Edward was seated at his office desk. The matter involving Harry Potter had already been more or less settled, and now what Edward needed to do was write a brand-new script. After thinking it over repeatedly, he finally decided to pull out a film ranked rather highly in the history of Thai horror movies.
"Coming Soon"
Edward looked at the film title, his brow tightening slightly.
"Coming Soon"—a strange and unusual movie. Its level of horror was extremely high, widely regarded as one of the scariest Thai horror films ever made. However, because of its very particular setup, the movie had also received plenty of criticism. Some people even believed that the later Taiwanese horror film Incantation had elements similar to Coming Soon. Although the plot wasn't exactly the same, the level of psychological disgust and disturbance it evoked was about the same…
Some would even say Incantation surpassed it in that regard.
The core premise of Incantation revolved around an idea similar to the old chain-message curses from years ago—things like: "If you don't forward this, you're not a real XX," "I can't help it, I have to pass this on or my whole family will die." That was why Edward said the setup itself was deeply unsettling.
The protagonist of Incantation is named Li Ronan. At the very beginning, she stares directly into the camera, guiding the audience to chant repeatedly a saying that she claims is a mantra to bless her daughter.
Then, the movie inserts a flashback sequence.
Back when Li Ronan was pregnant, she, along with her boyfriend Dom and their friend Chih-Ming, formed a ghost-hunting team. They trespassed into the forbidden territory of the Old Village deep in the mountains of Kaohsiung. Rumor said it was a cult village worshipping the "Great Black Mother," with altars made of children's teeth and hair, and underground tunnels filled with mirrors and talismans. Local elders had repeatedly warned them not to enter.
But, as characters in horror movies always do, the trio ignored all warnings. They tore off the sealing talismans, took offerings from the altar, and triggered the taboo.
Dom suddenly went mad in front of the altar and smashed his own face with a hammer until he died.
Chih, after returning to Taipei, began hearing voices and eventually bit off his own tongue inside a police station, killing himself.
Li Ronan, terrified and pregnant, was hospitalized—becoming the sole survivor.
Years later, the main story officially begins.
Li Ronan brings her six-year-old daughter Chao-Fei home from the psychiatric hospital. Immediately, all kinds of supernatural events start happening inside the house. Chao-Fei keeps pointing at the ceiling, calling something "bad, bad."
The security cameras record a human-shaped shadow hanging upside-down; toilets flush by themselves forming strange whirlpools… and many other phenomena.
A subtle detail emerges: Li Ronan's mental state is clearly unstable.
Meanwhile, a man working at the welfare center, who genuinely cares about Li Ronan's child, begins investigating. He learns that Li Ronan's own parents are dead. To break the curse, he decides to seek out a tantric master for guidance, while Li Ronan looks for other ways to save her daughter.
Later, Li Ronan seeks help from a temple couple, Master A-Qing and his wife, to conduct a seven-day fasting ritual.
But because Li Ronan breaks the rule of "no feeding," Master A-Qing ends up bleeding from all seven orifices and dies violently before the altar. His wife, A-Qing Sao, consumes ashes in a trance and then hangs herself, leaving behind the chilling final words: "She is laughing."
Even the remaining statues in the shrine turn their backs, unwilling to look at Li Ronan.
At the same time, the man investigating obtains new information. A master he consults explains that the curse is tied to the Great Black Mother. Anyone who utters the deity's true name becomes cursed and ends up as a sacrifice. Li Ronan's daughter, Chao-Fei, has been marked as the next vessel, meaning her death is almost inevitable.
Thus, Li Ronan begins editing videos and uploads carefully crafted "Blessing Videos," tricking hundreds of thousands of viewers into chanting the mantra along with her under the pretense of praying for her daughter. In reality, she is distributing the curse among the viewers. At the very end, the camera focuses on the true visage of the Great Black Mother. The screen abruptly cuts to black—and the audience, without realizing it, completes a mass sacrificial ritual.
This is the main reason Incantation received so many negative reviews. People found it absurd and outrageous, how could anyone do something so horrific? Many viewers despised the movie precisely because of this.
Compared to that, the story of Coming Soon was even more unique.
The movie begins with a little girl slowly opening her eyes in confusion as she lies in bed. Instinctively, she turns her head, only to see a corpse beside her, a woman whose eyes had been gouged out. Terror overwhelms the girl; she screams and hides.
