Kampung Kreepy

Photo: Netflix.com I watch a lot of bad horror movies. Heck, my family thinks I watch nothing but bad horror movies. Recently, however, I saw something that made me think, “Damn, that was a good one. Good enough to crack my top 10.” I’m talking about Netflix’s Blood Red Sky , a German vampire movie that takes place on a plane in mid-flight. The premise: a German woman and her young son embark on a flight to the United States. The doctors there think they have a cure for her condition. Her flight is hijacked by a group of brutal terrorists. To protect her son, she has no choice but to reveal her secret. The movie is slick. The protagonist is relatable and very sympathetic. You care right up to the end. The pace is fast, the action sequences are exciting. The vampires themselves are scary and feral. The claustrophobic setting makes them even more terrifying. As you can probably tell, I like my vampires to be frightening. None of that Twilight nonsense (although I have to confess tha...

In The Girl with Ghost Eyes , author M.H. Boroson has created a fantastical world filled with beasts and beings from Chinese myth and legend. What’s more amazing is that the author made me view my culture with new eyes. The book is set at the end of the 19 th century in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The protagonist Xian Li-lin is a young Chinese immigrant who is a Daoist (or Taoist) ghost hunter and martial arts expert. Her “yin” eyes allow her to see the spirit realm. It’s tough enough that Li-lin has to navigate a strict culture in which women have little power and almost no voice. As a widow, she has no husband to give her status. She is in a country that doesn’t understand her customs. Her problems are compounded when her father, a powerful Daoist exorcist, is seriously injured by an evil sorcerer. She is left alone to face an evil that threatens Chinatown with widespread death and destruction. The book is beautifully written, with evocative language that transports the reader to a...

Folklore is a rich source of stories, especially for the horror and urban fantasy genres. I thought I would share a Chinese festival—the Hungry Ghost Month—that starts August 8. During this period—which is the seventh month of the lunar calendar—Chinese people of the Taoist or Buddhist faiths believe the gates of hell open and hungry ghosts wander the earth in search of food and entertainment. People of Chinese descent burn ghost money and ghost goods, such as paper-mache cars, cell phones, houses and jewelry, to ensure their ancestors are well taken care of in their afterlife. When I lived in Singapore, the air would be thick with smoke from the burning of incense and the joss paper products. There would be burnt patches outside people’s homes and in fields and on cement walkways. Offerings of food and fruit would pop up at makeshift altars all over the island. Photos: Pixabay.com The Hungry Ghost Festival also is a time for live (and loud) musical performances so as to placate the...

Please check out my recent interview with Charlie K. Stone : https://charliestone.ca/yin-leong I discuss how I got into writing, where I get my ideas from, and why I decided to become an indie author. 

Photo: Netflix.com Anyone who has caught Kingdom , the Netflix South Korean television horror series, knows it is addictive. It’s also a must for any fan of the zombie subgenre. The series features fast-paced action and on-the-edge-of-your-seat tension. It has palace intrigue, beautiful and lush settings, good fight scenes, and some amazing costumes. It’s set in the Kingdom of Joseon, Korea’s last dynastic kingdom, which lasted from 1392 to 1897. It’s a turbulent period. The Japanese are a constant threat, while villages at the kingdom’s borders have to make peace with the warring tribes. The best part, of course, are the zombies. These aren’t George Romero’s shambling automatons. The Kingdom zombies are quick, nimble, nasty, single-minded, and very, very hungry. The makeup is superb, and their movements when they awake is creepy as hell. If you’ve seen Train to Busan   (2016), you know Koreans know how to do zombies. Photo: Netflix.com For fans (including myself) eagerly awa...

How do you like your horror movies? With lots of slicing and dicing, and blood splatter everywhere? Or do you prefer jump scares and edge-of-the-seat tension? How about a mounting sense of dread? The slow burn toward terror? I’m generally not big on serial killer/slasher flicks. I couldn’t finish watching The Midnight Meat Train (2008), for example. It's way too gory and violent for me. I also haven’t seen any of the Saw or Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. I prefer dread and atmosphere. I want chills that send cold fingers down your back, that will stay with you for days. I like the sort of movie that—when you think you’ve forgotten all about it—suddenly plays back in your mind at 3 in the morning when you’re alone and you just heard a weird sound in the next room. The movie also gets bonus points if it has a strong female protagonist. Below are 10 movies that I particularly liked. They aren’t big box-office hits and they haven’t been shown widely in theaters nationwide. Two...

Have you ever stumbled across a reference to “qi” in a book about feng shui? Ever wondered what the five feng shui elements are? These are some pretty cool notions, let me tell you. They’re perfect for a magic system in an urban fantasy novel. This is the second in a series of posts in which I discuss the ideas and concepts behind my novel The Geomancer’s Apprentice . The book is—you guessed it!—an urban fantasy adventure that is loosely based on Chinese culture and mythology. It revolves around superheroes known as Dragon warriors who can manipulate qi, the life force that underpins the universe. (Click here if you want to read the first post, in which I provide a guide to the terms, objects and monsters that appear in the book.) Junie Soong, my main character, is in her early 20s and stuck in a series of dead-end jobs. Her mother talks Joe Tham, a relative who runs a struggling feng shui business in Washington, D.C.,’s Chinatown, into hiring Junie. She discovers her Dragon power...