EXCLUSIVE: Singapore’s Mokster Films is to launch sales on upcoming Taiwanese supernatural horror feature The Damp at the European Film Market (EFM) next week.
The feature is written and directed by Fu Tien-yu, a Taiwanese filmmaker who was honoured with Tokyo’s Kurosawa Akira Award in 2024. Production is due to start this March in Taiwan, with a theatrical release planned for 2027.
Set at an all-girls school in a perpetually damp mountain region, the story follows an introverted teenager who discovers that several students had died in the nearby river months earlier, a scandal that the school attempts to erase. However, the dead students return through moisture and humidity, which becomes the medium through which their ghostly presence exists, turning themselves into an unavoidable invasive force against the living.
The script was written by Fu with veteran screenwriter Yang Qian-ling, whose credits include Lo Chi-leung’s The Vanished Murderer and Nick Cheung’s Keeper Of Darkness.
It is an ASOBI production, with Steve Wang as producer who will also handle the theatrical distribution in Taiwan through his company Activator. The Taipei-based company previously handled the marketing and distribution of Detention and Incantation, both among the highest-grossing Taiwanese horror titles of all time.
Director Fu is also producing along with Jeff Yeh, line producer of 2024’s biggest Taiwanese film Gatao: Like Father Like Son, and Angie Chen.
This horror film is a departure for director Fu, who is better known for drama.
Fu said of her move into horror: “It grows naturally out of my drama work, which has always focused on everyday emotions. Horror allows those feelings especially fear and emotional pressure in women’s lives to surface in a more immediate and visceral way. I want to create a horror film where fear accumulates rather than strikes.”
Fu made her directorial feature debut with Somewhere I Have Never Travelled in 2009, while 2012’s The Happy Life Of Debbie was named best mini-series/TV movie at the Golden Bell Awards. Her most recent feature is 2023’s Day Off, which won critical acclaim and prizes at Osaka Asian Film Festival, Udine’s Far East Film Festival, Taipei Film Festival and Golden Horse Awards.
In 2024, she was awarded the Kurosawa Akira Award by Tokyo International Film Festival to recognise her continuing the tradition of the Taiwan New Cinema from the 1980s. She is only the second Taiwanese filmmaker to receive this award, after auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien.
No comments yet