Editorials

Experience Four Times the Terror in the Thai Anthology ‘4bia’

August 23rd, 2024 | By Eric Vega

For decades, horror anthologies have been a godsend for up-and-coming directors looking to showcase their talents. Movies like All Hallow’s Eve and V/H/S have broken into the mainstream, but there’s a whole world of lesser-known horror anthologies to explore. Take the 2008 film 4bia, a showcase of haunted tales from four of Thailand’s greatest horror filmmakers. While it’s relatively unknown outside of Southeast Asia, 4bia offers spooky stories steeped in Thai culture and folklore.

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At an average runtime of thirty minutes, each story in 4bia offers bite-sized glimpses into the Thai horror scene. While they’re technically all ghost stories, they couldn’t be more different from one another. The subject matters vary wildly, from royal adultery to high school bullying. Attentive viewers will pick up clues that reveal a web of continuity between the four stories, although these act more as Easter eggs than essential plot points. With each film, the directors give it their all to deliver a tense and terrifying experience – to varying degrees of success.

The first film in the series, directed by Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, is simply titled Happiness. It follows Pin, a young woman stuck in her apartment with a broken leg. Feeling lonely since her boyfriend left for a camping trip, she takes up a text correspondence with a mysterious stranger. 

Predictably, Pin realizes this guy might be a bit of a creeper once she sends him a selfie. He makes an eerie comment about being in the photo right next to her, though she doesn’t see anything. She tries to cut off contact, but her phone is flooded with ominous texts. The man tells Pin that he’s coming for her and, in a panic, she locks down her apartment.

As the lights go out, a terrifying apparition appears to Pin and she is violently ejected from her window – plummeting to her death. As she bleeds out, her body is littered with fliers memorializing a deceased prince. In a flashback, we see the prince, freshly dumped by his girlfriend, commit suicide by diving in front of a taxi – causing the very accident that broke Pin’s leg. Now in death, Pin and the Prince can keep their loneliness at bay, forever. While the ending reveal is somewhat surprising, this short suffers from a glacially slow pace – but things only get better from here.

Happiness is followed by Tit for Tat, directed by Paween Purijitpanya. Purijitpanya clearly understood the assignment and delivers a film that uses rock music, shaky cuts, and exaggerated lighting to imbue the story with a frantic and deadly energy.

We meet Ngid, a nerdy student at the mercy of a group of bullies. He’s abducted and brutally beaten before being tossed out of a pickup truck. Presumed dead, the bullies are shocked to find Ngid back at school the next day carrying a strange book. One of the group opens the book; she is terrified, trips, and impales herself on a rusty pipe.

The bullies lose it, and in the chaos Ngid is forced to look at the book himself. He panics, knowing something the others don’t – looking at the book will curse you. Ngid loses his balance and falls out of the window, skewering himself on a pipe.

One by one, the bullies look at the book – and die horribly. Like in Final Destination, the Rube Goldberg-esque accidents are both terrifying and hilarious. In a flashback, we see Ngid practicing black magic. Ngid imbues a stolen photo of a dead woman (Pin) with a curse and hides it in the book. Pink, the final survivor, gouges her eyes out to ensure she will be spared – heavy metal ending to a frenetic horror film that’s extra, stylized, and damn fun.

Banjong Pisanthanakun’s In the Middle takes the third slot in 4bia and introduces a vastly different tone, shifting to horror comedy. It follows four friends on a river rafting trip through Chiang Mai. Sharing a tent, the boys manage to scare themselves with spooky stories. One of the boys, Aey, proclaims that if he were to die, he would haunt whichever of them sleeps between the others.

The next day, the boys suffer an accident on the river. Aey disappears, and the survivors are forced to call off their search. To avoid Aey’s “middle” curse, they end up sleeping in a triangular position. Still, Aey’s ghost appears to them in the night, and they flee into the jungle.

Hoping to banish him, they decide to convince Aey he’s dead by showing him his body – but it backfires. Instead, they discover that all four of them had perished on the river, and only Aey understood the truth. The friends reconnect in this new afterlife and affirm their eternal bond.

In the Middle is the most lighthearted of the shorts, with standout performances from the bumbling friends. The humor is clever, the reveal is satisfying, and you can’t help but grow to love these goofballs.

4bia concludes with Last Fright by director Parkpoom Wongpoom, who delivers a wonderfully tacky 2000’s melodrama that pits a common flight attendant against a gothic and scorned princess.

We meet Pim, who is poorly hiding a secret romance from her loved ones. Her lover’s identity becomes fairly obvious when we are introduced to Princess Sophia, a foreign royal who recently discovered her husband’s affair with a mystery woman. It’s revealed that Pim had previously served the royals on an international flight to Thailand, and her service has been specifically requested by Princess Sophia.

Pim finds out that she will be serving the princess solo on her private flight, as her colleague’s brother was found drowned in Chiang Mai (Ter from the previous story). What follows is a deliciously catty flight as Sophia and Pim attempt to humiliate each other. Pim goes too far when she decides to serve the princess shellfish – to which she is deathly allergic. Shortly after landing, Pim hears that the princess has passed away.

In an ironic twist of fate, Pim is tasked with escorting the princess’s body on the flight back home. Wrapped like a mummy, the princess sits in first class like a living passenger. Pim is haunted by her guilt, hearing constant anaphylactic coughing, and is terrified when the body disappears. She demands that the pilot initiate an emergency landing and, when he refuses, attempts to break through a window with a fire axe. She is restrained by the pilot and seated across from the body.

As her wrappings slip off, Princess Sophia is revealed as a grotesque ghoul who vomits and curses Pim. After the plane finally lands, the crew is shocked to discover Pim’s body at the foot of the princess, an ending that revels in melodrama.

In all, 4bia is a slightly uneven showcase of four wildly different filmmakers, but one that celebrates the spirit of low-budget horror. It’s not afraid to take chances, and it’s obvious that the artists involved worked hard to put their stamp on each story. They might not all be winners, but as a collection they give us an entry point to the weird and wonderful world of Thai horror.