Earlier this year, Kevin Ko’s terrifying supernatural found footage movie Incantation exploded in its native Taiwan, winning big at the Taipei Film Festival and becoming the highest grossest Taiwanese horror film of all time. It wasn’t long before Netflix snatched up streaming rights to the movie, releasing the curse of Mother Buddha onto international audiences this July, and scaring us all senseless. Incantation has been heralded by many as the scariest Taiwanese film of all time due to (among many other frightening factors) the realistic and unsettling VFX - and early next year, thanks to Unearthed Films, you can take home Ko’s first foray into the world of practical gore and guts.
Coming January 2023, Unearthed will release their edition of Kevin Ko’s 2009 debut Invitation Only, a film which has been fondly referred to as Taiwan’s first slasher.
Invitation Only stars Ray Chang (Tomb Mystery), Julianne Chu (The Ghost Tales) and Maria Ozawa (Geisha of Death) and according to Unearthed, follows:
Wade Chen, driver of President Yang of the Weida Group, gets some major dirt on his boss when President Wang starts having sex in the back of the car. Chen, who unwittingly has the upper hand, gets invited to the high-society party of his dreams and soon he is pounding his boss' sidepiece under the guise of being President Yang's "cousin". Nothing he dreamed the hedonistic evening would be happens as planned, and the end result is an epically gory bloodbath of the most inventive proportions. INVITATION ONLY is a social commentary on class wars and the acknowledgement of what a man can do when he is pushed into survival mode by his captors.
While the ‘torture porn’ resurgence of the early ‘00s is well-documented in Western horror (Hostel, Saw, etc), most easily accessible Taiwanese horrors from the same era tend to have a more supernatural focus. With Invitation Only, Unearthed will expose a whole new audience to a sub-category of Taiwanese horror that has previously been somewhat difficult to come by.
Since 2002, Unearthed Films have specialized in bringing home the most extreme and subversive horror, from Srđan Spasojević’s infamously disturbing A Serbian Film to Category III classics like Herman Yau’s The Untold Story. If Unearthed’s catalogue is anything to go by, Invitation Only will be a worthy addition to the shelf of any gorehound (and this one probably won’t curse you.)