While she hides, trembling, the door creaks open. A woman with burn-scarred features enters. She holds a knife, her hair twisted and strange, shouting frantically for the girl to come out or suffer the consequences. The little girl is terrified.
The trembling of the cabinet draws the scarred woman's attention. As the woman approaches, the girl acts first—pushing the woman over and trying to run. But the scarred woman grabs her leg, the girl screams, and the woman stabs down with the knife, only to miss the girl and stab her own hand instead. The girl manages to break free and flee.
She tries to escape the house, but fails. Just as she is one step away from freedom, the scarred woman grabs her by the leg and drags her back, locking her in the basement. There, several other children are imprisoned. All of them share one horrifying trait: none of them have eyes.
Their eyes had all been gouged out by this scarred woman.
The girl screams helplessly, but her fate is already sealed.
Soon after, a group of villagers breaks into the house. Their children had gone missing, and they followed tracks to this place. When they open the basement door, they find their missing children, now eyeless. Rage consumes the parents. They beat the scarred woman mercilessly, and in the process, her name is finally spoken aloud.
Her name is Chaba.
The villagers slice open Chaba's mouth and then hang her, preparing to kill her. Her blood-filled, crimson eyes glare directly at the camera, as if staring at every audience member individually. Then the camera slowly zooms out, revealing that everything up to now was simply a movie scene being projected in a theater.
Inside the theater, the cleaning lady felt uneasy after seeing Chaba's final blood-red stare. As she steps outside for a cigarette and she runs into the director of the film, who is also smoking. Curious, the cleaning lady asks why the director doesn't go inside to watch his own movie.
The director didn't answer at first.
He simply took a few more drags of his cigarette before finally saying that he planned to edit out the final scene where Chaba was shown being hanged. He didn't want that scene to appear in the movie at all—this way, he could keep the audience from seeing it.
The cleaning lady felt puzzled, but this was the director's creative decision, and it wasn't her place to interfere. So, she said nothing and prepared to return to work. However, when she walked back into the hallway, she suddenly noticed a strange figure ahead. Curious, she followed it, eventually reaching one of the closed screening rooms.
After stepping inside, she realized the theater was completely empty. She was just about to leave when the projector screen suddenly lit up on its own and began playing the footage of Chaba's hanging—the very scene the director said he would cut out.
The cleaning lady became deeply unsettled. She turned to leave at once, but just then, the movie image vanished. The projector light was still shining, yet within that beam, she saw the shadow of a person suspended in mid-air, struggling violently.
The cleaning lady instantly understood—
That figure might be right behind her.
Trembling uncontrollably, she slowly turned her head.
And there, hanging behind her, was Chaba herself—still suspended, still writhing, her blood-red eyes fixed on the janitor with a chilling, unblinking stare. The cleaning lady let out a piercing scream—
and the footage cut off right at that moment.
After that, the male protagonist made his first appearance. He was an employee at the movie theater. That day, he was chatting with his coworker about camrip movies—the kind recorded illegally during screenings. Such pirate recordings were extremely common, even in Edward's previous life.
Many films had camrip versions circulating before they officially premiered, causing huge losses for film studios. That was why theaters hated camripping so much.
The protagonist was fully aware of this.
But he was also a gambling addict, deeply in debt and desperate for cash.
So when his coworker, Brother Yuan, asked him to help record the film, he reluctantly agreed.
Brother Yuan handed over a small portion of the advance payment with a cheerful grin. After receiving the money, the protagonist didn't go straight to record the movie. Instead, he phoned another gambling friend, asking him to help place bets on a few lottery numbers.
Right then, a girl walked in—his ex-girlfriend. She looked down on him, disgusted by his behavior, and after collecting her belongings, turned to leave.
But as she walked down the hallway, she noticed something strange—
The corridor was eerily silent.
She glanced back. Nothing behind her.
But when she turned forward again, her heart almost stopped—
At the far end of the corridor stood a distorted, uncanny figure.
It was Chaba with her posture swaying unnaturally.
Before the girl could even react, the lights began going out—
one by one.
And with each section of darkness drawing closer, Chaba seemed to inch closer as well.
Terrified, the girl screamed and bolted back toward the staff lounge, hoping Brother Yuan would help her. But the lights continued shutting off behind her, chasing her down the hallway.
Her screams grew even sharper.
