The Coffin

A horror film supported by the Hubert Bals Fund? That demands an explanation. When Ekachai Uekrongtham presented his intriguing project in 2005 in Hong Kong and was given a HBF Award, the plan had a different character. However, he found little other support for his story about living people who crawled into coffins and he almost gave up. It was only when the producer Pantham Thongsang suggested working out the story as a genre film, that things started to move, and finally the film even became a box-office hit in Asia.
The core of the story, based on a real ritual, has been kept. Because people think that death can be misled, there is a custom of lying in a coffin while alive for a night or during a ritual.
The protagonist is a young man (played by Ananda Everingham, who is popular in Thailand) who takes part in the ritual in the hope that it can heal his girlfriend. However, he receives a far from pleasant surprise from the world of the dead. A sick woman from Hong Kong (a role played by Karen Mok) comes to Thailand especially to take part in the ritual and also becomes involved in all kinds of events with a supernatural nature.
The film has all the elements of a commercial horror film, but in its story and its details much of the original project has been retained, as a result of which it can hardly be called a run-of-the-mill genre film. (GjZ)