Shutter (Thai Version, Duh)

In my opinion these pictures represent more than macabre urban legends.  They are signs.  Think about it.  Why would the dead return to the living without a message to convey?

  Beginning with Ringu in 1998, throughout the late nineties and early naughts, if you wanted good horror, you had to turn to Asia (Now it's all about the French/Western Europe).  Nobody does creepy horror quite like the Asians.  Of course, most of them are fairly similar: pale girl, long hair, out for revenge.
   Shutter is one of my favorite Asian horror movies.  Only four years later, Hollywood felt the need to release their own, Americanized version, 'cause that's what we do.  Read subtitles?  Fuck that, let's just make our own with that guy from Dawson's Creek.  Seems legit.
   Being the movie purist I tend to be, ninety-nine percent of the time I'm going to prefer the original version of any movie over the remake.  Some things just don't translate well to Hollywood.
   Jane, a college student, and Tun, a professional photographer are leaving a wedding together.  Jane is the designated driver and doesn't seem to have been drinking, but she still ends up running someone over.  Tun orders her to drive away, leaving the obviously injured woman unconscious on the side of the road.  Mysterious things start happening around the couple.  Jane starts having creepy dreams.  His neck is super sore and he's gained about one hundred and twenty pounds in, like, two weeks.  Tun can't seem to take a picture without a mysterious spirit photobombing every single one of them.
   They take these photos to a Weekly World News- style magazine, and the editor tells them that while most spirit photography is faked, other pictures can't be explained.  One way to be sure that a picture actually features a ghost is to take its picture with a Polaroid camera.  The camera develops its own film, meaning that there's no chance of human error or tampering.
   Eventually Jane finds evidence that Tun is actually the one being haunted by the ghost of his ex-girlfriend, Natre.  She's an odd loner who quickly and dramatically fell in love with Tun in college.  Spoiler alert: The villain here is not the restless spirit of Tun's ex-girlfriend, it's Tun.  Apparently he let his gross friends rape her while he just watched.  She kills each of his friends, one by one, until only Tun is left.  Rather than killing him outright, her ghost has been riding around on his shoulders.  Desperately trying to free himself of her ghost, he throws himself out a window.  Absolutely no one mourns him.
   Love this movie.  The twist at the end is genius, and although it surprised me the first time I saw it, the hints sprinkled throughout the story are pretty fun to look for the second, third, and fourth time around.  It's a bit slower than the American version, which is often true.  Us Americans really don't have the attention span for a slow, thoughtful build-up of the creep factor.  Maybe that's why we also felt the need to remake Ringu and Ju-on.  Plenty of jump scares to keep the tension high, though.  If you don't feel like reading the subtitles, I judge you, I guess the American version with Joshua Jackson isn't awful, but you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you don't at least try to watch the Thai version.  Shutter gets four out of five Polaroid pictures.

You can watch the full movie here.