Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Creature Feature Short Take: Krasue

But I'm a good head! Yeah, right.

Because what's better than decapitated love? Say hello to Yuthlert Sippapak's GHOST OF VALENTINE (KRASUE VALENTINE) featuring the classic story of boy meet girl ghost, boy falls in love with girl ghost, girl ghost wants to eat the living, etc.

The Krasue has a similarity with a ghost from Malaysia called the Penanggalan or the Puntianak. This type of ghost has been depicted before in films such as Hong Kong's 'Witch with the Flying Head' (1977) and Indonesia's 'Mystics In Bali' (1981)."

Interestingly, according to some accounts in China, there was a group known as the Falling-Head People or Luotou Min in the South, whose heads could fly. Once, a General Zhu Huan acquired a concubine whose head would fly away every night when she was asleep. That caused quite a scandal, so they promptly determined ways to dispatch her. And all she wanted to do was terrorize the living...

Other readers of OTOSOTE will remember a Hellboy issue that dealt with the Penanggalan:

Actually, this is the German version, so Die actually means 'The' and not 'Die'

So the next time you go running around, just remember:

Floating heads attached to their internal organs and nothing else are a poor choice for company. You can always do much better...

Oh and in the meantime, you can hop over to http://www.tripmastermonkey.com where they've got an article of mine up about other creatures of the night. Happy halloween!

1 comment:

bjanepr said...

ah, very neat bryan. the penaggalan is similar to the philippine mananaggal, which also does that creepy detach the body at its torso thing, and i think which also gets confused w/ the aswang for reasons of the creepy detach the body at its torso thing.

and yay for hellboy having a penanggalan issue.