When Edward considered how deeply Thailand respected Buddhist temples and monks, he no longer found anything strange about the matter. If monks appeared onscreen and their involvement "failed" to solve the problem, it would easily cause controversy, so the simplest method was to avoid letting the characters interact with monks at all.
Naturally, this saved the production a great deal of trouble. Realizing this, Edward stopped overthinking it and decided to continue writing the rest of The Victim. He intended to use this film as his return to directing or to be more precise, the return of horror films themselves.
Once filming was underway and progressing smoothly, many of his later problems would naturally resolve. Thinking of this, Edward felt his mood lighten, and he continued recalling the plot while writing the next part of the story.
In the footage, Mei finally understood that when the film crew first started shooting, everyone had been gathered to pray, except her. She was nowhere to be found.
When the props master eventually located her, he found Mei wearing the ceremonial headpiece and dancing in a strange, trance-like manner. There were scratches on her face, and she looked frightening. It took several people to restrain her long enough to remove the headpiece. Once it was taken off, Mei instantly returned to normal.
The props master recalled that the headpiece had originally been given to Mei by a woman, but since they'd forgotten about it, it was tossed into storage. They never imagined it would later trigger the chain of horrifying events that followed.
At that moment, Mei realized the headpiece was the true culprit. She decided to go to the third floor to destroy it, but she couldn't open the glass door. Through the reflection on the glass, she suddenly saw a female ghost.
As she turned around, the ghost appeared at the end of the hallway, dressed in traditional attire, dancing as it flickered closer in a series of unnerving jumps.
Terrified, Mei grabbed something and smashed the glass. At the same time, the ghost reacted as if struck — its form flickered, becoming thin and distorted, letting out shrill, piercing screams.
Seizing the opportunity, Mei snatched the headpiece and bolted. She rushed into her car, intending to drive it to a temple and destroy it properly. But once inside the car, she began hearing noisy static through the radio broadcast. The headpiece she'd placed in the passenger seat had also vanished.
Driving while anxiously searching for it, Mei glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a pair of hands holding the headpiece up in the reflection. She twisted around, but the back seat was empty. Panic flooded her. When she looked at the mirror again, those hands were already lowering the headpiece onto her own head. The moment it touched her, Mei blacked out completely.
When she regained consciousness, she found herself in an unfamiliar place. She removed the headpiece, bewildered by her surroundings. What was this place?
Hearing the faint sound of bells, she followed the noise and eventually arrived at a run-down shantytown. She stepped inside, turned on a flashlight, and saw countless photographs plastered densely across the walls, all of them related to her.
She slowly realized this was the hideout of an obsessive fan, a girl who idolized Mei to an extreme degree, wanting desperately to possess the same face and the same life.
The girl had spent all her savings undergoing cosmetic surgery to become like Mei, dreaming she could change her own fate. But the procedure failed.
Consumed by desperation, she sought out a black-market doctor for another surgery. The filthy conditions and lack of sterilization caused severe bleeding. Even as she died, she stared at a television playing Mei's commercial, gazing at the face she had longed so painfully to become.
When the black-market doctor realized he had caused a death, he panicked and called his assistant. Together, they submerged the girl's body in a lake to avoid being discovered.
At this point, Mei finally remembered the fan. The girl had indeed visited her many times, and Mei had even taken a friendly photo with her. She never imagined this girl would become the one haunting her. Mei immediately reported everything to the police. They recovered the fan's body from the lake, and at first it seemed that the matter had finally come to an end.
But while Mei was applying makeup one day, she heard the faint tinkling of the fan's bell. The ghost appeared beside her, gently caressing her face, whispering that she wanted to become Mei.
Mei continued applying makeup, but she spoke one chilling line: "I am Mei."
At that moment, she was already fully possessed, becoming the vessel that replaced the dead girl. The movie ended there.
Strictly speaking, the plot of The Victim was extremely outrageous. What the film showed was essentially just a fictional storyline within a movie: Mei plays the role of Ting, who is possessed by a vengeful spirit. Even after the problem is "resolved," Ting remains possessed.
In parallel, the real-world actress Mei becomes possessed afterward as well but not by a random entity, rather by her obsessive fan. In this sense, Mei is an incredibly unlucky woman.
None of this was her fault. She had no involvement in the fan's tragedy and had even been kind to her, taking a picture together. She was, by all accounts, a responsible celebrity. Yet, after dying, the fan did not haunt the doctor who actually killed her, but instead targeted Mei — even though Mei had helped her.
From this perspective, the film strayed far from the standard formula of Thai horror. The usual structure of Thai horror revolves around cause-and-effect and karmic retribution, which is the first impression most people have.
But this film completely abandoned that structure. It wasn't a story of karmic justice at all. Mei and the other cast members had done nothing wrong; they simply suffered misfortune. Of course, the production crew bore some responsibility: if they had realized how dangerous the headpiece was early on and taken it to a temple to purify it, perhaps nothing would have happened.
But reality allowed no such "if." Thus, several crew members died, including the director, the producer, and the props master — and Mei ultimately could not escape becoming the ghost's replacement.
In that sense, it was a film that deviated from normal expectations. Still, the film introduced some interesting elements. For example, the dream-within-a-dream concept was considered quite innovative at the time. And the early setup suggesting the possible ghost was the Thai beauty contestant, only to reveal later that she wasn't the culprit at all, offered a kind of twist.
Unfortunately, the twist felt too abrupt, as if a novel spent dozens of chapters building one protagonist, only to have a completely new character appear at the end and steal the spotlight. Naturally, viewers would be confused. If the film had given even a little setup earlier in the story, audiences might have accepted it. Instead, the film's handling resembled Naruto.
