From folklore to horror: The Medium as a case for Thai folk horror

While folk horror has never been identified as exclusive to western cinema, most studies of the topic have so far been strongly aligned with western world-views, philosophies and methodologies. This makes it difficult to apply their findings to films made in non-Christian non-western countries, such as Thailand. This article discusses Banjong Pisanthanakun’s film Rang Song (The Medium) (2021) as a case in point to demonstrate how folk horror operates as a mode in Thai cinema. Building on the existing studies and modifying the current definitions of folk horror to apply them to the Thai cultural context, the article argues that Thai folk horror narratives are steeped in representations of the urban–rural divide that pit metropolitan Bangkok against low-income provinces (in particular, the northeastern region of Isan) and reflect on cultural tensions related to ethnicity and class.

Beyond the vampire: Revamping Thai monsters for the urban age

This article revisits two of the most iconic Thai monstrosities, phi pop and phi krasue, whose changing representation owes equally as much to local folklore, as to their ongoing reinterpretations in popular culture texts, particularly in film and television. The paper discusses two such considerations, Paul Spurrier’s P (2005) and Yuthlert Sippapak’s Krasue Valentine (2006), films that reject the long-standing notion that animistic creatures belong in the countryside and portray phi pop and phi krasue’s adaptation to city life. Though commonplace, animistic beliefs and practices have been deemed incompatible with the dominant discourses of modernization and urbanization that characterise twenty-first century Thailand. Creatures like phi pop and phi krasue have been branded as uncivilised superstition and ridiculed through their unflattering portrayals in oddball comedies. This article argues that by inviting these monsters to relocate to contemporary Bangkok, Spurrier and Sippapak redefine their attributes for the modern urban setting and create hybrids by blending local beliefs and cinematic conventions. The creatures’ predatory character is additionally augmented by the portrayal of the city as itself vampiric. The article therefore reads these predatory spirits in parallel with the metaphor of the female vampire – a sexually aggressive voracious creature that threatens male patriarchal order and redefines motherhood.

Monsters in the making: Phi Pop and Thai Folk Horror

This article discusses the construction of phi pop as the monstrous figure of Thai folklore and proposes to read phi pop films as a classic example of Thai folk horror – a local sub-genre of horror whose main convention seems to be the representation of the insurmountable rural/urban divide. The films take different approaches to the topic, and the cinematic phi pop emerges as a figure of both comedy and horror, although in newer productions where the creature is no longer isolated in a remote village but rather follows rural migrants into the city, its portrayals are significantly more unnerving. The chapter provides a brief overview of Thai beliefs concerning the origin and characteristics of the creature and examines four films representative of most common approaches to Thai folk horror: Ban Phi Pop (Srisawat 1989), P (Spurrier 2005), Mekong Hotel (Weerasethakul 2012) and Pob (Ratanaruang 2018).