As much as you try to fight them, monsters never die. They are born out of old folkloric legends, influenced by religion, shamanism, society, and passed down through oral tradition. They live through time and space, re-emerging in different forms with every new generation.
It’s of no surprise, then, that they also inhabit contemporary Asian content. Whether the monsters are goblin-like deities, thousand-year-old foxes, or hopping vampires, the genre’s popularity is destined to last. Udine’s Far East Film Festival knows this well and, for its 27th edition – along with a program composed of shiny new entries to the genre – it hosted a retrospective titled “Yokai and other Monsters”, curated by local film critic Giorgio Placereani.
To look at folklore’s on-screen presence is to look at far eastern Asian film history. Within Udine’s FEFF retrospective, 12 films were screened, differing by showcased monster, genre, country, and by year of release, the latter spanning from 1968 to 2023. “Older films were excluded because many are lost,” explains Placereani.
Japanese yōkai (妖怪) are the “godfathers” of the FEFF 27, says Placereani on various occasions. These folkloric monsters came to prominence during Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868) and are still very much present in contemporary mainstream media, from films such as Miike Takashi’s The Great Yokai War (2005), to Hayao Miyazaki’s animations, and even in the Pokémon universe.
Alongside the film festival’s programme, the first Italian exhibition dedicated to Shigeru Mizuki opened at Udine’s Museum Casa Cavazzini. Artist and mangaka Mizuki (1922-2015) acted as a mediator between academic folkloric studies and its popularisation, from his biggest hit – the 1960s GeGeGe no Kitarō animation series, based on his hugely popular manga – until today. Mizuki was one of the most prominent artists to carry the legacy of centuries of yōkai art into the 20th and 21st centuries of popular culture. “All his work was like a bridge between opposites,” says Vincenzo Filosa, curator of the exhibition. “Past and future, reality and fantasy, materialism and spiritualism. What you can see here [in the exhibition], you can find in any contemporary manga, and even, for example, in Pokémon and in [multi-media franchise] Yo-kai Watch.”
After Mizuki published his first work on yōkai, the first yōkai-themed films started to emerge in 1960s Japan. Famously, the Daiei trilogy, directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda, focused on yōkai and is now mostly remembered for its special effects, including puppetry, suitmation, and even traditional hand-drawn animation. Yokai puppets get the most screen time in the second film of the trilogy: Yokai War: Spook Warfare (1968), which screened at FEFF 27. Until the end of WW2, yōkai were used as metaphors for foreigners and outsiders in popular visual media, while in the 1960s trilogy, they represent “Japaneseness”.
This important change can also be attributed to Mizuki, who contributed to the “mascotisation” of these monsters, changing their roles from outsiders to representatives of a shared, nostalgic Japanese past. The quirky 1960s yōkai therefore captured the imagination of a young generation who later revived the genre with examples such as Tomoo Haraguchi’s Sakuya, Slayer of Demons (2000), Takashi Miike’s The Great Yokai War (2005) and its sequel (2021) – on which Mizuki served as an advisor and made a guest appearance – and, most successfully, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001).
On the Korean side of the genre, on-screen folkloric monsters spring from a mix of Confucianism, Buddhist mythologies, Chinese or Japanese influence, and even traditional Korean shamanism. A monster from folklore who occupies an especially prominent place in Korean film is the gumiho (구미호), the fox with nine tails that takes the shape of a beautiful woman and eats flesh.
FEFF 27 screened two movies tracing a straight timeline from 1969 Shin Sang-ok’s A Thousand Year Old Fox (1969), the first film to bring the nine-tailed fox into modern Korean culture, to Park Heon-su’s The Fox with Nine Tails (1994), which, other than giving a first contemporary and romantic take on the genre, was the first time CGI special effects were used in Korean cinema.
Monster movies also brought innovation into the cinema of the Philippines. The very first Filipino experiments with filmmaking revolved around its most popular folkloric monster: Ang Manananggal (1927) directed by Jose Nepomuceno, the director considered the “Father of Philippine Cinema”. The manananggal (literally “remover”) is a mythical female creature that can separate its upper torso from the lower part of its body, having fangs and wings that give it a vampire-like appearance.
FEFF 27 screened two films with this monster at their centre: the first of an extremely popular franchise, Shake, Rattle and Roll (1984), along with a contemporary feminist take on the manananggal, The Woman in Unit 23B (2016).
Hong Kong monsters have also been responsible for generating franchises and remakes, and it’s little wonder, considering one of the first examples was as funny and chilling as Ricky Lau’s Mr Vampire (1985). The jiangshi (hopping vampire) genre generated such a craze of remakes and tributes that its influence is still visible in today’s biggest box office hits, such as Korean Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma (2023) and Juno Mak’s Rigor Mortis (2013).
Other than the beloved hopping vampire, Chinese folklore also manifests itself in film such as Tsui Hark’s brilliant fantasy Green Snake (1993), an irreverent film based on an old Chinese tale – the Legend of the White Snake – but eager to push its themes to generate a feast of eroticism and action-fantasy.
In Southeast Asia, things have not been so different. Among hundreds of folkloric ghosts, Thailand has the krasue, another self-segmenting female creature that manifests as a floating, disembodied head, usually young and beautiful, and the sua saming, a sort of weretiger and shapeshifter. The latter even makes its appearance in one of the most interesting examples of Asian arthouse cinema, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004). The monsters’ invasion of experimental cinema has therefore also begun.
On Malaysia’s side, FEFF 27 screened Shuhaimi Baba’s Pontianak Scent of the Tuber Rose (2004), a mix between a thriller and what feels like a television melodrama, while Indonesia was represented by its own monster genre superstar Suzzanna, a famed actress whose four-decade career in horror films eerily reflected the life of some of the characters she interpreted. To prove her cultural impact in interpreting female folkloric monsters, FEFF screened an interesting documentary about her titled Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic (2024) by David Gregory.
Films starring folkloric monsters have been made since the beginning of cinema and are still being made today, with the same sense of relevancy. Whether that is to process historical trauma, to release strong fears, to criticise society, to express patriotism, or in the plain hope of making some money, folklore in cinema is still alive. And its monsters are thriving.
Written by Emma Mattiussi
Featured image courtesy of Far East Film Festival
Emma Mattiussi is a short fiction writer and editor. Her writing has been published in various literary magazines. She works with Lago Film Festival and participated in the 2025 FEFF Campus. She is the co-founder of Italian independent magazine La Seppia, for which she edits and writes about zombies.
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