Someone in the Dark

Something about summer and horror has always made sense. The heat, the long nights, the strange suspension of normal life — horror fills the gap that other genres can't easily. It's no coincidence that the season's biggest scares tend to arrive around this time of the year.

What's been interesting recently in the US is where those scares are coming from. A new generation of filmmakers — many of them starting on YouTube, working with minimal budgets and maximum concept — have been quietly redefining what a horror film can be. Obsession, Backrooms, Talk to Me: films that cost very little and terrified audiences who thought they'd seen everything. The formula, if there is one, is simple: strip away the production value, lean into something psychologically or culturally specific, and expect the audience to meet you there.

Watching that trend develop, I kept thinking about something happening on the other side of the world. Southeast Asia has been producing some of the most distinctive horror films of the past decade — not as imitations of Japanese or Korean horror, which have long dominated Western awareness of Asian genre cinema, but as something genuinely their own. Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand: each country has a deep well of folklore and spiritual belief that their filmmakers have been drawing from in ways that feel current rather than historical. The horror in these films isn't imported. It lives in the soil, the forest, the family line.

Horror might not be something for everyone. But once you get past the first section, you will find quite the opposite side of the content spectrum — music and photos that will clear your head and warm your heart. I promise.

— Yubin

A cursed Javanese village, a Malaysian jungle at the edge of the world, a shaman's inheritance in northeast Thailand — same region, three completely different kinds of dread.

The concept for Impetigore began with a story Joko Anwar's older brother told him as a child: that the leather used to make traditional Indonesian shadow puppets — wayang kulit — comes from human skin. Anwar carried that image for years before he knew what to do with it.

What he eventually built around it is a film about Maya, a young woman from Jakarta getting by on a toll booth salary, who learns she may be heir to a large house in the remote Central Javanese village where she was born. She travels there with her best friend Dini, unaware that the village has been trying to locate and kill her for years. The community is under a curse — newborns are born without skin — and Maya's family is the reason. 

Impetigore took nearly a decade from concept to screen, shelved repeatedly for lack of funding before a three-film deal with American production company Ivanhoe Pictures finally got it made as an Indonesian-Korean-American co-production. It premiered at Sundance 2020, received Indonesia's submission for the Academy Awards, and won Best Director and a record 17 nominations at the 2020 Indonesian Film Festival — the first horror film to win Best Director at the Citra Awards in their history. RogerEbert.com called it "an uncommonly effective film that is smart and provocative in addition to being all kinds of creepy."

What Anwar does that most horror filmmakers don't is make the cultural specificity central to the plot rather than decorative. The wayang kulit tradition isn't window dressing — it's the engine of the plot, the source of the horror, and the reason the film could only have been made in Indonesia by someone who grew up with that folklore. Anwar has said he never consciously chose to include Indonesian folk elements: "It's not a choice, it comes naturally. I grew up reading and being told about this type of folklore all the time." That's the difference between atmosphere and argument.

Stream on Prime Video, Sling TV, AMC+, Shudder (Trailer)

Roh — Emir Ezwan (Malaysia, 2019)

Roh means soul in Malay. Shot in two weeks on a budget of $88,500 in the Dengkil forest south of Kuala Lumpur, it is Emir Ezwan's debut feature and Malaysia's official submission to the 93rd Academy Awards — an unlikely choice that turned out to be exactly right. A mother and her two children, living in near-total isolation at the forest's edge, bring home a young girl found covered in clay. She delivers a prophecy of death and says nothing more. What follows is rooted in Islamic belief and Malay black magic, building its fear not from jump scares but from the forest itself — the sense that something has been watching the family long before the girl arrived. For a film made for the cost of a family car, it is a remarkably solid piece of work — the kind of debut that makes you wonder what comes next.

Stream free on Tubi and Plex (Trailer)

The Medium — Banjong Pisanthanakun (Thailand, 2021)

A Thai-Korean co-production written and produced by Na Hong-jin — director of The Wailing — and directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun, who made Shutter in 2004. The film follows a documentary crew embedded with Nim, a shaman in the Isan region of northeast Thailand who serves as the vessel for an ancestral spirit called Ba Yan. When Nim's niece Mink begins exhibiting signs of the same inheritance, the crew keeps filming — and what they capture becomes increasingly difficult to explain. Shot in the pseudo-documentary style of a legitimate ethnographic film, The Medium takes its time establishing the genuine texture of Isan spiritual practice and then dismantles it. Some critics found the found-footage format a bit too long; others called it the most terrifying film of 2021. What isn't in dispute is the film's central argument: that the most frightening thing is not the possession itself, but the moment when the belief system you've trusted your entire life stops working.

Stream on Prime Video, Sling TV, AMC+, Shudder (Trailer)

Three young artists reinventing R&B — groovy, light-handed, and very much of this moment. After the weight of what came before in the Film section, consider this the exhale.

Korean R&B has spent the last couple of decades carving out its own identity — not a copy of American soul or hip-hop, but something that sounds and moves differently. Crush has been near the center of that shift since his debut in 2012, and wonderego, his third full album released a decade into his career, is the fullest version of what he's been building toward.

