Laughing With the Ghosts
As a genre, the horror comedy has a tendency to over-deliver on one element and skimp on the other. A character getting their throat slit can be horrifying; a Deadpoolian “well, that just happened” isn’t all that funny. On the other hand, some filmmakers make what could be classified as a black comedy but insist on its horror bona fides because of gratuitous blood. Taiwanese director John Hsu’s DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY, which had its Chicago premiere last night at the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema, manages to land right in the middle of the horror comedy spectrum by marrying a high bits-per-minute ratio with uncompromising gore.
DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY follows a recently-undead (and unnamed) protagonist played by Gingle Wang who learns that she will fade away in the next 30 days unless she joins a haunting agency. Hsu and co-writer Vincent Tsai have built a deeply bureaucratic world of ghosts, where spirits must get signed and acquire haunting licenses to stay in the land of the living. Makoto (Chen Bolin), a washed-up ghost agent, takes pity on the newbie, bringing her under his wing and into a forced mentorship of sorts with Catherine (Sandrine Pinna), a faded specter-star. Catherine’s act, haunting the hotel room she committed suicide in, is a showcase for the film’s scarier elements, full of blood-curdling screams and backbends.
The Rookie (as she is referred to in the credits) stumbles into notoriety when she impales herself on a hotel’s neon sign in front of a young couple, going viral in the process. The ersatz team, comprised of the central trio and Kouji (Soso Tseng) on tech support and Camilla (Bai Bai), the Rookie’s fashionista friend, jumps into action to ride the wave of the Rookie’s newfound fame. This draws the ire of Jessica (Eleven Yao), Catherine’s jilted former protege, whose early adoption of the Internet for haunting has brought her great acclaim. DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY veers into showbiz satire here, sending up both influencers and the entertainment industry’s need for novelty as the Rookie is thrown into the spotlight.
The most satisfying element of DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY is that the jokes, of which there are many, always work. Echoing the rat-a-tat rhythm of 30 ROCK and the tender dirtbaggery of IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, the film’s humor has a velocity that is rarely seen on screen these days. There’s also more than a little influence from WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS and BEETLEJUICE here, as the extensive lore and etiquette of the afterlife dictates how the characters move. Some may feel that comparing the film’s comedy to television is damning with faint praise, but the dire theatrical comedy landscape more than warrants these comparisons.
DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY, brimming with stupid humor and tons of blood, keeps its many plates spinning while also weaving an earnest story of found family and the power of self-assurance. A less savvily-made version of this same script may have felt overloaded, but Hsu and Tsai keep it all light (and, again, deeply funny). The cast’s performances are nimble and winning, and the film’s effects and production design credibly place these hauntings in our world. DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY is something rare; an efficient horror comedy that takes its supernatural elements seriously.
