Death Whisperer (2023) & Death Whisperer 2 (2024)

Warning: some spoilers included!

Death Whisperer takes place in Thailand in 1972. We’re mostly concerned with a farmer family whose many children all have names starting with Y – there’s Yard, Yam, Yos, Yod, Yee, Yen and Yak - which makes it somewhat difficult to keep them straight in dialogue until about the final act of the first movie. As if having a Dad who is badly trying to be a traditional patriarch and terrible at giving his kids names weren’t difficult enough, the family are beset by attacks of a supernatural entity that seems focussed on the youngest, Yee (Nutthatcha Padovan). For some time, it is not at all clear if the spirit wants to eat or possess her; what is clear is that it likes to put families through the emotional wringer, delighting in wreaking emotional as well as physical pain. The local shaman, Sarge (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul), is of some help, as is the return of Yak (Nadech Kugimiya), the son who didn’t want to become a farmer so much, he became a soldier instead, yet the spirit’s attacks become ever more disturbing.

And this willingness to get increasingly weird is one the two main strength of Taweewat Wantha’s Death Whisperer. It also stands in marked contrast to the aesthetically conservative streak of the film: this is very much a film that takes elements of the contemporary Southeast Asian horror mainstream (particularly Indonesian horror), some bits and bobs of the Conjuringverse and films like the South Korean The Wailing, and transplants them into the Thailand of the early 70s without doing much with the historical context. This mostly works out okay for the film because it is good at picking and choosing the pieces that work for it, and because Wantha manages to use them in a way that doesn’t let them feel like magpied bits of other films, but rather parts of the one at hand.

The film’s other main strength is its great hand when it comes to the kind of set piece that suddenly ramps up the tension or the ick-factor. These are nearly always well-placed and effectively realized – just look at the first teeth-stealing (it’s a whole thing in these movies) scene.

Death Whisperer 2 takes place three years after the tragic ending of the first one. Everyone in the family has tried to move on – Yad (Jelicha Kapaun) is even engaged to be married and move away – except for Yak, whose disgust for horror movie bullshit endings has caused him to team up with Sarge and become a rural exorcist and ghost puncher (no, really, he’s punching ghosts on the regular). The latter term, I’ve borrowed from a Letterboxd review from the great Gemma Files, because it’s the only, and perfect, term to describe Yak’s new occupation. Yak is specifically hunting the ghost who killed his sister, but leaves nothing else supernatural unexorcised and/or unpunched on the way.

Eventually, Yak punches his way to a haunted forest, where he, Sarge, and some macho assholes are getting a ghost history lesson while encountering a lot of disturbing, not always punchable, things that go bump.

At the same time, the remaining family members are threatened by the spirit as well, until things climax on the evening of Yad’s engagement do.

Where the first film does go for a somewhat generic, atmospheric ghost horror with incursions of weird vibes, the second one externalises most internal horror into a wild tale of Yak-centric ghost action and one of the best funhouse-style horror climaxes I’ve seen in quite some time. There’s macho posturing, one-liners like “You fucked with the wrong family, you godamn ghost!”, and a general sense of filmmakers who have been given a blank check after a very successful first film to do whatever the hell they want – which is apparently a tale of ghost punching and shotguns with magic bullets.

All of which could be dumb, and a bit of a disappointing tone shift, but actually feels like a perfect way to escalate things. Wantha’s still great at the more traditional spooky bits, but he also excels at the more action-heavy parts of the movie by absolutely, unironically, embracing the cheesiness and the silliness while keeping the creepy parts creepy. It’s the sort of thing young Sam Raimi would have been proud of, and one could imagine Don Coscarelli nod at approvingly, and makes Death Whisperer 2 the superior kind of sequel I always hope for in any horror movie sequel.

Long Weekend (2013)

Original title: Thongsook 13

Nam (Cheeranat Yusanon) and her friends whom I'll dub Male Jerk One, Male Jerk Two, Female Lesbian Semi-Jerk One and Female Lesbian Semi-Jerk Two are off to a cursed island where a ceremony to appease a Devouring Ghost went very very badly a few decades ago for a nice summer weekend. One of the group's dads has bought a house there incredibly cheaply (though, one suspects, he still paid too much for it seeing what's going to happen soon). This calls for what goes as teen debauchery in Thai cinema.

The Jerks are also very happy they could get rid of Nam's regular follower, Thongsook (Chinnawut Intarakusin) for once. Even as a child, Thongsook never was quite right, able to see ghosts and only protected from possession by an amulet he has to wear all the time, but after a ghost-related incident when he and Nam were small where he hit his head, he turned from "slightly off" to actual developmental disability. Thongsook's been fixated on Nam ever since. Nam clearly isn't always quite happy with this state of affairs, but a mixture of guilt for Thongsook's accident and actual sympathy leads to her being seemingly the only person in Thailand who isn't his mother acting like an actual human being towards him. We can't say the same for the Jerks, whose behaviour can only be described using the word "total" and the word "shits". Really, I have no idea why a basically nice and kind-hearted young woman like Nam's hanging out with these people, except for the whole being in a horror movie thing.

One can imagine that the Jerks' reaction when Thongsook somehow manages to reach the island to surprise them isn't very positive. In fact, when Nam is knocked-out by a very convenient (the script is nothing if not lazy when it comes to the early set-up) painkiller pill, the male Jerks and female lesbian Jerk One play the kind of "prank" on Thongsook that people who aren't assholes would call torture. They drag him to the shrine where the ceremony once went awry and lock him into the Devouring Spirit's former cell; of course, Thongsook loses his amulet in the process. Consequently, all hell breaks lose very soon.

At first, Taweewat "SARS Wars" Wantha's Long Weekend didn't exactly endear itself to me despite a few atmospherically staged scenes, because it mostly appeared to be just another supernatural teenage slasher with a pretty lousy, generic script (and therefore the last thing I'd expected of Wantha). If you'd make a drinking game based on lazy plot ploys, you'd fall down dead of alcohol poisoning after the first twenty minutes. That impression was further exacerbated by the fact that everyone in the movie except for Nam is the kind of person who tortures and bullies the mentally disabled, which has never been the sort of thing that results in much investment in a character's fate on my side, while the whole "now these nasty people will get their comeuppance" angle always seemed like the cheapest way a horror film can go to me, the kind of thing people enjoy who take capital punishment to be a great idea.

However, once everything is set up, Long Weekend quite quickly becomes imaginative. There's no letting up between clever and pleasantly silly scare scenes at all, leaving the hopefully delighted viewer with little space to think (always a thing to be avoided in carnival ride style horror like this) or to complain. The supernatural in these scenes is decidedly weird, and quite obviously hates to repeat itself, so there's never a dull moment on screen with one crazy and energetic idea following the next before you can even think about breathing, particularly once the final thirty minutes begin racing by.

Running through everything following the set-up is a rather wicked sense of humour that for once isn't used to stop the film dead in its tracks in the typical horror comedy style but really rather goes for the short, sharp guffaw between scares in its audience. The humour is well-timed, funny, and never gets in the way of the actual fun. Why, I even laughed out loud repeatedly despite my general dislike for horror comedies, laughing, and public expressions of emotion. While it's at it, Long Weekend also squeezes in exactly the type of final twist I usually can't stand, but it does it so beautifully and - again - weirdly, I found myself rather charmed by it.

And here I thought actually watchable Thai horror cinema was dead.

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