By The Hanging Balloons (Credits: Our Insane Blogs)
Toei and Thailand’s 13 Studio are co-producing a feature-length, Thai-language film adaptation of Junji Itō’s “The Hanging Balloons”, with Thai horror filmmaker Taweewat Wantha set to direct, the companies announced Tuesday.
A New Home for the Balloons
The project takes Itō’s chilling short story — in which giant balloons bearing the faces of their doomed victims drift across the sky — and relocates its nightmare to Thailand. According to the announcement, the film will offer a new interpretation of the story while staying faithful to the original work’s eerie worldview.
Wantha is no stranger to Thai horror. His directing credits include Death Whisperer 2 and Tha Rae: The Exorcist, and he has the upcoming film Dawn of Soengsang on the way. Pairing a director with that pedigree with one of horror manga’s most iconic short stories feels like a genuinely exciting match.
Itō’s original story first appeared in Asahi Sonorama’s Monthly Halloween magazine in 1994. English-speaking readers may know it best as “Hanging Blimp,” the title used when Viz Media published it in the Shiver: Junji Ito Selected Stories collection in 2017.
Itō’s Stories Keep Crossing Borders
This is not the first screen adaptation of the story. A Japanese live-action film version arrived back in 2000, and the tale was also featured in Netflix’s Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, which premiered worldwide in January 2023.
Notably, this Thai film is part of a growing wave of pan-Asian Itō adaptations. Earlier, Toei, Thai film studio M Studio, and South Korean production company Showbox announced they are jointly producing a live-action film of another Itō short story, “The Long Hair in the Attic.” That project is being directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, known for The Red Line, Hunger, and Inhuman Kiss, and it is expected to begin filming next year.
With two separate Thai productions of Itō’s short stories now in the works, it seems the master of horror manga is finding a second home in Southeast Asian cinema. A release date for The Hanging Balloons film has not been announced yet.
Wantha’s involvement is a particularly strong signal. Thai horror has been on a remarkable run internationally in recent years, and Death Whisperer 2 was one of the biggest local hits of its year. Bringing that sensibility to one of horror manga’s most visually striking concepts — faces in the sky, hunting the living — could make for genuinely unsettling cinema.
Itō’s work has never been more in demand. Between the Netflix anthology, multiple live-action projects, and his ever-growing global readership, the horror master’s stories are being adapted at a pace few manga authors can match. A Thai-language take on one of his most famous shorts is exactly the kind of cross-cultural experiment that could introduce his nightmares to a whole new audience.
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Source: Anime News Network — read the full story there.