Just then, the door to the staff lounge finally opened.
Brother Yuan stepped out—with a bizarre smile on his face.
The girl panicked and, without thinking, punched him straight to the ground.
Only afterward did she learn the truth:
It was a birthday prank her coworkers had prepared for her.
They even brought out a cake.
The Chaba she saw was merely a cardboard movie standee.
After the coworkers left, the protagonist and Brother Yuan stayed behind to record the camrip. The protagonist operated the backstage equipment, while Brother Yuan sat inside the theater brazenly filming with a DV camera.
While waiting, the protagonist stared at a pawn ticket in his hand and drifted into memories of his past with his ex-girlfriend.
Back then, he had been addicted to drugs. To buy them, he ignored her pleas, pawned her watch, and even injured her when she tried to stop him. Heartbroken, she finally left him. The protagonist regretted deeply what kind of monster he had been… and at some point, he drifted off to sleep.
When he woke up, it was already morning.
Panicking, he rushed to find Brother Yuan—but there was no one in the screening room. Only a dropped DV camera lay on the floor.
He picked it up and checked the footage.
To his confusion, it contained only a little over sixty minutes of film, which didn't match the movie's full length. But it was too late—the production company would soon discover that the film reel had been swapped. This was his only copy.
He opened the recording.
For the first thirty minutes, the camera captured nothing but the theater's floor. Only afterward did Brother Yuan appear—collapsed on the ground, staring at something off-screen with absolute terror, scrambling backward as if trying to escape something horrifying.
At that moment, the protagonist's gambling friend arrived, excitedly telling him that all the lottery numbers he bought last night had won. But the protagonist couldn't celebrate. He was far more worried about Brother Yuan's disappearance.
With no other leads, he went to Brother Yuan's home to look for him.
The house was empty.
Strangely, there was a trail of something smeared on the floor—something like footprints. But these footprints seemed to come out of the wardrobe, not toward it. This left the protagonist extremely uneasy.
Gathering his courage, he opened the wardrobe—
but found nothing inside.
With no answers, he prepared to ride back to the theater.
That night, the people who had hired him and Brother Yuan to record the movie confronted the protagonist. Since they couldn't contact Brother Yuan, they demanded the film from him, even threatening him. With no other choice, he returned to the theater alone at night to finish the recording.
While filming, he made a horrifying discovery—
The footprint pattern in the movie matched exactly the footprints he saw in Brother Yuan's home earlier.
Terror surged through him.
He rushed outside to call Brother Yuan.
But the ringtone wasn't coming from his phone.
It echoed—from inside the theater.
The protagonist followed the sound to the screening room.
The ringtone was playing from the speakers.
Confused, he looked toward the screen—
And saw Brother Yuan's corpse projected onto it.
His eyes had been gouged out.
His hand held a ringing phone.
And the incoming caller ID displayed—
the protagonist's own number.
The protagonist panicked. He immediately stopped the movie and fled the theater. But he kept feeling as if someone—or something—was behind him. When he turned around, all he saw was a single leg being pulled back out of sight.
He burst through the main doors. After only a few steps, he heard them open and close behind him. When he turned back, nothing was there.
He tugged at the strap on his shoulder, thinking it was his backpack.
But unbeknownst to him—
he was carrying Chaba on his back.
He returned home, still shaken, and soon heard strange noises coming from the bathroom. Following the sound, he found the same footprints from Brother Yuan's house. Behind the shower curtain, someone appeared to be brushing their hair.
When he pulled the curtain open—
No one was there.
But the comb on the floor, tangled with long strands of a woman's hair, made it clear:
He had indeed been haunted.
…
The next day, while helping coworkers hang posters, he inadvertently learned that the Chaba case in the movie was based on a real crime, something that truly happened. His fear deepened.
Back inside the theater, he thought he saw someone who looked exactly like Chaba. He went in to investigate but found nothing, and afterward got into a misunderstanding with two short coworkers.
His ex-girlfriend witnessed the scene and assumed he had relapsed into drug use. She confronted him, discovered the DV camera in his hand, and realized he had been pirating movies. Disappointed and angry, she scolded him, accusing him of resorting to illegal recording just to buy drugs.
The protagonist hurriedly explained everything that had happened these past few days.
But his ex-girlfriend remained skeptical—half believing, half doubting him.
(End of Chapter)