The album title splits into two halves — wonder and ego — and so does the record itself. The first half reaches outward: house music influences, collaborations with international producers, the kind of looseness that comes from someone who no longer needs to prove anything. The second half turns inward: personal narrative, vulnerability, and the emotional residue of a decade in the industry. Across 19 tracks spanning R&B, soul, funk, pop, and house, Crush never lets the ambition feel overworked. Hmm-cheat is percussive and slick; Ego is soft and searching; Bad Habits with Lee Hi floats somewhere between the two. "Shortcomings are what made me who I am for a long time," he said of the album. "Wonderego is a journey that begins with it."

What makes Crush interesting rather than merely accomplished is the light touch. Nothing here is trying too hard. The grooves are warm, the transitions smooth, the emotional register consistently honest without tipping into melodrama. It is the sound of someone who has figured out, after ten years, exactly how much effort to show.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

cure — SIRUP (Japan, 2021)

SIRUP grew up in Osaka absorbing Stevie Wonder, D'Angelo, and Alicia Keys, and then made something that doesn't sound quite like any of them. His 2021 album cure is neo-soul filtered through a Japanese sensibility — silky, relaxed, built around a voice that can move from a whisper to a falsetto quite effortlessly. The production is meticulous without feeling clinical, and the Japanese lyrics — in a genre that often defaults to English for global appeal — give the album a particular intimacy. SIRUP has since toured across Asia, performed at Bangkok's Big Mountain Music Festival and held his first Seoul solo concert, building an audience that crosses borders regardless of the language. cure is the clearest statement of what makes him distinctive: R&B that knows exactly where it came from and is completely uninterested in sounding like it came from somewhere else.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

The Greng Jai Piece — Phum Viphurit (Thailand, 2023)

The title is untranslatable in any tidy way. Greng jai is a Thai concept — the social impulse to hold back, to not impose, to leave the last piece of food on the plate out of consideration for others. Phum Viphurit named his second album after it, which tells you something about his instincts as an artist. Born in Bangkok, raised in New Zealand, returned to Thailand for university and never quite left either place behind — his music carries that double exposure lightly. The Greng Jai Piece is funky, sun-warmed, and casually sophisticated, drawing from neo-soul and indie pop without promoting either influence too loudly. Put this on after something heavy. It will do exactly what it promises.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Hideaki Hamada did not set out to be a photographer. He studied English literature at Kansai University, worked as a designer, and shot film as a hobby since high school. What changed was his son being born. When Haru arrived, Hamada picked up his Pentax 67II with a different kind of attention. By the time his second son Mina was old enough to run through grass with his brother, Hamada had something he hadn't planned on: a serious project of his own.

The series that emerged — Haru and Mina, begun in 2012 — is nominally a family album. Two boys growing up in and around Osaka, playing in rivers, sleeping in cars, eating watermelon on summer evenings. But to call it just a family album is to miss what makes it special. Hamada photographs his sons from a particular distance — not so close as to be sentimental, not so far as to be cold. The children are rarely performing for the camera. They are simply present, absorbed in the act of being children, and Hamada is watching from just far enough away. "I want to show their living form," he said. "Children always act more than I expect."

The light in his photographs does most of the work. Film grain, warm tones, the particular gold of Japanese summer afternoons — images that feel like they were shot in a moment you have already forgotten but somehow recognize. The word that appears most often in writing about his work is nostalgic, but that's not quite right. Nostalgia looks backward; Hamada's photographs feel more suspended, neither past nor present, captured in eternity.

He became a full-time photographer in 2012 at the age of 35 — late, by most measures. His work was discovered in countries like Taiwan, Lithuania and Singapore before Japan took notice; it was Kinfolk, the American magazine, that finally brought his own country's readers to him. He now has over 550,000 followers on Instagram, where he continues to publish daily. The Haru and Mina series is still ongoing. The boys are grown. The light is the same.

Follow him on IG @hamadahideaki and his homepage

In 2023, sales of 35mm film rolls hit their highest point since 2004. In 2025, 312 new film development labs opened worldwide — roughly one every 28 hours. Asia-Pacific is now the fastest-growing film market on the planet, with South Korea seeing 22% year-over-year growth in film camera sales. Japan, long the historical center of camera manufacturing, sold over 4.2 million rolls of film in 2023 alone. A medium that the industry had quietly written off is not just surviving — it's expanding.

This is not nostalgia in the passive sense. The people driving the revival are largely in their twenties. They didn't grow up with film but they still chose it. The same generational impulse is visible in vinyl records, which outsold CDs in 2022 for the first time in decades — a milestone that once seemed unimaginable. But where vinyl's appeal is partly tied to sound quality debates, film's resurgence is more straightforwardly about constraint. A roll of 35mm gives you 36 frames. You can't review the shot. You won't see the result for days. In a world of infinite, instantly reviewable, AI-generatable images, the limitation is the point.

Hideaki Hamada — whose photographs appear in this issue's Photography section — shoots exclusively on a Pentax 67II, a medium format film camera. He always has. The grain, the warmth, the particular way afternoon light falls on film emulsion: these aren't stylistic choices so much as conditions of attention. You look differently when each frame costs something.

What the numbers are telling us is that a growing number of young people in Seoul, Tokyo, and beyond have decided they want to look that way too. Not because film is necessarily better, but because the process asks something of you that a smartphone doesn't. Intentionality, in an era when images have never been cheaper to make or easier to forget, turns out to be worth paying for.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com