A couple is haunted by a missing friend on a strange mountain and in their lives in the chilling Taiwanese Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, directed by Tsai Chai Ying, and presented through the Fantasia International Film Festival.
It’s a terrible feeling to have lost someone. Quite literally, a friend or loved one going missing leaves a knowledge gap that is impossible to fill. The lack of closure looms, affecting one’s life and actions. Five years ago, Chen Jai-Ming, Song Yu-Xin, and Zhang An Wei were on a hiking trip on a mountain. Only Chen Jai-Ming and Song Yu-Xin came back. In the time since then, the loss of their friend has hung over their lives, forcing the pair to be unable to truly move on.
They aren’t the only ones. The film opens with an effective, atmospheric setting sequence as a lost hiker looks for help on a misty mountainside. Finding a hut and possible safety, it’s for naught as a figure with a yellow slicker calls him away into the nothing. It is a Taiwanese legend that if lost on a mountain, something in a yellow coat will lead you off the path to civilization, instead guiding you into whatever unknown it came from. (Apropos to the opening, it’s followed by a lovely title animation that sets the melancholy mood)
The fact that they aren’t the only ones is a terrible feeling, a looming loss of many looms over our protagonists. It’s scary to know it’s not just them. Visiting the mountain often, they are often found with so many others in a large dormitory. Other hikers may be just up for the weekend, but there is a feeling of shared trauma. In physically returning to the location, it’s a literal never leaving, much like their vanished friend.
Playing Chen Jai-Ming and Song Yu-xin, respectively, Jasper Liu and Angela Yuan give heartfelt performances; you can see the machinations of wanting to move on, but they can’t. The pain in their eyes is too great to let go. Driven, but sad.
The specter of death and loss hangs over, akin to a curse. And they might be cursed, literally. Of course, I won’t show the film’s hand, but An Wei’s disappearance includes a hefty helping of uncomfortable folk horror. The additional layer embiggens the story, the curse, the loss. It’s bigger than Chen Jai-ming and Song Yu-xin. Recall the back half of the title, “The Yellow Taboo”. Folk horror breaks and oversteps taboos (even if the taboo of the title is specifically the folktale itself), ignoring and discarding warnings and the lines of the sacred and/or profane, setting up for continued terror. Arcane rituals unset, making the audience and characters uncomfortable; it’s unknowable to them and thus unable to take a terrible wrongness.
The metaphor of being unable to move on becomes true in the result. Haunted Mountain is chock full of visions of death as Chen Jai-Ming is forced to watch his love die again and again in a varity of bloody methods. Director Tsai Chai-ying handles these very well with controlled skill. While dreams, they are well-designed tricks to the audience and Chen Jai-Ming. The unknowing of what is real, what is a dream, and what is whatever it is haunting them, affecting their lives, is a terrific and terrifying blurred line. The addition of rot via maggots, dead creatures, and the ghostly person in the yellow slicker is expertly handled with a knowing hand. 
With the mountains in the title, it has to be a character in and of itself, and it is. It looks alive and ready to eat; haunting yellow slicker and the dead rot mixed within the lush, but washed out greens. On a technical level, the cinematography creates an otherworldly fog-cloaked landscape. The rolling hills, glens, paths, gullies, and creeks that make up the mountains form a truly unnerving terrain. The trees and moss-covered rocks are as sinister as any in The Evil Dead.
Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo is an unvervving, effective ghost/curse tale. It’s one steeped in loss and emptiness due to said loss. The mountains are fantastic, ethereal settings, used well by Tsai Chai-ying to bring terror.
Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo is presented through the Fantasia International Film Festival, running July 16th through August 3rd, 2025.