Editorials
Fatal Frame: Chilling Thai Horror Film ‘Shutter’ Turns 15
Considered Thailand’s response to the early aughts J-horror craze, Shutter made a massive splash at the box office in its native country in 2004. When Shutter premiered the following year in North America on April 23, its terrifying reputation had preceded it, and rumblings of an American remake were already underway. Despite sharing the recurring J-horror staple of a long-haired vengeance-seeking female spirit in white, this particular supernatural tale offered originality in the form of unreliable narrators and grim moral complexities. Shutter delivered a compelling character-centric story that’s unafraid to go full throttle on well-executed scares.
The feature debut by Parkpoom Wongpoom and Banjong Pisanthanakun, the plot revolves around photographer Tun (Ananda Everingham) and his girlfriend Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee). They’re a happy couple in love, but they open up the doors to supernatural torment when a distracted Jane accidentally runs a woman over while driving home from a friend’s wedding. Tun, who’d been drinking, convinces Jane to flee, leaving the woman alone in the middle of the road. Subsequently, strange images begin showing up in Tun’s photography, and spooky things start happening to the couple. The obvious is that their wrong-doing prompted justice and punishment from beyond the grave, but the narrative takes its time unraveling shocking truths.
It’s the story’s structure and character work that sets Shutter apart. Played with charm and an almost tentative sweetness, Everingham quickly sells Tun as someone morally weak but well-meaning. It’s as much Everingham’s performance as it is the central romance between Tun and Jane that sets him up as a protagonist with a rooting interest. Something that turns out to be a brilliant red herring.
Wongpoom and Pisanthanakun rely on the storytelling conventions of J-horror to lull the viewer, then they subvert them. First, with the hit and run accident as the inciting event, the apparent reason driving the revenge of the evil spirit. Then, Tun’s friends, the very ones he celebrated with at the beginning, start committing suicide. Tearful questioning by a grieving spouse in front of Jane sows the seeds of doubt. Tun harbors secrets, and it could threaten not just his relationship with Jane, but their lives.
It’s at this point that the hauntings escalate. There are the traditional ghostly scares, but Wongpoom and Pisanthanakun weave in a lot of ingenuity in the scare department, too, making full use of the photography. The ghostly Natre (Achita Sikamana) makes her presence known in professional pictures, the darkroom, and even in one clever bathroom scare that ends in welcome levity. It’s another late-night driving encounter that threatens to leave your pants soiled; Natre is one seriously pissed off ghost, for a good reason.
As with many stories of this ilk, Tun and Jane eventually trace Natre back to her hometown, to learn the truth of Natre’s fate and ensure she’s laid to rest properly in the hopes of quelling her unrest. It comes with significant reveals of Tun’s connection to Natre, as well as a climactic showdown between the living and dead. All of which would make for a solid entry in supernatural horror. But it’s during the happily-ever-after false ending that Wongpoom and Pisanthanakun finally show the rest of their hand; Tun never was the protagonist at all. He and his friends deserved everything coming to them, including Natre’s sentence for Tun. It’s a final jolt type twist and one that offers a satisfying conclusion. Justice has been served, and Natre is a curse tailor-made only for the monster that made her.
From a narrative standpoint, it gives a reprieve to the standard J-horror ghost. Sadako and Kayako spread like supernatural diseases, without discrimination. In Thailand, the belief in spirits and ghosts is quite common, and they’re often considered benevolent. There are wicked spirits, too, often stemming from horrible deaths. There’s a popular Thai saying to the effect of, “You may not believe, but never offend the spirits.” A small offering or shrine can go a long way to peaceful coexistence.
Despite a ghastly appearance and the effective way in which she terrifies, Natre is benevolent. She haunts and claims only those who harmed her directly, and their vile actions were in dire need of retribution. For Jane, there was no malintent, only truth.
The best horror movies deftly balance the scares and story. They elicit severe chills yet keep us engaged with fleshed-out characters and narrative. Shutter does both remarkably well, imbuing the tropes of a horror trend with its own culture and transforming it into something far greater.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
You must be logged in to post a comment.