10 Horror Movies to Watch this Lunar New Year
From vampiric kung fu comedies to South Korean psychological thrillers
by Alex Secilmis 17 February 2026
© Cineclick Asia
While often colloquially referred to as “Chinese New Year”, the Lunar New Year is celebrated by many countries across Asia—countries with criminally under-seen and underrated horror movie catalogues.
To get your festivities started, we’ve assembled a chilling list of everything from Hong Kong vampire kung fu comedies to Thai found footage folk horror.
Three… Extremes (Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, 2004)
© Lionsgate
Three genre film specialists, Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook, and Takashi Miike, each contribute a brutal entry to this horror anthology. If that’s not enough to sell you, Park’s segment, “The Cut”, marks his second collaboration with his No Other Choice star Lee Byung-hun.
A Chinese Ghost Story (Hong Kong, 1987)
© Film Workshop
A tax collector spends the night in a haunted temple and falls for a young woman. The catch? She’s a ghost, and he has to descend into the pits of hell to set her free. If The Evil Dead were infused with a charming romance, zombie skeletons, and the wuxia genre, you would have A Chinese Ghost Story.
A Tale of Two Sisters (South Korea, 2003)
© Cineclick Asia
A mental institution patient returns home with her sister, only to face a haunted house and an evil stepmother. Kim Jee-woon’s acclaimed psychological horror film inspired an English-language remake, The Uninvited.
Mr. Vampire (Hong Kong, 1985)
© Golden Harvest
After a reburial-gone-wrong unleashes a jiangshi (a “hopping vampire”), a Taoist priest and his two students race to defeat the undead creature in this riotous kung fu horror comedy. The film was a blockbuster hit, spawned a franchise, and launched the career of prolific director Ricky Lau.
Song at Midnight (China, 1937)
© Xinhua Film Company
Widely considered the first Chinese horror film, this musical adapts The Phantom of the Opera while also exploring the country’s political unrest head-on. The primary subplot centres on Chinese leftist revolutionaries.
The Medium (Thailand, 2021)
© GDH 559
A documentary crew travels to the Isan region of Thailand to interview a medium claiming to be possessed by the spirit of Ba Yan, a local deity. When her niece starts exhibiting strange behaviour, she believes that Ba Yan has chosen her next host—she is sorely mistaken.
The Ancestral Home (Vietnam, 2025)
© Infinity Entertainment
In this hit horror comedy, a Gen Z content creator returns to her hometown for viral material, but she’s met instead by the ghost of her dead brother and a horde of greedy relatives.
Incantation (Taiwan, 2022)
© Netflix
Distributed internationally on Netflix, this fourth-wall-breaking found footage folk horror film follows a newly pregnant woman who breaks a religious taboo. Six years later, when the resulting curse hunts her down, she must protect her daughter from malevolent spirits.
Impetigore (Indonesia, 2019)
© Shudder
The good news: a woman inherits a house in her ancestral village. The bad? She doesn’t know that her community has been trying to find and kill her to remove a curse.
Roh (Malaysia, 2019)
© Netflix
Living in a forest, a widowed mother and her two children meet a strange young girl. But when they take her in, she delivers a terrifying prophecy: they will all be dead by the next full moon. Later released on Netflix in 2021, this critically-acclaimed indie chiller is a slow-burn steeped in Malaysian folk horror.
Bonus: Nocebo (Irish-Filipino, 2022)
© Shudder
A fashion designer (Eva Green) plagued with a mysterious illness seeks help through the traditional folk healing of a Filipino carer (Chai Fonacier). An international co-production, Lorcan Finnegan’s social horror finds parallels in the Filipino and Irish experiences of colonialism, while local filmmaker Ara Chawdhury served as a consultant writer.