Netflix’s gleeful horror-comedy Dead Talents Society wears a lot of its influences out in the open. Writer-director John Hsu talked with Polygon earlier this month about how YouTube streamers, ’90s Taiwanese pop music, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers, and real Asian urban legends like “the little girl in red” helped inspire his manic movie about the capitalist grind of the afterlife. In Dead Talents Society, ghosts endlessly chase viral fame as haunting superstars, while one new ghost, The Rookie (Gingle Wang), deals with the humiliation of being an incompetent scarer.
During that interview, Hsu also mentioned that he’s an avid gamer, which has heavily influenced his career: He learned to script and edit while making World of Warcraft machinima videos and posting them on the AFK PL@YERS YouTube channel, and he went on to direct the 2019 film adaptation of the 2018 horror game Detention.
“Since I’m such a huge
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