In Naruto, when Kaguya Ōtsutsuki suddenly appeared as the final enemy, it triggered massive complaints. The reason was simple: she had virtually no groundwork or foreshadowing. Then Black Zetsu suddenly betrayed everyone, forcing the plot in a new direction.
Some may say that surprising the readers is what makes a twist effective, but readers were watching from an omniscient perspective drawn by the author. If Kishimoto had placed even a small amount of foreshadowing earlier on, the audience would not have been so resistant.
Thus, once Kaguya appeared, criticism exploded. But in retrospect, Kishimoto may simply have been trying to introduce a new major force to set up Boruto.
After all, Naruto had already written nearly everything that needed to be written. Naruto and Sasuke's power levels had escalated far beyond anything the story could reasonably counter unless an external threat appeared. In that sense, the direction was understandable — even if it wasn't well-received. Ironically, Boruto turned out to be such a disappointment that it damaged many fans' affection for Naruto itself.
At this moment, Edward felt that The Victim suffered from a very similar issue. Its biggest problem was that the true ghost was barely foreshadowed at all, only revealed at the last moment as the vengeful fan. No wonder the film's ratings were low.
Still, although the ratings were low, the film was not weak in terms of scares. Even if Edward didn't personally find it impressive, his standards were based on modern horror sensibilities, after all. Horror films of that earlier era had already reached a point where innovation was difficult. Nearly every horror film was trapped in the same cycle: how do you scare people?
From early jump scares to psychological horror, then to found-footage styles, and then back again to jump scares, the reason was simple. Jump scares provided the strongest, most instinctive fright. They triggered primal survival responses embedded in human biology. That was not easy to replace. As a result, filmmakers kept relying on jump scares. But this also meant horror films consistently received lower ratings.
Sighing, Edward decided to write a "Horror-Movie Survival Report" and publish it, hoping to spark discussion about these issues.
…
["In recent years, horror films, once one of the most vital genres in the film market, have fallen into an unprecedented creative crisis. Audience evaluations continue to decline. Many new films are labeled as 'flops' even before release. Behind this phenomenon lies a multi-layered stagnation in horror-movie creation: repetitive scare tactics, weak storytelling, and a lack of cultural depth. The result is aesthetic fatigue, poor box office, and collapsing word-of-mouth.
The essence of horror cinema lies in generating fear. But modern horror has sunk into a swamp of formulaic frights: sudden jump-scare faces, shrill sound blasts, dim-lit shadows emerging from corners. These once-effective methods no longer work in an age where information spreads instantly — today's viewers have long become immune to such clichés.
Worse still, many horror films refuse to innovate at all, simply copying classic techniques from earlier masterpieces — for example, the iconic 'Sadako crawling out of the television' from The Ring, or Kayako's contorted descent down the stairs in The Grudge. Countless later films have mimicked these scenes, but almost none have surpassed them. If audiences can perfectly predict the next scare, fear evaporates, replaced only by boredom and irritation.
A horror film cannot rely solely on scares. True excellence lies in constructing dread through solid narrative foundations — as Shutter Island does with themes of confinement and psychological collapse, or as my company's Conjuring series does with its grounding in real cases. But many modern films fall into the trap of 'scaring for the sake of scaring,' resulting in fragmented storytelling and glaring logical holes.
In some regions, horror films avoid supernatural elements due to censorship, forcing them to explain ghosts as 'illusions' or 'mental illness,' which strips the story of its foundations. Other films rely on the notoriously overused trope of characters making absurd decisions merely to advance the plot. Without coherent narrative tension, audiences feel confused rather than frightened.
The highest level of horror uses fear to explore human nature, society, or philosophy — such as the Alien series' reflections on human evolution and cosmic loneliness, or Dollhouse's dissection of family bonds and fanatic religiosity. But many contemporary horror films remain shallow, lacking cultural density.
Some regions' horror cinema still falls into the rut of attributing fear simply to 'ghostly disturbances,' offering neither compelling world-building nor meaningful commentary. In contrast, films from Kalos Region, such as Agony, explore crises of faith through clashes between tradition and modern science, while Alola Region works like Alolan Midnight Seaweed (???) evoke terror through deep-sea phobias — all showing how cultural richness elevates horror cinema.
Beyond creative issues, horror films now face challenges from both the market and their audiences. With the rise of streaming platforms, viewers have more choices than ever. Horror is no longer the obligatory 'late-night watch.' Meanwhile, short-video platforms have conditioned viewers toward fast, intense stimulation, making traditional horror pacing feel slow.
Even more critically, the horror audience is shrinking. Young viewers prefer relaxing comedies or sci-fi spectacles, while veteran horror fans have turned to niche cult films or older classics. If horror films cannot attract new audiences nor retain old ones, declining performance becomes inevitable.
Yet the crisis is not unsolvable. Creators must break out of their comfort zones and upgrade scare techniques, narrative cohesion, and cultural resonance. Films like Hereditary and Midsommar show how horror can merge with human psychology and social commentary. Or filmmakers can adopt the realistic, grounded styles of Kalos Region horror to bring fear closer to daily life."]
…
Edward exhaled thoughtfully.
"…Why do I feel like I played a part in causing all of this?" he murmured.
And indeed, it was true. In a sense, he had pushed the development of horror films to this point. As he kept raising the bar, the genre naturally struggled to surpass itself. How to break through this ceiling? That was now the challenge.
The only good news was that the people of this world still had a relatively low threshold for fear. Edward's films could continue to function effectively — at least for now. Eventually, of course, things would reach the very state he had just described. And when that happened… it would become a real headache.
(End of Chapter)