The horror movie Control Freak, now streaming on Hulu, has a super relatable premise: the intense, nagging sensation of a persistent itch. It stars Kelly Marie Tran (Raya and the Last Dragon, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) as Val, a motivational speaker tormented by an itch on the back of her head that she can’t leave alone. She tries bandages, wears many beanies, and ties down her hands when she sleeps. But the demonic itch steadily breaks down her body and her will, summoning something monstrous into her ordered existence.
The movie, written and directed by The Park’s Shal Ngo, manifests the source of this torment as a paranormal monster connected to the generational trauma of Val’s parents’ flight from the Vietnam War. But the itch also has a psychological dimension anyone can relate to: It represents Val’s persistent, suppressed anxiety breaking through her attempts to clamp down on it.
“I’m playing in these really high-anxiety moments in someone’s mind, and it got really intense,” Tran told Polygon in a video call alongside Ngo. Tran had never been in a horror feature before, let alone in a starring role requiring her to be in virtually every shot of a movie that was filmed in a 22-day sprint. “I’ve never done anything like that before. There were days where I would have, I’m not exaggerating, seven outfit changes in a day,” she said. “It was wild. I had a great time, and it was also really hard, and I learned so much.”
But the physical and mental demands of the shoot took their toll. “By the end, I was pretty unwell,” she laughed.
Ngo got the idea for the movie from a disturbing true story, recounted in a New Yorker article, about a woman who had an itch so bad, she scratched through her skull and into her brain. “It started with realistic body horror, like the actual horrors of having a body and having something go wrong in your wiring to the degree where something like that can happen,” Ngo said. “I thought [that] was very, very terrifying.” Hard agree.
Developing the concept from his earlier short, Ngo initially went down a medically angled route that was “much more pedantic and about the science of the brain.” In that version, Val was a video game programmer. But Ngo felt the story worked better when he brought in elements that made it more personal.
That started with a light satire of self-help culture, inspired by Ngo’s experiences with the Landmark Forum and David Lynch’s beloved transcendental meditation. (“It started to get a little culty,” he said.)
For Tran, Val’s status as a motivational guru unlocked the character. “It hyper-pressurizes this feeling she has that she has to present herself in a way that seems polished and professional. She wants people to view her this very specific way,” Tran said.
“And yet on the inside, she’s basically the opposite,” she said. “And I think there are a lot of people walking around in the world who have the same perspective no matter what your job is. I think that there’s a pressure that we can feel to try and seem like we have it all together and we might not.” In this context, Val’s self-help aphorisms have an ironic undertone. “For so much of the film, you’re seeing this person not listen to any of the things she’s telling other people to do, which I think is just the funniest, smartest juxtaposition,” Tran said.
Image: Hulu
Then there were the paranormal elements, rooted in East Asian folklore. Ngo says the monster plaguing Val in Control Freak is based on “an ancient Chinese parasite that has to do with bad karma and this endless hunger. Then I used some creative license and turned it into something that was a little bit more Vietnamese. There’s different versions of these hungry demons in Korea and Japan that can never be satiated, that induce this hunger in you, and that just seemed to be a good starting-off point for the incessant itch.”
Initially, Ngo says, he toyed with using generative AI to create a visually surreal monster. “I thought it would be very cool to do a pure AI monster in a movie. I was like, What if this is the first movie with an AI monster?” He discussed it with a friend “who does a lot of really cool stuff with AI,” playing with the idea of “this presence that was just constantly changing and shifting into something else.” In the end, though, he went with “something much more grounded and physical and practical [that] could really touch you and move you.”
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ngo introduced Control Freak’s focus on the Vietnamese American immigrant experience, which Tran really responded to. Val’s spiral begins with a quest for a missing birth certificate, which leads her to track down her estranged father and explore roots she had purposefully disconnected from. Just like Val’s father in the film, Ngo’s grandfather was a Buddhist monk who had served in the South Vietnamese army. That specificity spoke to Tran when she read the script.
“My parents are refugees from the Vietnam War, so having that be part of Val’s father’s story and his experience, and that being the source of the demonic curse that’s taking over their lives — yeah, it felt really personal and relevant,” Tran said. “I’m just such a huge fan of horror, and I found the concept of addressing generational trauma within the genre really exciting, in addition to it being such a Vietnamese story.”
Control Freak is streaming on Hulu now.
