Vibe
In Làng Địa Ngục, the wedding of Phong—the village chief’s daughter—should be a communal celebration. Instead, a series of grotesque deaths begins to expose an older curse tied to Rượu Sọ Người, a forbidden form of dark magic said to exchange five lives for supernatural power. Phong, Sang, Khảm, and the villagers are drawn into a search for whoever is carrying out the killings, while the legend of Thập Nương, the woman in red associated with the ancient ritual, shadows every clue. As bodies accumulate and suspicion spreads, the investigation becomes inseparable from the village’s inherited crimes and the possibility that revenge has been planned across generations. The film stands on its own, but viewers familiar with Tết ở làng Địa ngục will recognize characters, symbols, and myths whose origins are being filled in.
Watch for
- Folklore turned into horror mechanics: Water puppets, folk verse, wedding imagery, spirit-luring fireflies, the boatwoman, and ritual objects are not simply production-design flourishes. The film repeatedly turns familiar cultural forms into clues, threats, and visual manifestations of communal fear.
- The Làng Địa Ngục timeline: The story takes place roughly half a century before the main events of Tết ở làng Địa ngục. That distance lets the film explain earlier versions of myths and family relationships without requiring viewers to have watched the series first.
- Sảo Há and constructed village space: Production returned to the Hà Giang village used for the wider franchise but created separate feature-film environments. Fog, steep terrain, enclosed wooden architecture, and limited routes in or out make geography part of the suspense.
- Mystery beneath the supernatural surface: The movie presents curses and occult techniques as real possibilities, but it still structures much of its momentum around suspects, motives, hidden alliances, and the question of who is staging the deaths. The pleasure comes from folk horror operating like a murder puzzle.
Production notes
ProductionQ developed Kẻ ăn hồn alongside the broader Làng Địa Ngục screen universe created by director Trần Hữu Tấn, producer Hoàng Quân, and novelist Thảo Trang. ProductionQ’s own materials describe the feature as an adaptation of Thảo Trang’s novel Kẻ ăn hồn and as a story set before the catastrophe explored in Tết ở làng Địa ngục. The company began shooting the feature after work on the series, returning to Sảo Há in Hà Giang while designing separate sets for the theatrical film. During preproduction, the team consulted historical adviser Phan Thanh Nam in an effort to ground costumes, settings, and folk imagery in Vietnamese visual culture. Release history needs careful preservation. Early campaign materials announced December 8, 2023, and some stale exhibitor/ProductionQ pages still show that date. The film was postponed on December 7; later coverage reported that it had not yet obtained its exhibition permit. ProductionQ then announced preview screenings from the evening of December 14 and a nationwide opening on December 15. The theatrical launch was strong: Box Office Vietnam figures cited by Znews put the opening weekend at roughly VND25 billion and the running total at VND31 billion by December 18, while later reporting placed the gross above VND66 billion. Skyline Media subsequently handled international sales, including a limited U.S. theatrical release beginning January 19, 2024.
Trivia
- ProductionQ describes Kẻ ăn hồn as part of the same Làng Địa Ngục universe as Tết ở làng Địa ngục, with the feature taking place before the series’ principal events.
- The film’s central occult device, Rượu Sọ Người, is built around a ritual requiring five deaths, turning a piece of invented folklore into the structure of the murder mystery.
- The production returned to Sảo Há in Hà Giang, the remote mountain location associated with the Làng Địa Ngục screen world, while constructing separate sets for the feature.
- The planned December 8, 2023 opening was postponed at the last moment; the film instead held early screenings on December 14 and opened nationwide December 15.
- Skyline Media later took the film to international markets, with The Soul Reaper opening in U.S. cinemas on January 19, 2024.
Legacy
Kẻ ăn hồn is important less as a perfectly resolved horror narrative than as evidence that Vietnamese commercial horror can build a reusable fictional universe around local folklore. The film arrived immediately after Tết ở làng Địa ngục had become a visible streaming success, then used theatrical scale to expand that world backward in time. Its strong domestic opening and later international sales demonstrated that the appeal of the concept extended beyond a one-off television event. The film also belongs to a broader 2020s shift in Vietnamese horror toward specifically local myth, ritual, landscape, and visual tradition. Rather than importing a generic haunted-house vocabulary, Kẻ ăn hồn foregrounds water puppetry, rhymed folk verse, village superstition, ritual objects, historical costume, and the cultural memory of isolated mountain communities. That does not make every story choice successful, and contemporary reviews noted problems with pacing, dialogue, and the final act. But the ambition itself is significant. It offers a modern folk-horror spectacle whose images can be recognized as Vietnamese before the plot is explained, while also showing how a local production company attempted to turn a literary-horror universe into interconnected streaming and theatrical storytelling.