A Vietnamese horror film premiering internationally at the Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival in Estonia, Crimson Snout is a perplexing quasi-pro-vegan horror film about a crazed demon dog in a rural part of the country. The sheer amount of skinned frogs and dog meat would lead the viewer, on one level, to assume something of a carnivorous agenda — especially if the viewer assumes the meat is real meat and not computer generated replacements, which would seem beyond the budget of the small genre film. A closer viewing challenges this guttural assumption: in theme, Crimson Snout morally (even if marginally) aligns against the meat industry, specifically the dog meat industry in Vietnam, in ways that rub against the production (assuming the dead animals were indeed real, dead animals).

As a horror film, director Luu Thanh Luan’s feature directorial debut is the kind of horror that stumbles around a village of bad people doing bad things to other bad people. Two not so bad people — Nam (Ngô Quang Tuấn) and his pregnant fiancée Xuân (Mie) — find themselves in the middle of the hostile dog-pile. It’s not that they are good people (or people who tend to do good); they are morally neutral, removed from the decisions that carry moral weight. They do choose, as city folks moving to the small town where Nam was raised, to not eat dog meat. Their dietary decision poses an issue for the family since they raise dogs and own a butchery that sells their meat. 

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