I just went to watch Spirit of the Victim at GSC 1 Utama.

It is supposely ‘The Biggest Thai Horror Film Of The Year‘, as written on its poster. Although I have to admit that the ‘horror’ scenes were very plentiful and non-stop, but they were, as with many other Thai horror movies, awfully predictable.

I’m not saying that Thai horror movies are not good or anything like that, but the directors and script writers could really improve a lot by changing and differentiating their movies from what I call the ‘Standard Thai horror movie plot’!

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• The standard theme: ghostly revenge.
  • Someone did something bad, probably raped, killed, or cruelly left a girl who liked him, and the girl became the ghost or something like that.

  It won’t be other themes like demonic invasion, religion-related, or some other stuff.

• The standard ghost: unhealthy human form.
  • If you noticed, most of the ‘ghosts’ in Thai horror movies are in human form, but with very pale and spotted/ scarred/ diseased/ burnt skin, blood oozing out of eye/ ear/ mouth, severe eye shadows, abnormally gigantic bulging eyes or possibly with red/no eyeballs.
  • Basically like a human with the worst health ever, to induce the basic human psychological instict to fear and resist such ‘people’ from nearing us and infecting us.
  • And I really don’t know why, most of the ghosts are female ghosts.

It won’t be other forms like invisible spirits, ghost in normal human form or possessed animals/objects.

I’ve got an example image of a standard ghost here, it’s the ghost from the Thai horror movie ‘Shutter‘. I can’t simply display it because some people might not wanna see it. It’s kinda scary… Haha…

If you really wanna see it, you can click on the image below.

Woops! Hope that didn’t scare you, now let’s continue… =)

• The standard scary scenes: all the ghost movie clichés!
  • Dark rooms, lights turning-off by themselves, doors slamming shut by themselves, seeing ghost in mirror, ghostly shadows forming on the wall etc.
  • The main character will always be alone with the ghost. He/she will always venture into dark, scary places alone, very brave!
  • Mostly involve the ghost figure ‘crawling‘ towards you. Aikes!

Basically, it won’t be any other scene that is not that obvious a ghost was about to come out.

• The standard ask-for-help: the bomoh (shaman or witch doctor).
  • Well, I guess that’s the culture over there. (No comment)

• The standard shock: EXTREMELY loud and sudden sound effects.
  • It always involves dead-silent background and when the main character is doing something and looked into the mirror and *BANG*!! Sudden extreme and over-exaggerated loud sound effect as the ghost appears on the mirror.
  • I did an experiment in the cinema: I knew a ghost scene was coming up so I looked away to see if the sound effect alone could shock me. And when the *BANG* came, it was almost as shocking as me watching it!

Bottom line, try listening to your iPod while watching, I think it will be as scary as watching Scooby-doo.

AND FINALLY,

• The standard ending: the super-uber-damn-predictable-clichéd ’shocking’ ending.
  • If you ever thought that the ghost is dead/crisis is over before you see the movie credits rolling, you’re wrong. The ghost, or another ghost, will surely come back to the main character in the end, and finally ‘be one’ with him forever and ever or something like that.

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There you have it! The standard Thai horror movie plot!

OK, I’m not saying that all Thai horror movies are like that, there were a few that I’ve seen that were pretty good, really! But seriously, you’ll always find one or two, if not all, of the standard stuff in it.

I would recommend this movie to those of you who like sudden shocks and the feel of adrenaline rush. Try not to get the front seats like we did though! (we got the 2nd row) =( And try not to drink too much water before going in, you won’t have time/mood to go to the toilet.

This Place Is NOT for people who fear heights!

I’m going to move out from my apartment in 1 month’s time and I think I should write something about living on the (I think) highest residential unit in this area before I move out.

I currently stay on the 12th floor of Cyberia Condominiums in Cyberjaya. Staying so far up from the ground has its own pros and cons.

The bad thing being that I have to wait a long time for the lift, have the fear of falling down (aww!), and as my friend’s sister said, will surely die if there was a fire or earthquake or terrorist attack or whatever bad event… =(

The management is kind enough to have installed 2 lifts in my condo, but, why must it be that… Only 1 of them goes to the 12th floor?!

So if one day you woke up late for class, and you discovered that the lift that goes up to the 12th floor has broken down! (it has happened a few times now) What do you do?

You’ll have to walk down to the 11th floor, and if you’re unlucky, wait for the lift to come up from the ground floor, stopping floor-by-floor all the way up (cuz people staying on all floors are using the same lift), get in, and wait for it to go down, again floor-by-floor (cuz it’s 8am rush hour, everyone going out). Which will take like around 7 minutes just to get to the ground floor!

The good thing about staying here, however, is that I get to enjoy nice scenery since I can see the furthest from here!

I can see aeroplanes (still very low!) in the sky dozens of times a day as we all know KLIA is very near to Cyberjaya. I can even identify which flight company each aeroplane is from!

The scene here is so nice, in fact, that birds often stop by outside my window to enjoy and chat!

Funnily enough, sometimes I get scary thoughts of, say, since my room is so high up, and as you can see there are no metal frames on my window, so what happens if I failed all my exams one day and couldn’t think rationally and wanted (just for awhile) to die? There would be nothing to stop me… *swt*

Even though I’m not afraid of heights, it sometimes really scares me to walk on the balcony on the 12th floor. It’s really scary and you will start thinking “What if the floor breaks?” or “What if there’s a banana skin on the floor and I stepped on it?”

This concern intensified when the news (or rumour) of a guy falling off the 16th floor of an apartment near MMU’s Malacca campus spreaded among the MMU community last year.

Some “eyewitness’s” accounts on how that guy’s dead body was smashed and left on the ground with the body bent into an awkward L-shape (if you didn’t see the photos, imagine! ), really made living on the 12th floor a much less comfortable thing!

But let’s not talk about disgusting things… I believe that as long as I don’t look down, but instead look forward, everything is beautiful.

Sigh, although there are some things that I hate about staying here, I think I’ll miss this place when I move out in July. Good or bad, I’ve stayed here for almost 1 year!