiking by an old truck driver and his young partner. They soon realize the truck is car­rying a ter­ri­fying cargo.
• Salvage: Mrs. Nuch runs a used car deal­er­ship, but doesn’t tell her cus­tomers that all the cars have been rebuilt after being involved in deadly acci­dents. When her young son goes missing after playing in the lot one night, it seems that she will be forced to con­front the tra­gedies that have fuelled her success.
• In The End: It’s a bril­liant decision to end with this very funny seg­ment, a parody of the Thai horror film­making busi­ness. Filming a sequel to Alone, the film crew are unsettled when the act­ress playing a heavily made-up ghost become sick and has to go to hos­pital. When she returns unex­pec­tedly, they don’t know if she’s human or a ghost, espe­cially when the hos­pital calls to inform them that she has died.

An inter­esting insight is that in three of the seg­ments, the concept of karma is central to the nar­rative. These haunt­ings are never without a reason, and this gives the horror a fatal­istic sense of inev­it­ab­ility that is quite effective. I was also quite impressed with the camera work in each seg­ment; in par­tic­ular, the begin­ning of Ward where the camera is locked to the wheels of a hos­pital gurney while the soundtrack fea­tures the rev­ving engine of a motorcycle.

I would say that Phobia 2 is a great calling card for these dir­ectors, and for Thai horror cinema in gen­eral. It’s cer­tainly been suc­cessful in get­ting this hor­rorphobe to seek out the film­makers’ other films.

Official site of the film

(8/10)

Tagged as: #afterdark10, horror, thailand