Alejandro Hidalgo, the Venezuelan director behind The Exorcism of God, is moving into Southeast Asian horror with The Hungry One, a supernatural thriller set during Malaysia’s Hungry Ghost Festival. Kuala Lumpur-based Abnormal Studios is handling worldwide sales and introduced the project at Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market. Singapore’s Clover Films has already pre-bought rights for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The film follows Emily, an American woman who travels with her Chinese Malaysian husband Simon and their son Louis to his family mansion for the summer. Their stay aligns with the 15-day festival, when the underworld is believed to open. Emily becomes the target of a presence trying to cross over and must uncover the house’s past. It is a familiar haunted-house frame with a culturally distinct ritual calendar.
A packaging story, not just a genre story
The announcement is a market package as much as a film. Abnormal Studios is selling at Busan, a key pre-sales window for Asian genre titles, and Clover Films has already committed for three territories. The project is in pre-production, with producers working to lock the final portion of financing.
That structure matters: a regional pre-buy gives buyers an early signal that the film has commercial interest before the full budget is closed. For media planners and content buyers, it is also a reminder that horror travel is often built on a strong local ritual, not just a monster.
The track record behind the pitch
- Director: Hidalgo’s first feature, The House at the End of Time, remains Venezuela’s biggest horror hit at the box office. His second, The Exorcism of God, sold to more than 150 countries and ended 2022 as the highest-grossing Latin American film worldwide.
- Producer: Harrison Allen won the live action short Oscar this year for the Netflix title The Singers; his feature Anima screened at SXSW.
- Writer: Justin Parker worked on HBO’s Emmy-nominated Station Eleven and the docuseries Religion of Sports.
- Sales infrastructure: Abnormal Studios, part of Westec Media, has handled more than 400 titles since 2020 and releases about 100 films a year across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Mongolia and Nepal.
Filmmaker and entrepreneur Justin Leong is driving the project through Los Angeles-based Lightning Pictures. He said growing up in Asia, the Hungry Ghost Festival always felt “movie gold” visually, with fire, offerings and rituals that give audiences a world they may not have seen before.
What to watch
The key number is not the budget, which remains open, but the speed of early territory sales. Clover’s three-market commitment is a small but meaningful test. If more regional buyers follow before financing closes, The Hungry One becomes another data point for culturally specific Asian horror traveling through global pre-sales.
For the industry audience, the question is whether a Venezuelan horror director’s international sales record combines with a Malaysian-Chinese festival story to create a new financing template. The genre has already shown that local myth can cross borders when the packaging is disciplined; this project will test whether the Hungry Ghost Festival can carry a similar load.
Source: Variety
