I’m Chi Tran, a Vietnamese-born NY-based writer-director of "Inhuma", a horror short where “the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living”. When my grandmother, the first Vietnamese female surgeon, passed away after a long health episode in 2017, I had my glimpse into the world of funerals and grief, a universal pain. What was supposed to be a celebration of my grandmother’s memory turned into a farcical procession of mercilessly upholding cultural tradition and worrying about funeral logistics in the face of unbearable pain. Think Hereditary meets Four Weddings and A Funeral. In recent years, Asian cinema has entered its golden age. Asian horror has always understood what Western horror often misses, that the scariest hauntings aren't supernatural but familial. Ghosts in Asian cinema are ancestors, obligations, debts unpaid. Inhuma and our owl-faced demon lies at this peculiar intersection of the Asian-American experience and the cultural terror of Asian horror: it capitalizes on the rising genre wave coming from the East to express a universal message we’re all terrified to admit, that loving someone means eventually letting them go. We've earned the place to scare you in our mother tongue, and I hope "Inhuma" will do so. Read less