Writer and director Andrew Undi Lee first conceptualised Night Bloomers – a five-part horror anthology series focused on Korean–Australian diaspora experiences, coming to SBS on October 28 – while recovering from a near-fatal experience. In 2014, he died but was revived and brought back in a coma, before spending several months in recovery. During this time, he experienced vivid nightmares, including a recurring dream where he was a ghost trapped in a kind of purgatory, attempting to find resolution so he could pass through to the next world. Informed by this cataclysmic experience, Night Bloomers explores the lessons that the living can glean from death and darkness.

The show opens with a message: “The ancient Koreans believed that in order to cleanse the evil in our world we must untie the knots in our heart that link us from life and death.” The so-called knots of the heart explored here are wide-ranging: from the pain of trying in vain to connect with a distant, ancestral culture to miscommunications within immigrant families borne of a lack of intergenerational understanding, and anxieties about being unable to bring disparate aspects of one’s identity together to form a coherent whole. Each episode runs to roughly 20 minutes and exists as both a standalone short film and one piece of a loosely interweaving narrative about Sydney’s Korean community, which is the largest in Australia.

The first vignette follows Sophie (Ra Chapman), a young woman on a quest to reconnect with her cultural heritage. She cooks japchae for her well-meaning but condescending white friends, who critique the meal and chide her for not knowing that there’s a Korean grocer around the corner when she mentions that she bought the ingredients at Coles. At the grocer, she gets chatting to Min Jee (Deborah An), a beautiful, friendly sales assistant armed with an arsenal of spicy snacks and K-drama recommendations, who embodies the “authentic” Korean identity that eludes Sophie. She soon develops a parasocial attachment, illuminating the internal struggle that can take hold when a second-generation immigrant fails to perform the ethnic identity necessary to grant them access to a diaspora community, while simultaneously experiencing isolation within their dominantly Anglo environment.

In the third chapter, Danny (Jeno Kim) tries a tough-love approach with his hoarder mum (Clara Kim), Marie Kondo-ing her home against her will and threatening to cut off communication with her grandkids if she doesn’t clean up her act, in the literal sense. When she sneaks back to the tip in the dead of the night to retrieve her dusty junk, she unwittingly brings home an unexpected house guest. They settle into a mutually beneficial dynamic, wherein she delights in his company and he provides a temporary storage solution for her mountains of stuff. The story highlights the sometimes insurmountable void that can develop between immigrant parents, who commonly experience isolation as they struggle to adapt to their new country, and their kids, who may fail to grasp the underlying causes of their parents’ sometimes baffling behaviour.

Night Bloomers begins with these somewhat familiar immigrant tropes – strict parents, generational divides, perpetual outsider status – and presents them in creative and unexpected ways. Lee draws from Korean folklore and shamanism, reimagining characters such as a trickster goblin who bestows both luck and misfortune to prompt community reflection, and “egg ghost”, a malicious, faceless entity whose presence threatens its observer with an eternity trapped in the void. Such ghoulish creatures and hidden, supernatural forces are inserted into an otherwise recognisable, contemporary Western Sydney setting, highlighting the ways in which immigrant communities use folk tales to navigate and make sense of new environments and times of uncertainty.

Korean–Australians and viewers from other immigrant communities will likely relate to the characters and their struggles, while horror fans will appreciate the show’s twists and turns, and its grounding in broadly unknown folklore. Created with support from SBS/NITV and Screen Australia’s Digital Originals initiative, which fosters the work of filmmakers from underrepresented backgrounds, Night Bloomers is an example of the fresh, singular art that’s possible when adequate resources are provided so that cultural narratives can be told from within their communities.

Worth a look

Think ghosts aren’t real? Then explain The Enfield Poltergeist (Apple TV+, October 27), a four-part retelling of the 1977–1979 haunting of kid sisters Janet and Margaret Hodgson in a London council flat. Incredibly, actors lip sync the actual recordings of the hauntings in a replica of the original house, giving the show the effect of a spooky theatre production. For fans of: 1970s interiors, The Conjuring 2 and demonology.

Imagine coming out as queer, only to then have to come out as someone who communes with ghosts. That’s the situation for the cast of Living for the Dead (Disney+), a Kristen Stewart–produced reality TV show that sees a merry band of queer ghost hunters crisscross America to bring healing to disgruntled spectres and the humans they torment. For fans of: creepy kitsch, sentimentality and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Adelaide-born twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut feature film, Talk to Me (Amazon Prime), follows a group of teenage friends on a descent into terror by way of a handshake gone wrong. Shot and produced in Adelaide, the film was picked up for international distribution by indie horror kings A24 (of Midsommar, The Witch and Hereditary fame) and went on to become their second highest grossing film ever. For fans of: so-called “elevated horror”, murky metaphors and special effects that are a little too good.

If you’re not even close to scared yet, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Shudder) is an oldie but a goodie that’s still surprisingly terrifying nearly 50 years on. Not for the faint-hearted, but worth a Halloween watch to see the genesis of classic horror tropes, including a masked killer with a fondness for power tools. For fans of: bell bottoms, nostalgic Americana and stories allegedly “based on a true story”.

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