A hunting trip in the Bhutanese mountains sounds like a pretty good way to get away from everything – right up until people start disappearing and the group realises they’re not the ones doing the hunting anymore, and Khekpa: The Hunt takes the basic slasher setup and drops it into a landscape where getting lost could be almost as dangerous as whoever is chasing you.
And that setting is a big part of what makes this one worth keeping an eye on.
When The Hunting Trip Goes Bad
The trip begins with a group of friends heading into the remote Bhutanese mountains, expecting an escape into the wilderness rather than a fight for survival, but that changes when they start noticing signs that somebody else has been in the area, and then people begin disappearing.
With the group isolated from the outside world, they have to work out what is happening while simultaneously trying to stay alive, as the person hunting them appears to know the terrain far better than they do, turning the mountains into a massive advantage for their unseen pursuer – there is no convenient road nearby, no quick trip back to civilisation and no guarantee that heading in any particular direction will actually make things better.
One Of Bhutan’s Early Slasher-Style Films
Khekpa: The Hunt is directed by Sangay Jamtsho and stars Jamyang Tempa, where the film had a limited release in Bhutan on March 28, 2026, with a runtime of approximately 101 minutes, and one of the more notable things about the film is its place within Bhutanese horror, where the industry is still relatively small compared with neighbouring countries, so rather than leaning on the supernatural traditions that feature heavily in much of Asian horror, Jamtsho takes the film in a much more straightforward slasher and survival-thriller direction.
The obvious advantage of a Bhutanese mountain setting is that you don’t need to work particularly hard to make the characters feel isolated, as I am sure the terrain will be doing a lot of the work here -a slasher in a house has walls, doors and rooms that the characters understand, but out here, the group has to deal with distance, unfamiliar terrain and the possibility of getting even more lost while trying to escape.
No Ghosts Needed
There is also something refreshing about Khekpa: The Hunt keeping its danger human rather than supernatural, as Bhutanese horror could quite easily have gone down the folklore route, but this instead takes a familiar survival premise and asks what happens when people are simply being hunted somewhere they have almost no control over.
That keeps the tension fairly direct, because the characters don’t need to discover an ancient curse or understand some complicated supernatural mythology – they just need to figure out who is hunting them and how the hell they’re going to get away.
Sangay Jamtsho Keeps It Lean
With a runtime of around 101 minutes, the film will have enough space to establish the group and make the mountain environment important without turning the premise into something unnecessarily complicated.
If you enjoy survival horror, wilderness thrillers and chase-heavy slashers, this is one worth checking out simply for the setting alone – it’s a familiar horror formula, but sometimes changing where the hunt takes place is enough to make it feel fresh again, hopefully.
Trailer
Check out some more Bhutanese horror movies
Leave a Reply