phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2025

Dead Talents Society



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 51m
Country: Taiwan
Language: Min Nan, Mandarin
Genre Tags: Comedy, Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: Follows ghosts who want to become the spookiest of urban legends and most successful and famous stars in the underworld through their scare tactics and performances amongst the living.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: A comedy about fame, social media, learning to love who you are, and found family. Also, everyone is a ghost. Much more comedy than horror, but it does know its horror tropes and mines a lot of great humor from them.


Outside Reviews:

Katie Rife
Grade: B+ - A Frightfully Charming Taiwanese Horror-Comedy About the Hell of Personal Branding

This all unfolds over the course of the film, which is peppered with horror sequences that range from surprisingly scary — Catherine's a real pro, let's put it that way — to zany slapstick comedy. Often, they blend the two, as when The Rookie tries out a routine that sees her running terrified guests out of Catherine's hotel, then shocking them by jumping off the roof and splattering in front of them on the sidewalk. The wild tonal shift from The Rookie's gruesome, bloody fall to her childlike joy moments later (she's battered, but fine — she's already dead!) could be jarring, or even distasteful. But Hsu presents it with such good humor that the effect is to cheer her on.


Tasha Robinson
Netflix's Dead Talents Society is the spiritual successor Beetlejuice really needed

It's a chaotic approach, but also a high-energy one, packed with goofy gags and referential imagery, from the mumbling hair-in-face ghostress who evokes movies like The Ring and Ju-On: The Grudge to Jessica's fluffy red dress, taken from the final act of Satoshi Kon's anime classic Perfect Blue. Dead Talents Society is simultaneously a media satire and an underdog story, as Rookie teams up with a group of misfits led by grimly positive talent agent Makoto (Chen Bolin). Together, they try to save Catherine's career, beat the smirking, patronizing Jessica, and keep Rookie from oblivion.