We’ve been pretty much underwhelmed by this new wave of Asian horror films. Still, the box copy for Laa-thaa-phii—retitled as Ghost Game—certainly caught our round eyes:

Ghost Game tells the story of 11 contestants who sign up for a scary reality show which force them to confront the supernatural and their innermost fears. They’re brought to an ancient war museum in Cambodia, which was used as a Khmer Rouge prison twenty years before. Thousands of innocent people were tortured and killed there during the Cambodian war in the 1970s. Now the museum is abandoned, and no one dares to step inside. The single winner of the show will be rewarded for 5 million Baht ($US 130,000), the highest amount ever offered on a Thai game show. Inspired by the big reward, they accept to risk their lives in the museum…

We were pretty much sold once we saw that the film was about the Commie horrors of the Khmer Rouge. Any future Hollywood remake will take place in a slightly fictionalized Abu Ghraib prison, where Americans will be terrorized by the righteous spirits of angry (and misunderstood) Muslim terrorists. Ghost Game comes from Thailand, where the populace hasn’t lost their collective memory. The film actually caused controversy due to a setting that closely resembles the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, built on grounds where the Khmer Rouge tortured dissidents who’d later be spread over a killing field.

The film's producers had even requested permission to film at the Genocide Museum. That’s not as exploitive as it sounds. The spirits in Ghost Game are originally provoked by a series of desecrations meant to stir up the departed victims of genocide. The reality-show contestants begin to meet their grisly ends, and the film has sympathy for the right ghosts.

The message of the film ends up being about the true nature of evil—and the importance of understanding its lasting impact. We don’t have anything against exploitation that perpetuates a loathsome truth. Too many people are seeking to cover up Commie atrocities. There are plenty of old Leftists who’d join the Ghost Game characters in destroying the inconvenient skeletons left behind by the Khmer Rouge.

Ghost Game is entertaining, too. It’s certainly more eventful than your average Asian ghost tale. There are parts that get incoherent, but that might be attributed to some heavy editing done to appease Cambodian outrage over the project. Whatever the producers took out can’t prevent this from being an inspiring film based on horrific fact.

Make it your own: We got our copy at our favorite brick-and-mortar source for quality bootlegs. Ghost Game was enough of a hit that it’s now easy to pick up a similar copy on the internet. Just don’t get conned into buying a crappy shot-on-video American horror film with the same name. Hopefully, you’ll get a subtitled Ghost Game where—like ours—the opening text that attempts to appease angry Cambodians isn’t translated.

 

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