J horror, K horror … Japan and South Korea have contributed mightily to our expanding cultural views of what horror cinema entails. From Japanese classics like Ringu / The Ring (1998) and Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), with their predominantly female ghosts tethered as much to a person as to a place, to South Korea’s groundbreaking Whispering Corridors (1998) and the propulsive Train to Busan (2016), with their trademark social commentary, these Asian supernatural-horror films helped broaden sensibilities of what horror can do and where it can go — much as the seminal, semi-underground splatter films of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 1960s laid the groundwork for that sensibility’s mainstreaming in subsequent decades.
The ranks of Asian horror may soon expand more, with Indonesia’s Dancing Village: The Curse Begins, a prequel to KKN di Desa Penari (2022), the highest-grossing Indonesian film ever at the time. (“KKN” is the abbreviation for Kuliah Kerja Nyata, the nation’s college-student community-service programs.) I’ll be speaking more about this ahead of Dancing Village’s theatrical release Friday, and in the meantime, check out this clip: It starts slowly, and then gets creepy as fuck.
Also, not necessarily for upcoming reviews but just to keep you posted on horror movies being released in the near future:
Vermines / Infested
U.S./France co-production that won for Best Picture (Horror) and Best Director (Horror) at 2023’s Fantastic Fest, director and co-writer Sébastien Vaniček family horror about a fast-reproducing venomous spider streams Friday on Shudder.
Cuckoo
A mute girl in a German Alps resort. Strange noises and bloody visions. Something very wrong in a tranquil vacation paradise. A film by Tilman Singer starring the ubiquitous Dan Stevens (Godzilla x Kong, Abigail), it comes out theatrically on May 3.
I Saw the TV Glow
A teenager just trying to make it through life in the suburbs gets introduced to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath our own. The second feature from producer-director Jane Schoenbrun (2021’s We're All Going to the World's Fair) hits select theaters May 3.
Previews: "Dancing Village: The Curse Begins" and more