AFTERIMAGES: Five Horror Films From Hell. And Singapore.

Writer-director Tony Kern is on a filmmaking roll here in Singapore, having already chalked up two feature films in the horror genre - A Month of Hungry Ghosts and Haunted Changi - and getting his next - you guessed it - horror feature primed for production with an August release scheduled. As far as the Chinese Almanac goes for South East Asia that is smack right in the middle of the Hungry Ghosts Festival, and coincidentally also the lucrative National Day Week for locally produced films.

Titled Afterimages, it consists of five horror short films in an anthology, wrapped around a tale about a group of artists who burn effigies of cameras, and receive films in return. Which is going to be those five horror shorts. Filmmakers, are you listening?

I suppose having done extensive research for his debut feature film - the documentary A Month of Hungry Ghosts - has brought a certain Asian flavour to the horror tales Kern is inspired to produce, with the synopses for included shorts Ghost Pool Leg, Rekindling and Xiao Bao Bao showing roots in Asian mythology and superstition about ghosts under water, photographs and suicides, and the lady's finger vegetable. The shorts Skin Deep - which at first glace may seem like the M Night Shyamalan produced Devil - and Burnt Offerings round up the, erm, offerings in this feature.

Afterimages is currently under production, and a teaser has been released for Ghost Pool Leg, featuring an extensive clip of a Beautiful Asian Woman Swimming Underwater In Pool at Night. Heh.