Asian American horror stories are way more nuanced than just the white-narrated, Yellow Peril Fu Manchu. Upon Halloween, we want to highlight some Asian American horror creatives and their stories to get your spook on!
“Horror stories and movies provide an escape from the true menaces in our reality.”
Teresa Lo
1. Burlee Vang
Burlee is a Hmong American poet and film director. In 2016, Burlee Vang and Abel Vang wrote and produced the supernatural horror movie “Bedeviled”, starring Asian American actor Brandon Soo Hoo (@brandonsoohoo). The movie is about the terror that happens when five teenagers download an app that uses their darkest fears to torment them.
Read more about his poem “To Live in a Zombie Apocalypse”.
2. Teresa Lo (@teresalowriter)
Born and raised in Kansas, Lo, Chinese American, spent most of her childhood reading. One Halloween, Lo read In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz, and since then fell in love with the way dark literature made her escape into another world and inspired Lo to explore the meaning of good and evil. [Source]
Her book Hell’s Game is a young adult horror story that explores the cruelty that teenagers can inflict on each other and the meaning of true evil.
Visit her website for more information.
3. Rena Mason
Rena Mason is a Thai-Chinese American author who writes both short stories and original novels about new and scary worlds in “Hellhole”, a re-telling of America’s most dangerous murderers in history in “East End Girls” and a woman whose post-apocalyptic nightmares start to come true in “The Evolutionist”.
Check out her website for more information.
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AZI Media is a multimedia company dedicated to fostering conversations through storytelling for Asian Americans by Asian Americans. This post (and more) can also be found on our Instagram and Facebook.
Written by Tiffany Huang. Illustration by Susu Schwaber.
