While Taiwanese arthouse films have been regulars on the international festival circuit since the breakthroughs of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and the rest of the New Taiwan Cinema in the 1980s, the island’s popular cinema has always struggled to differentiate itself in the West from the more familiar cinemas of Hong Kong and Mainland China. But in recent years, the tide seems to be shifting. The Taiwan Film Archive has done tremendous work restoring and re-releasing film classics going back to the 1960s, everything from the wuxia and kung fu films of King Hu and Joseph Kuo to the New Cinema classics. And as the productivity of Hong Kong’s cinema has steeply declined in the decade since the Umbrella Movement (though great films are still being made in the former colony), Taiwan’s pop cinema has been on the rise. John Hsu’s Detention, a 2019 horror film based on a video game and set during Taiwan’s White Terror of the early 1960s, was a hit across the sinophone world (though it was not allowed to be released on the Mainland). His latest, Dead Talents Society, is an existential comedy about scary movies and celebrity, a kind of Scream meets Monsters, Inc. meets All About Eve, deeply steeped in the aesthetics of 21st-century East Asian horror.
A brief prologue sets up the world: Sandrine Pinna (Legend of the Demon Cat, See You Tomorrow) plays the ghost world’s most popular star, Cathy. She haunts the creepy Room 414 at a hotel, where she pops out of a closet and does a backwards crab walk until her victim runs away screaming. These kinds of hauntings are essential for the ghost world’s economy, which gets a boon when ceremonies are performed to clean the haunting sites: the more famous the scare, the bigger and more lavish the ceremony. Cathy though is soon upstaged by her young protege, a mean girl who takes hauntings in a new direction (the Internet!) and relegates Cathy to has-been status.
Then we join the story of a young ghost, The Rookie, played by Gingle Wang (star of Detention). She has no particular talents and is going to disappear from existence in 30 days unless she can obtain a special Haunting License. Cathy’s manager Makoto takes her in, and a ragtag team of misfits work to teach her the haunting ropes. It all leads to a haunt-off between the new girl and the mean girl to scare a trio of YouTube skeptics. Success means goodies for all the ghost world, as well as a bit of self-esteem for our loser heroes. Failure means a death worse than death.
Dead Talents Society is a breeze. Mostly light and goofy, it moves at a furious pace through its ingenious world — well, until its post-credits scene, which is the funniest one of those that most viewers will have witnessed in a long time. It lacks the acrobatic genius or set piece construction of something like the Mr. Vampire series, but has something of the same attitude. Its references are to J-Horror-era classics like The Ring, which may be a little outdated (Hideo Nakata’s film came out more than 25 years ago!), but classics are classics for a reason. And its central metaphor — that being remembered on social media has become a replacement for being remembered by your friends and family — is a powerful one.
The Rookie’s trouble begins when an item special to her is accidentally thrown away by her surviving family. This is what triggers the countdown to her disintegration. The only solution for a ghost whose memory has been lost by the living is to try to live on as a meme. But that kind of celebrity is fleeting and limited: the pursuit of it causes all kinds of problems for the striving ghosts, and even if they do succeed in achieving it, it’s only a matter of time before a trendy new ghost comes along and usurps their place. Real human connection — being remembered and having a tangible impact on the lives of the living — is much more permanent, more real. Hsu is smart enough not to strain the metaphor, but it’s more than a little disturbing, scary even, how much his ghost world resembles our own increasingly haunted social media.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 5.
