Your Stage : It’s not a demon. It’s love, broken. by Koby Nguyen

Koby Nguyen

It’s not a demon. It’s love, broken.

I’d like to share an image that deeply inspires my project Ma, Where is Your Head ?.

This is not meant to be a typical horror film. What I want to capture is the fragile beauty of a loving mother, her tenderness, her daily gestures, and how, after betrayal and poisoning, that gentleness fractures into madness, despair, and death.

The horror does not come from outside. It is born inside the family, in silences, in rituals, in ordinary places that slowly turn uncanny and unbearable.

It is a story where maternal love transforms into a nightmare, where the Japanese countryside, water, chants, forests, simple acts, mirrors the inner collapse of a woman.

I want to create a film that is sensory, poetic, and visceral, taking the audience from softness to the unspeakable, from beauty to terror. A film where one feels love and fear, light and darkness at once.

Ma, Where is Your Head ? is my exploration of the most intimate and universal question:

What remains of love once it is broken?

Koby Nguyen

This photo was taken towards the end of the Meiji period (1910).

A mother washes her child in a river in Niigata Prefecture. Photo by Ishizuka Saburo.

https://x.com/polipofawysu/status/989972732858195969

Koby Nguyen

Through the window, innocence watches shadows take flight.

Koby Nguyen

Even in horror, light insists on breaking through.

Koby Nguyen

Silence, a song, a flame, tenderness before the storm.

Koby Nguyen

A fragile world, carried on a mother’s back.

Koby Nguyen

The past always looks back at us, even as we move forward.

Koby Nguyen

She steps into the water, between memory, death, and return.

Koby Nguyen

This is no longer a dance. It is a descent. A ritual where the body becomes the stage of broken love, memory, and ghosts. Every gesture is a scar, every silence a scream...

Koby Nguyen

Every hand carries the memory of broken promises.

Koby Nguyen

When love breaks, the body invents a new language.

Koby Nguyen

Even in madness, a mother keeps her flowers.

Koby Nguyen

Gestures become scars, visible in the air.

Koby Nguyen

Between scream and silence, she is reborn without a face.

Koby Nguyen

She dances with her ghosts, and her ghosts dance within her.

Koby Nguyen

Ce n'est pas seulement un film d'horreur. C'est une expérience rituelle, où chaque geste devient une cicatrice, et où la musique, telle une incantation, guide le spectateur à travers la beauté et la terreur. Unique, car elle naît du corps, du silence et du son.

Dans Ma, les paysages ne sont pas des arrière-plans, ils sont des miroirs vivants de la descendance de la mère, porteurs à la fois de beauté et de terreur.

Koby Nguyen

What I share here is only a glimpse of how I find inspiration and create. Each of my projects is pushed to the furthest edge of my imagination, becoming a world of its own, with its own poetry and vision.

Koby Nguyen

ママ、あなたの頭はどこにあるの ?

Maurice Vaughan

Hi, Koby Nguyen. If you put "What I share here is only a glimpse of how I find inspiration and create. Each of my projects is pushed to the furthest edge of my imagination, becoming a world of its own, with its own poetry and vision." in your post and ask others to share how they find inspiration and create, you could put the post in the Anything Goes Lounge.

Julien Samson

Minh, what you hold here is a project of rare intensity. In Ma, Where is Your Head ? there is already the immediate aura of a horror film destined to become a classic.

Reading your vision, I thought of Hereditary for the way horror is born at the heart of the family unit, of The Babadook for its alchemy between the intimate and the nightmarish, but also of Asian films like Ju-On or The Medium, where daily life, rituals, and traditions become landscapes of haunting.

Yet your project stands apart: here, it is not about a demon, an external curse, or a genre device. The horror is born from within, from the tenderness of a mother that fractures under poison, betrayal, and loss. It is a terror that breathes poetry, silence, flesh, and memory.

Ma, Where is Your Head ? has the potential to stand at the crossroads of these great works, while asserting a voice that is unique, personal, visceral, and profoundly Asian, a work that could leave a lasting mark on the genre as both an heir and a reinvention.

Koby Nguyen

Very well Maurice, I will do it.

Koby Nguyen

and the light comes back...

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