Vampire Meets Skeleton God: Beitou Summer Cooling Fest Fantastic Screening Event

It is a summer tradition in Japan that people tell chilling stories during summer evenings to make people sweat and cool off the summer heat. This evening, in collaboration with the Beitou Hot Spring Museum and Beitou Summer Cooling Festival, Honggah Museum will hold an extraordinary screening event and show several black comedies that will cool you down faster than air-conditioning, presenting strange events and even stranger phenomena from different corners of the world. Daredevils will walk through the dark corridors of the museum, past the museum’s permanent (dusty) collections, and encounter the skeleton god, vampires and more…

The screening event will not only include ghostly legends from Asia, but also feature strange phenomena and stories from the Caribbean islands and the Southern hemisphere. It attempts to present the lesser-known alternative images and imaginations of ghosts and monsters from island regions around the globe. SALGÁ, an urban legend from the Caribbeans, depicts a succession of strange events taking place on the island of Curacao; “The Skeleton God” tells the story of a plane crash in the hillside regions of Miaoli and the local Hakka beliefs of the Skeleton God. “What We Do in the Shadows”, a hilarious pseudo-documentary and cult classic from New Zealand, follows the mysterious underground society living in Wellington, and invites everyone to experience the comical everyday lives of the living dead.

On the same night, artist Ni Xiang will also pass by the museum and talk about his recent job as a funeral ritualist and the many rituals that he had recently performed. What will happen on this fantastic night? Dare to find out…

It seemed like it would be just another average day, but that quickly changed. Nobody knows who did it, but Jacqueline, a local journalist, is committed to figuring it out. Together with her cameraman, they set out to find who’s behind the scream that was so loud it sounded like it circled the earth at least three times. Jacqueline interviews several witnesses, and they each tell a different story. At the end of the day, gossip is just like salt; it’s in everything!

This film is based on an air crash that happened above the Huoyan Mountain in Miaoli, Taiwan and a deity in the local Hakka Wanshan Temple, who specializes in re-arranging bones of the deceased. The film combines death and the reconstruction of the body, two opposite extremes, and is an attempt to reconstruct local events and folklore through images.

Organizer: Chew’s Culture Foundation, Honggah Museum