[Weekly Update] September 27th, 2020

September is almost over, and so is 2020. How was your new year resolution? I can't tell you mind, because I don't even remember what my resolution is lol. I guess it was to finish my first feature script.

But then I abandoned it with about 10 pages left to finish, and started a second script. Oh 2020, you are full of surprises.

ABOUT THE CHANNEL

• Hope you enjoy our video on Thai horror. It'll be the last of our three part horror series, and we hope they give you some ideas on what to watch this coming October.
• One thing that really surprises me is how many Thai viewers we have. Even though Thai viewers comprised of about 2% of views. In terms of absolute number, the amount of people is still pretty scary.
• I only just realize that our channel now has more subscribers than there are people living in the city of Waterloo in Canada. Sincere thanks to all of your supports. Without you, this channel cannot grow to this size. I don't know how you can tolerate my accent for this long, but I'm truly honoured to have all of you here.
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• On another note, Tomorrow, YouTube will officially terminate community caption tools.
• YouTube suggests using Amara.org for the captioning. I still haven't look into how exactly it operates, but as far as I know, it is a free website that everyone can caption any videos.
• Unless YouTube directly link to their interface, it is unlikely anyone would use Amara. We will see if it's worth it to bring attention to the external tool, and build a captioning community together. But nothing is decided yet.
• That means from this point forward, most, if not all the videos we upload will be limited to captions we can provide, being English and Chinese. It is unfortunate, but there really isn't much we can do.
• We'd like to thank everyone who helped creating all the captions over the years. Your contributions has helped thousands of people on our channel alone. For channels like ours, with such diverse international audience, every caption is invaluable.

ABOUT MEDIA

• What other country makes excellent horror films? Actually, what types of film is most popular in your country?
• In our last video about Thai horror, many also brought up Malaysian Horror, which I also heard a lot about, but never actually saw any. The one I remember is 23:59, mostly for its title, and what a title it is. Something about it is already uncomfortable, like you are dreading the last minute for... something to happen.
• In fact, the entirety of South East Asia is still producing high quality horror that can be described as the descendants of the J-horror genre. This is perfect for me, since I love that genre of films. While Korean horror is fine and all, the mood just isn't the same.
• Hong Kong used to make a lot of interesting low budget horror flicks. I covered The Eye on this channel, but there are also horror films based on true crime stories, like The Untold Story. Hong Kong horror tends to blend in a little bit of social commentaries into their horror films, I noticed.
• Mainland China had a horror boom in the last decade, but pretty much all of them sucks. I suspect the boom came not because of demand, but because making them are so easy. The highest profile one is The House That Never Dies, Apparently it was a big box office success?
• However, Chinese broadcast code forbids supernatural explanations in these films, so frequently, you see movies explain their mysteries away with dreams and hallucinations. One movie, I forgot which, explains everything by saying the house is build on top a natural gas deposit, and prolong exposure caused all the hallucinations. Seriously.
• One thing I've always wondered is where is all the Taiwanese horror films. People of Taiwan, like Hong Kong, have a lot of superstitions in their culture. It would make a lot of great horror elements, but I never heard anything about them. If you are from Taiwan, let me know if there's a film I should look out for!
• And finally, I have to highlight some horror films from my country: Canada. Have you heard of canuxploitations?
• It's a genre of mostly horror films made in the 70s and 80s, back when Canada has some excellent tax credit policies for filmmaking. A flood of low budget B-movies are made in Canada to save money. Some fame directors like David Cronenberg emerged from this genre.
• Some of the canuxploitations are so famous, you probably don't even know they were made this way. The one on top of my head is Black Christmas, one of the most famous porto-slasher flicks. This, along with Halloween, would later start the slasher horror cycle of the 80s.

Anyway, this is all I have for today! For our next video, I'll be talking about an anime film no one in the west ever talked about.

Also stay tuned for our Patreon bonus video in a few days!