Ghost Board (2026)

Apparently (the movies wouldn’t lie to us!) detention in Thailand means having to spend a day doing chores for a Buddhist temple out in the sticks for the terrible crime of board gaming during school hours. On their way back, the three male board gaming kids and the girl who had to join them for different reasons (trauma to be explained later on), stumble upon a ruin, wherein they find an ancient boardgame. Boardgames, say the rules, need to be played. Alas, this is a horror movie, so the thing turns out to be a cursed example of its kind.

Now, the kids have to fight off various crappy looking CGI versions of monsters from Thai folklore, as well as the deadite-style possessed sister (Panisara Rikulsurakan) of one of their own, to win the game and survive the night.

I had quite a bit of fun with Chanathip Wongpoltree’s Ghost Board. In fact, given that I’m probably not its core audience, rather more than I expected. Going by the general tone, this is certainly horror meant for kids, but clearly, made with rather different assumptions of what kids are officially allowed to see and enjoy in their exciting monster movies. So this one starts off with a little boy hanged by supernatural forces pissing himself during his death, and features rather more explicit trauma than media made specifically for Western monster kids are generally allowed to show. Though, having been a Western monster kid myself once, and watched and read things very much not made for my age group pretty early on, I think this approach is simply more honest.

Anyway, even with its pieces of past trauma the kids have to conquer besides the monsters to survive, this is simply a very fun monster movie, certainly influenced by Evil Dead and to a degree by Stranger Things, yet filtered through tropes and monsters of Thai folklore. The pacing is speedy without becoming hysterical, the characters and their plights simply drawn but not bland, and there’s a sense of fun running even through the trauma-solving bits.

Sure, the CGI is mostly a bit crap, but when it comes to children (and policemen) being threatened by a headless dude with two swords using the head of one of his victims as a kind of seeing-eye lantern, I care more about the spirit of the thing than about how well it is done on paper. So, I really had a blast with this one.