MANILA, Philippines ? There's more to Asian horror than just scary hair, cursed cellphones and suddenly seeing dead people.

That vein of supernatural horror is pretty much tapped out, having been redone to death by Hollywood to the point of diminishing returns. I mean, if I see another long-haired ghost, I?ll scream. And not out of fright, either.

Not to worry?there?s lots more where they came from. And some of them are so weird, off-the-wall, politically incorrect and downright transgressive of Western film taboos that the danger of a sanitized Hollywood remake starring Kiefer Sutherland or Sarah Michelle Gellar (or, God forbid, both) is laughably remote.

Asian horror encompasses more than the aforementioned tales of the supernatural. Indeed, the term embraces diverse genres: everything from peculiarly Asian takes on your classic vampire, werewolf or zombie movies; to gross-out psycho killer cannibal flicks, to tales of black magic and voodoo, Asian style, to genre mash-ups that throw in gore, kung fu action and slapstick comedy in equal measure. Some are examples of the art of filmmaking at its finest, but most are low-budget exploitation trash aimed at the lowest common denominator. I love them equally.

Consider any of the following, picked out at random from my stash of DVDs, and you?ll know what I mean:

?The Untold Story.? Alternatively (and tellingly) titled ?Human Meat Roast Pork Buns,? this Hong Kong shocker stars Anthony Wong (the general in ?Mummy 3?) who flees to Macau after murdering a mahjong partner who catches him cheating. Old habits die hard, and he ends up murdering another mahjong partner and his family, and taking over his restaurant. To dispose of the corpses, he grinds them up and uses the result to make bola-bola siopao! The police come sniffing around, and he bribes them with?what else??boxes and boxes of the takeout siopao. The cops proceed to eat the evidence con mucho gusto, but our anti-hero can?t stop killing. He decapitates the cashier (after raping her with a fistful of chopsticks) and makes more siopao, but garbage bags full of human bones are starting to wash up on the beach, and it?s only a matter of time before he?s caught. The amazing thing is, this was apparently based on a true story! The best of a fertile vein in Hong Kong sleaze that includes films with titles like ?The Human Pork Chop,? ?There?s A Secret In My Soup,? ?Bloody Buns? and the inevitable ?Untold Story 2.?

?Ebola Syndrome.? Stomach-churning as ?Untold Story? was, this one ups the ante considerably. Anthony Wong returns as another sociopathic restaurateur. When his boss catches him in flagrante with his wife, he kills him, then decides to murder the rest of the family. He flees to Africa, where he finds work as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. To ease his raging libido, he makes do with choice cuts from the meat locker, but raw liempo is no substitute for a real woman. On the way to a tribal area to buy cheap beef, he chances upon a tribal woman on the road, and decides to rape her even though she?s obviously sick. Even before he?s done, she vomits on him and promptly expires. People start dying around him, bleeding from every orifice, and he soon discovers he?s carrying the deadly ebola virus. He kills his boss (again!) and is soon on the run again, back to Hong Kong, where he proceeds to go on a rampage, spitting and throwing up on people on the street and screaming ?Ebola! Ebola!? (Or, in Chinese, ?E-bo-lai! E-bo-lai!?). Has to be seen to be believed.

?Devil Fetus.? Worth the price of admission for the title alone. Wealthy socialite buys an antique jar at a charity auction, not knowing that it contains a malevolent spirit. It creeps out at night as a slimy demon and impregnates her with the titular creature. The family soon goes to hell as it possesses them in turn. Not even the family dog is spared.

?Intruder.? No supernatural horrors here, just pure human evil. The lovely Wu Chien-lien (?Eat, Drink, Man, Woman?) slips into Hong Kong from the mainland by murdering a prostitute and stealing her identity. She proceeds to kidnap a taxi driver so her lover can use his identity to join her. But first, she has to hack off his arm so her boyfriend?who?s lost his?can get around immigration?s fingerprint ID check. This one?s an early product from Milkyway Films, better known for stylish crime thrillers.

?The Seeding of a Ghost.? From Shaw Brothers, makers of countless kung fu epics, comes this nasty brew of sex and sorcery, nudity and necrophilia. A taxi driver nearly runs over a sorcerer (what we would call back home a mangkukulam), who puts a curse on him. His life promptly goes to hell. His wife starts cheating on him, is raped by hooligans, and falls to her death while running from them. Distraught, the taxi driver seeks out the sorcerer to help him with his revenge. They dig up his wife?s now-mouldering corpse so the sorcerer can perform the ritual known as ?seeding the ghost?. In the next sequence, the taxi driver impregnates the corpse. A slimy, alien-like devil fetus erupts from a pregnant woman and wreaks havoc at a mahjong party, where the intended victims get their comeuppance. Shaw Brothers also produced the similarly-themed (but somewhat tamer) ?Hex? and ?Black Magic? in the 1970s. A fairly recent Hong Kong production is ?Gong Tau.?

?Mr. Vampire.? The horror comedy is a durable genre, and this long running series of flicks introduces us to a peculiarly Chinese take on the vampire. The gyonsi is a reanimated bloodsucking corpse who, because of rigor mortis, hops to get around. His nemesis is a Taoist magician who uses incantations and spells to put him down, but the vampire is incredibly agile (not surprising, since he?s played by veteran action star Yuen Wah, one of Jackie Chan?s stunt brothers). ?Spooky Encounters 1 and 2,? starring Sammo Hung, are in a similar supernatural kung fu vein.

