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For the last sixty-two years, if I remember correctly, I’ve been going to see horror movies with my mother. Sixty-six if you count Bambi, in which the mother deer’s death is as traumatic as almost any scene from a horror movie. But I date my fascination with horror from seeing Psycho many times with my mother from the age of eight.
So the other day we went to see a Thai film called Tee Yod, a film which has made a huge splash, netting more in its first week than any other Thai film, I’m told — even more remarkably, a horror film. An old-fashioned horror film with decapitated heads, piles of guts, possessions, magic bullets, dark forests, cornfield monster chases, and cars-not-starting moments — the kind of thing I used to love in the 1980s. Tee Yod has got to be a classic, if only because it contains within its 121 minutes homages to virtually every classic of the genre.
It’s made a lot of money. In the world of those who live and breathe film, this generally would tend to suggest a populist and unoriginal product, but this film, considered within the totality of the genre, actually holds its own pretty well. It was made by people who love horror and who understand its tropes.
It has serious flaws. But it’s still a better-than-average example of its genre not just when measured against other Thai films, but against the genre as a whole.
Spoilers Ahead:
As to what it’s about: first the setting is a horror staple, the isolated house in the fields, the out-of-the-way small town — a perfect microcosm of claustrophobia and obsession. The elements: a dark spirit that has to possess a “more than perfect” human, preferably an innocent girl; the local sheriff and the local shaman, the farm hands refusing to work, the big scary tree, a nasty woman brewing up a spell out of human guts and her own urine, just your standard tropes with an exotic Thai coloration added — and now here’s a bit of a twist: it’s a struggling rural family with six kids and a very complex level of dysfunction.
After a few vignettes that seem almost a compendium of famous horror scenes reimagined with a Thai slant, a somewhat diffuse beginning, by the midpoint of the film some really imaginative ideas take over and the momentum builds in a relentlessly paced succession of shocks and chases. There’s a wonderful pursuit through a field by a semi-decapitated zombie-like creature that’s taken the form of the older brother’s mother — love that bit, it’s kind of “Children of the Corn” on steroids — and the ride through massed apparitions in a rickety pick-up would give any Hollywood splatterfest a run for its money. There are a few too many endings; there are at least three good places to end the film in the last ten minutes, some of which would have left us with greater ambiguity or more unease, and have positioned us far better for a sequel.
The film’s sheer enthusiasm, bombarding the viewer with a fresh (sometimes not so fresh) idea every few minutes, in the end works to its detriment. By not pacing the manic scenes with enough quiet interludes, and simply screwing up the tension with nary a pause, we lose many opportunities to show something that the director really wants us to see: the complex character arcs of the family members as each one of them works their way through personal problems through to some kind of self-awareness or redemption. The end result of these arcs is shown, but there could have been more development along the way. Without such scenes, we don’t care enough about the characters to really empathize with them while they are being attacked, terrified, and having their emotions toyed with by an evil spirit. And actually the fast and furious bits would have seemed even more relentless if there had been a few stopping points. Perhaps this was a length issue (the film is already slightly longer than the conventional length of a film in this genre) and maybe one day we’ll see a director’s cut with all that stuff in it.
Many of the actors seem a bit uncomfortable portraying rural folks; there’s a bit of Bangkok sophistication that they often don’t hide too successfully. The one character who’s entirely in character, in my opinion, is the girl who plays the middle sister — she is really convincing. And she isn’t any less cute than any of the other leads! I don’t buy the criticism I’ve heard from many sources that the actors “look too attractive” to be from Kanchanaburi — it’s the body language and accent, not the good looks, that get in their way.
I first heard of this film from my composition students. There’s apparently a movie music composition competition going on, using the trailer of this film as the test. Several of my students have apparently entered this contest, and some of them showed me the clip in question. I think I rather shocked one of my students my saying, “Oh, this scene, we have a little tinkly bit, on piano or celesta, to show the innocence of the kids along with some slow-moving low chord clusters to add unease because they are running ….” That is of course exactly how it was scored in the actual film, but I would use the word “film score” with caution: like many modern films in this genre, the soundtrack is mostly a creature of sound design rather than composition, with the odd chromatic scale or piano sting thrown in that might be from a large sound library. If we were back in the 80s, there might have been a brilliant, tinkly, nerve-wracking score by Goblin such as you hear the Dario Argento movies. That’s probably how I would hear it – pity I don’t have time to enter the competition.
Well, all minor cavils. I had a good time. My mother’s viewpoint: “A bit too much running around, and the makeup was disgusting rather than scary. But still a pretty good movie.”
So, it seems, she wasn’t that scared. Still, if you love horror, you can’t really miss this one.