Horror and the Asian American identity
Whether it's at the forefront of a film, or melting into the background, Asian Americanness in horror is having a moment
From left, Callina Liang, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, Lucy Liu, and Julia Fox in Presence.
Peter Andrews
Words by Andy Crump
Back in July, news dropped that actress Greta Lee is on the hook for her first directing gig: an adaptation of author Monika Kim’s 2024 novel The Eyes Are The Best Part, the macabre story of a young Korean American woman who crashes out so hard following her father’s extramarital dalliances and abrupt exit from her life that she makes “serial killer cannibal” her new personality.
Kim’s prose is evocative and delightfully gross. Those who read the book for themselves may never hear the word “squelch” again without blanching, and they’ll probably go off spaghetti for a while. How Lee portrays the revolting elements of Kim’s work on screen is a creative matter—“nauseating” is, after all, a product of aesthetic choices. Less open to interpretation is the core theme of The Eyes Are The Best Part, in which protagonist Ji-won’s Asian Americanness is addressed through text rather than subtext. To Kim’s readers as well as to characters in the narrative, her background is inescapable. Lee can’t adapt her way out of confronting that theme herself.
Happily, 2025’s horror cinema provides a map for how an artist like Lee might make a movie like The Eyes Are The Best Part, depending on which fork in the road she opts to follow: the one where identity is directly referenced, or the one where it melts into the background, unimpeachably there but left to the audience to consider on their own.
Shal Ngo takes the former course in his sophomore film, Control Freak, which dropped on Hulu in March. Here, the Asian American experience is key to how the plot functions. Motivational speaker Val Nguyen (Kelly Marie Tran) is gearing up to take her brand of pseudo-confessional pop psychology on a world tour, and has a stumbling block in her way. She needs her birth certificate to get into Asian territories, like China, which means she has to contact her estranged father, Sang (Toan Le), once a soldier, now a monk, and always a pathetic drug addict. There’s another wrinkle here, Val’s excoriation disorder, a condition she’s lived with since childhood, consequent to her mother’s death. The closer Val gets to her tour’s launch, the more pronounced the urge to scratch away at her scalp.
Meeting Sang again exacerbates the compulsion. Reconnecting with one’s abusive sire will have that effect. In Val’s case, her reunion with Sang quite literally opens old wounds when he regales her with tales of the Sanshi, a malevolent entity similar to a parasite, which feeds on human hosts and pushes them to self-destruction in doing so. Control Freak contextualizes the Sanshi in cultural and historical terms. The creature is sourced from Taoist tradition, a syncretic component in Vietnamese society instead of a distinct standalone belief structure. Eventually, we also find out that Sang is responsible for calling the Sanshi into our world while serving in the American War in Vietnam. It is, put bluntly, a part of Val’s heritage, and one she’d sooner shed by any means necessary, including sawing off her own hand in a sequence that does Sam Raimi of Evil Dead fame proud.
Control Freak centralizes Asian American struggles with assimilation and ancestry. The Sanshi’s modus operandi dovetails with how Val both leans into her roots as part of her career—her upbringing is the driving motif in her speeches—and also attempts to deflect them, which allows the film to mount anxiety with panic with desperation as she goes to perilous lengths to rid herself of the entity’s influence. It’s her family’s legacy, and Ngo builds the film’s stakes on reconciling that legacy with Val’s personal agency.
In a striking contrast, Steven Soderbergh takes the latter course on the same road in his umpteenth film as director, Presence, which opened in January one year after its world premiere at Sundance in 2024. His protagonist is Asian American like Val, but the movie opts to put its focus elsewhere.
This may be a tactical decision. Soderbergh is white. Not that white artists are incapable of telling stories about non-white characters and non-white cultural experiences, mind you—but there is a special level of obligation white artists must strive to meet when they tell those stories. Soderbergh is a master of his medium, efficient with visual language to a degree many of his peers aren’t; he’s also shrewd enough not to bite off more than he can chew in each of his projects. Deemphasizing Asian American identity in Presence adds a universalism to the plot and allows him to treat his primary characters, the Payne family, as a catch-all for broad representation of the typical American household.
But three of those characters are played by actors from the Asian diaspora: Callina Lang, Canada born of Chinese descent; Eddie Maday, Korean American; and none other than Lucy Liu, who’s arguably among the most influential Chinese American actors of her generation. (Any generation, really.) The fourth is played by Chris Sullivan, the “other” in a film that goes against expectations just by virtue of its casting. Even Maday assumed when he tried out for his role that the production would end up hiring a white quartet to play the Paynes. It’s nice to be surprised, every once in a while.
Maday plays Tyler, teenage hotshot and favored child of his mother, Rebekah (Liu), who neglects and occasionally outright dismisses her younger daughter, Chloe (Liang); the obvious preferentialism sits poorly with her husband, Chris (Sullivan), who tries his best to give as much of himself to both of his kids as possible. The Paynes start Presence out by moving into a new home that is host to a lost but harmless spirit, the audience’s point-of-view character. Soderbergh shoots the entire film from the ghost’s perspective—a novel visual flourish in line with his calling card as an auteur. If the ghost is his vessel for deploying narrative, though, it’s also his means for tamping down Asian American identity. We see Tyler, Chloe, and Rebekah in their private moments, Chloe most of all as she crushes on and ends up being intimate with Tyler’s friend Ryan (West Mulholland).
Nothing is said, at any point, about Chloe’s background. She is not Asian American. She is simply Chloe, quiet, bookish, in mourning over her friend’s death prior to the events of the film. One may read Soderbergh’s colorblind casting as pseudo-assimilation or a form of erasure, if they choose. But his casting may also be read as acknowledgment that the Paynes are defined by qualities other than Asian identity, and that the movies can express the Asian experience in countless ways without invoking identity. Neither Ngo’s nor Soderbergh’s approach is better than the other’s, of course, but as Lee starts working on The Eyes Are The Best Part, both Control Freak and Presence offer valuable lessons in the movies’ capacity for exploring that motif herself.
Published on October 20, 2025
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.