Thai horror has punched above its weight internationally for two decades — Shutter and The Medium saw to that. Now director Banjong Pisanthanakun is back with Inherit, a radical big-screen reinvention of one of the country's best-loved TV dramas, and he's betting it can help pull Thai audiences off their sofas and back into cinemas.
The source material is Tayat Arsoon, a Thai drama first broadcast in 1992 and remade twice for television, in 2001 and 2016. Its premise is ripe for horror: a curse handed down through bloodlines, anchored by Grandma Woranat, an elderly matriarch whose eternal youth is sustained by a parasitic centipede spirit. Rather than retread familiar TV ground, Banjong flips the perspective entirely, making the villain the centre of the story. Woranat, he says, isn't merely a cursed old woman but a seductive, dangerous embodiment of evil.
Bringing that vision to life meant going tactile. The production stitched together five separate architectural locations to create one sprawling, sinister estate, complete with subterranean chambers. In the lead role is Davika "Mai" Hoorne, one of Thailand's most recognisable stars, whose improvised moments — including an unscripted, deeply unsettling smile from the teaser — reportedly gave the crew genuine chills. Custom costume design tracks her demonic escalation, and the ensemble includes Baipor Thitiya Jirapornsilp and veteran Sinjai Plengpanich.
There's a commercial story here too. Thai box-office revenue has struggled since the pandemic, and Banjong points to a regional price gap: tickets in Thailand average 220 baht or more, roughly double the cost in Vietnam or Indonesia, where theatrical attendance has rebounded strongly. His answer is spectacle you can't get at home — which may explain why Inherit has already drawn attention on the festival circuit in Toronto, Busan, Sitges, London and Jakarta, where over 2,000 seats sold out in a day. One early viewer called it "delightfully insane".
For travellers, the timing is convenient. The film opens in Thai cinemas nationwide on 19 November 2026, and if it lands the way the festivals suggest, expect Thai horror's locations, aesthetics and mood to become a bigger part of the country's pop-culture pull. Bangkok already offers film-fan detours — from the GDH studio's growing profile to horror-tinged neighbourhoods and temples that double as shooting locations. Watching Inherit before a Thailand trip is as good a cultural primer as any: the folklore of curses, spirits and ancestral houses is very much alive in local imagination, and this film is set to be the conversation starter of the season.
Whether it single-handedly revives Thai cinema is an open question, but Banjong's argument is simple — horror belongs in the dark, with a crowd, on the biggest screen you can find.
Story via Bangkok Post Life.
