has additional, more relevant cultural cachet for its home-grown audience. The film takes its inspiration from an infamous 1998 incident that was caught on video, involving what appears to be a mysterious little girl dressed in red following a group of hikers on a mountain trail in Taichung, Taiwan.
The incident is recreated here as a shot-on-phone video clip, with the little girl identified as a mosien, a mountain demon said to resemble a small child or monkey that preys upon the fear and guilt of its victims. Building upon Taiwanese folklore and this modern urban legend,
The Tag-Along’s chilling and surprisingly emotional narrative takes shape.
Wei (River Huang) is a real estate agent who lives with his grandmother (Liu Yin-shang), but their life is disturbed when she’s taken by a
mosien and spirited away to a nearby mountain forest.
While investigating her disappearance alongside the apartment complex’s security guard (Chang Po-chou), Wei realises not only the horrific circumstances of his grandmother’s abduction, but also that he’s been neglecting her in favour of his work and girlfriend Yi-chun (Tiffany Hsu).
However, as the
mosien preys upon guilt, this realisation puts Wei next in line to be taken – which, after his grandmother turns up dazed and alone on a highway, is what comes to pass.
The film then shifts to its true protagonist, Yi-chun, for the remainder of its running time, as she similarly investigates the mosien while discovering a widening gap between herself and Wei. As the mosien makes its presence more felt in her daily life, Yi-chun’s emotions over her treatment of Wei also earmark her for abduction – that is, if she doesn’t act first to somehow rescue Wei and repair the rift between them.
The Tag-Along deals effectively with very universal and resonant themes of family, love and regret, which helps to put the horror elements into a relatable context. At the same time the story reveals darker secrets that make the characters nearly accomplices to the horrors that they suffer. Perhaps inadvertently, the mosien can act as a form of karma to balance a person’s sins.
Besides theme and character, The Tag-Along works on a technical level. First-time director Vic Cheng creates appreciable atmosphere using desaturated colours and low lighting, and he manages the tension well. Cheng alternates effectively between shock scares and nagging, unsettling horror – such as how the mosien can sometimes be seen scuttling in the background or lurking in plain sight.
The iconography is familiar – the mosien crawls creepily on all fours while wearing a red dress and peering through long black hair – but it’s no less effective here than in the many Asian horror films that have come before. Since the advent of Ring in the late nineties, the Asian horror genre has had plenty of ups and downs, and while it’s questionable if The Tag-Along will one day rate as a classic, it can genuinely be called haunting.