Shutter

• Shutter was the biggest Thai box-office hit of 2004 and one of the country's most successful horror exports, playing widely across Southeast Asia and grossing roughly $7 million worldwide theatrically.
• Star Ananda Everingham was already a working actor and former model in Thailand before Shutter -- he'd debuted on screen in 1998 -- but the film's success made him a regional breakout star.
• The eerie ghost images bleeding into Tun's photographs were achieved mostly with practical, in-camera techniques -- lighting and physical staging -- rather than digital effects, in keeping with the low-budget Thai horror style of the era.
• Shutter got a 2008 American remake directed by Masayuki Ochiai and starring Joshua Jackson, which relocated the story to Japan. It was critically panned (11% on Rotten Tomatoes) but still turned a profit, grossing about $48 million worldwide on an $8 million budget.
• The film won the Audience Award at France's Gerardmer International Fantastic Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Kinnaree Award for Best Film at the Bangkok International Film Festival.
• Co-directors Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom have said the ghost-in-photographs concept grew out of the 'spirit photo' chain emails circulating at the time, partly inspired by real photographs of the 1973 Thammasat University uprising in Bangkok.

Natre's position atop Tun's shoulders in the finale literalizes a Thai cultural belief about spirits riding the shoulders of the guilty: she doesn't kill him outright, she simply refuses to let him stand on his own again.

The film's photography theme suggests memory itself is the haunting medium -- film captures what the conscious mind refuses to retain, and Natre exploits this, forcing Tun's suppressed guilt to physically develop in the one record he can't control.

Jane functions as the audience's surrogate investigator, digging into a crime she's partly complicit in by fleeing the accident scene. Her detective work reads as penance disguised as righteousness, and the final revelation implicates her almost as much as Tun.

A hit-and-run on a lonely Bangkok road leaves a young woman dead in the headlights. Photographer Tun and girlfriend Jane flee the scene, burying the guilt in silence. But the dead don't stay buried in celluloid. White smears and ghostly figures begin bleeding through Tun's photographs, and when Jane develops the negatives, the truth develops with them. The girl is Natre, a woman from Tun's university days who knew him intimately. She's not haunting the car crash. She's haunting the bed. By the time you understand why she sits on his shoulders, you're already carrying her weight.