Reviews
“Folklore” Season 2 Review – Asian Horror Anthology Returns with More Cultural Scares
The West has a tendency to lump horror from East and Southeast Asia into one basic but limiting category. Because of this, someone might write off an entire continent’s contributions to the genre based solely on a few popular movies with similar plots and executions. However, Eric Khoo’s series Folklore highlights — not to mention celebrates — the differences that make each episode’s depicted culture so unique. That’s not to say there isn’t an overall theme here. This anthology show emphasizes a commonality among its stories; every tale of terror draws from the supernatural. More specifically, each self-contained episode is based on a local custom, myth or superstition. And as the second season demonstrates with both flair and potency, defying the past and ignoring tradition has serious consequences.
Like other anthology series, there is no specific order when watching the episodes. Skipping around is surely an option, though the sophomore season officially opens with Liao Shih-han’s The Rope. The Taiwanese entry straddles the line between life and death as a bride gets lost on her wedding day. The ceremony is incidentally held near a cleansing rite for the dead, and after Vivian Sung’s skeptical character gets caught up in the procession that same night, she wakes up with no recollection of how she even got home. Her strange experience leads to suspicions about her good-on-paper new husband (Wu Kang-ren), who hasn’t been entirely forthcoming about his last relationship. Luxurious production values and an almost intoxicating sense of dread help conceal flaws in this unsurprising story.
Idol-turned-actor Seiko Matsuda (Drop Dead Gorgeous) directs and co-writes the Japanese episode The Day the Wind Blew. While she admits she doesn’t enjoy standard horror, Matsuda delivers an invigorating story that is unlike anything else shown in the series so far. The episode described as “romantic horror” centers around smitten schoolgirl Mika (Haori Takahashi) and the object of her affection, a popular singer named Ken (Win Morisaki). When the plot starts to parallel that of a cheesy J-drama, Matsuda does the unthinkable and turns this serendipitous love story into something achingly bittersweet. There’s nothing quite overtly scary here, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be afraid of, either.
“Ayizah, Ayizah”
Sittisiri Mongkolsiri serves up the most intentionally distasteful story in the whole bunch. The Thai episode Broker of Death shows the lengths a struggling father (Natee Ngamnaewprom) will go to to make certain his ailing daughter (Jennis Oprasert) gets the operation she needs. Although once the desperate parent learns the terms and source of his loan, his entire outlook on life and family changes. His journey to do right by someone who continues to be wronged in death is compelling. The surprisingly emotional moments here offset the less savory ones.
Erik Matti represents the Philippines in 7 Days of Hell, a bizarre and excruciating tale of revenge. Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness) plays Lourdes, a mother and police officer who has to choose between her badge and family when her son becomes afflicted by a growing stomach tumor. Lourdes turns to the supernatural to help save her boy when traditional medicine and prayers don’t work. What comes next, though, is shocking and a testament to one mother’s unconditional love.
Retirement homes were once taboo in Asia, but times have changed and these places are gaining in popularity. Billy Christian explores this idea in the Indonesian episode Grandma’s Kiss, where a daughter temporarily moves her mother (Lydia Kandou) into a senior community until their home renovations are completed. As the mother begins to suspect this is actually a permanent arrangement, the other residents fear a monster called a Palasik. The director decidedly uses the supernatural to communicate suffocating parent-child relationships, but the theme ultimately becomes lost in its own metaphor.
“7 Days of Hell”
Nicole Midori Woodford plumbs the depths of maternal grief in The Excursion. Set in Singapore, a bereft mother (Mindee Ong) is still reeling from a family tragedy when her young son (Ethan Ng Kai En) starts to behave strangely. The parents take the boy to the beach as a way to mend what is broken, but their going there only opens the door to more pain. Sumptuous cinematography accompanies this meditative as well as relatable study of anguish and healing, and Woodford’s story is rife with gothic tendencies. The director doesn’t invent scares to make the viewer jump or squirm. On the contrary, the scares have more of a cleansing effect.
Season Two ends on a strong note with Bradley Liew’s Ayizah, Ayizah. The episode’s namesake (Sarah Ali) endures humiliation time and time again as she works as a live-in domestic helper for the Zuls (Remy Ishak, Sharifah Sakinah). The workaholic husband resorts to the dark arts to stay afloat at work and keep his demanding spouse happy, and the wife takes her frustrations out on her employees. The Malaysian entry eventually transforms into a macabre but delightful takedown of the entitled and rich. The stifling atmosphere is dependent on the oppressive setting, and the ending is straight out of a dark fairytale.
There’s more cohesion to the stories this time around, and despite some slights here and there, no episode is outright dismissible. A few have distinct problems — namely weak follow-through and belabored messages — but as a whole, the second season is both attractive and engaging. If additional seasons are feasible, Folklore would do well to expand its reach to more directors and places. As of now, though, it is a significant and unmatched source of cultural storytelling.
Along with the First Season, the entire Second Season of Folklore is now streaming on HBO Max.
“Broker of Death”
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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