Oh My Ghost! Oh My God! – or, if you want the full Taiwanese title, 怎麼可能我家的祖先是你家的鬼, which basically translates to something along the lines of “How Could My Ancestor Be Your Ghost”, is a new Taiwanese horror comedy that opened nationwide on September 10, 2026, after premiering as the opening film of the Taipei Film Festival in June.
It stars Japanese comedian and actress Naomi Watanabe as Japanese pop star Juliet, who travels to Taiwan to reconnect with her late mother’s birthplace, where she heads into the mountains with her manager, an old school friend and a couple of locals, but the trip quickly turns into something considerably less tourist-friendly when they become trapped by thick fog and supernatural phenomena connected to the mountain’s ancestral spirits.
Soda Voyu Finally Got to Make This Movie
Director Soda Voyu, also credited as Ta Su or Su Ta, is a Tsou Indigenous Taiwanese actor, and first became widely known on screen through Seediq Bale in 2011, where he subsequently won the Golden Bell Award for Best Supporting Actor for the television drama iHero in 2015 and has continued working across film, television and theatre, and this is his feature directorial debut, with Voyu writing, directing and starring.
The screenplay had actually been around for years before the film reached cinemas, as Voyu’s project was originally titled 山的那一邊，有鬼 – There Are Ghosts on the Other Side of the Mountain – and won an Excellent Screenplay Award in 2023, and it also received Taiwan’s feature-film production support, meaning this wasn’t a script thrown together immediately before filming.
The Cast and The Horror Aspect
Casting Naomi Watanabe as a Japanese pop superstar is probably the most obvious commercial hook, and it is also a logical choice for this one – Watanabe is an enormous Japanese entertainment personality, while Juliet is deliberately written as an exaggerated international celebrity arriving in Taiwan, and the production had originally approached her directly, and reports from the Taiwanese release campaign noted that she had a personal connection to Taiwan through her Taiwanese mother and had wanted to appear in a Taiwanese Chinese-language comedy.
She is joined by Jasper Liu as Juliet’s manager Xiao Luo, Esther Huang as her childhood friend Xinlan, Sakinu as the eccentric hairdresser Zuma, and Voyu himself as Xinlan’s boyfriend Chen Wan-de – Vivian Hsu also makes a special appearance as the mysterious Indigenous witch doctor – Voyu, Huang and Sakinu had actually already worked together in the 2018 mountain comedy Hidden Treasures in the Mountain.
Voyu has also specifically talked about the distinction between the Western idea of a “ghost” and the Indigenous understanding of ancestral spirits, where in interviews surrounding the film, actress Esther Huang has also discussed the importance of the ancestral-spirit worldview in the story, describing the spirits as connected with protection rather than automatically being equivalent to the frightening ghosts audiences might expect from conventional horror.
That distinction is built into the title itself it seems, as the joke is essentially that one person’s ancestor can become another person’s “ghost”, which sounds silly but points towards a genuine cultural difference in how the supernatural is understood.
Before the September theatrical release, Oh My Ghost! Oh My God! also opened the 2026 Taipei Film Festival in June as its world premiere, which is a pretty significant launch for a first-time feature director.
As for reviews, not too many about, but on Letterboxd, it currently has mainly negative reviews, although it does have a few 4 star ratings, but one review mentions about how it drops all horror elements for comedy, but isn’t ‘total trash’, while over on ATM Movies it currently has a 5 rating.
Check out some more Taiwanese horror movies.
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