?Wild Zero.? Fun zombie flick from the land of the rising sun, starring Japan?s garage rock noisemeisters Guitar Wolf (the band). There is a subplot involving a young rock ?n? roll-obsessed teen who falls in love with a Thai she-male (whut?!), but basically the motorcycle-riding Guitar Wolf (the guitar player of the eponymous band) has to save Japan from a zombie invasion. Of course, he uses guitar picks as shuriken throwing stars, and has a samurai sword hidden in his guitar, Zatoichi-style. In the end, rock ?n? roll prevails.

?Kaidan.? Directed by Hideo Nakata, who jump-started the whole J-horror trend with his ?Ringu? series, this atmospheric period Japanese ghost flick is a remake of a classic 1960s film which in turn was based on classic Japanese ghost stories dating back to the 19th century. The now-familiar elements of a curse from beyond the grave and ghostly women in white are all there.

Not to be confused with

?Kwaidan.? Classic 1964 flick reveals some of the roots of modern J-horror. Specially illuminating as to why hair is scary, the film by Masaki Kobayashi consists of four tales from Lafcadio Hearn. In the first, a samurai abandons his wife to marry into a wealthy family, but eventually regrets his decision and decides to return to her. She welcomes him to their derelict home, and they spend a blissful night together. But he awakes to find that he has been embracing her desiccated corpse, but her long black hair continues to writhe with a vengeful life of its own.

?Onibaba.? A mother and daughter survive in war-torn medieval Japan by killing wounded samurai and selling their armor and weapons, dumping the bodies in a hole in the ground. One night, a samurai wearing the titular demon mask (?onibaba? means demon woman) arrives at their hut and demands that the women lead him out of the woods. The mother lures him into the pit where he falls to his death. She rips off his demon mask to reveal a grotesquely disfigured face. She puts on the mask to scare her daughter away from the grubby peasant she?s fallen for, but when she tries to take it off, she finds to her horror that it won?t come off.

?Kuroneko.? A mother and daughter-in-law are raped and murdered by marauding samurai, and return as vengeful cat ghosts inhabiting a decaying mansion. They seduce wandering samurai, lure them into the house, and dispatch them. A samurai is sent by his lord to get to the bottom of the mystery, but he turns out to be the cat ghosts? son (and husband, respectively). Will he do his duty, or will blood be thicker than water?

?Marebito.? By the maker of the ?Grudge? series, this atmospheric Japanese film is a vampire flick with a difference. A documentary cameraman stumbles upon a subterranean world under Tokyo, and finds a naked, speechless girl whom he naturally takes home to his basement. There he discovers that she feeds on blood and will weaken and die without it. At first he sustains her by cutting himself and letting her suck on his own blood, but things soon go awry when pets and neighbors stumble upon his secret.

?The Chaser.? If your only exposure to the Land of the Morning Calm consists of koreanovelas, then you?re in for a nasty shock. Korean films have suffered from a paucity of ideas of late, but if you only see one Korean film this year, make it this one. Our hero is an ex-cop turned pimp (I mean, literally) who manages a stable of call girls. Girls have been disappearing mysteriously. Our hero assumes that they?ve either been pirated by rival pimps, or quit the life, but something far more sinister is afoot. Somewhere in the city, a psychopathic serial killer has been kidnapping prostitutes, torturing them, and brutally dispatching them with a claw hammer. When his top girl goes missing, our pimp hero has to race against time to save her from a grisly death. Other films in the Korean serial-killer genre include ?Memories of Murder,? ?H,? and ?Tell Me Something.?

?Art of the Devil 1, 2 and 3.? From the Land of Smiles comes this nasty series of films centering on black magic, Thai-style. When you start vomiting blood, nails, razor blades and live eels, and when iguanas erupt from boils on your back, you know that a Thai necromancer has put a blood curse on you, and the only way to survive is to find a more powerful sorcerer to throw the curse back at him. The second is the best of the lot.

Where is the Philippines in all this, you might ask?

We were early adopters in the whole Asian horror thing.

Unfortunately, I have yet to get hold of any of Gerardo de Leon?s classic horror films from the ?60s, including his atmospheric vampire flick ?Blood is the Color of Night (Kulay Dugo ang Gabi)? which stars none other than Amalia Fuentes and Ronald Remy (!) as bloodsucking fiends, and ?Terror Is A Man,? which is said to be reminiscent of ?The Island of Dr. Moreau.?

Not strictly speaking Filipino is ?Aswang,? a low budget American film in which the fetus-sucking creature gets a green card and gets to terrorize folks in a First World country for a change.

In the meantime, I guess I?ll have to make do with the likes of Seiko Films? immortal ?Huwag Mong Buhayin ang Bangkay,? in which Charito Solis makes a deal with the devil to bring her dead son Jestoni Alarcon back to life. He returns as one of the living dead, compelled to kill everyone who crosses his path, including Stella Suarez Jr., Ricky Davao and Rita Avila. For some reason, this is one film from the thousands that Seiko cranked out in the early 1980s that still gets shown on TV. Not to be missed, specially for the title song (!).