Davika Hoorne's 800-Year-Old Demon Seduces Busan in 'Inherit'

An 800-year-old centipede demon dressed in a $90,000 Gucci gown thrilled a 3,000-seat outdoor theater at the 2026 Busan International Film Festival. The film is Inherit, a Thai horror hit that screened in the festival's Open Cinema section, and the demon is Woranart, played by Davika Hoorne, a L'Oréal spokesperson and Gucci brand ambassador.

Hoorne and director Banjong Pisanthanakun spoke to The Film Stage after the rousing Busan reception. Their film adapts one of Thailand's best-known stories, the novel Tayard Asoon ("The Demon's Heir") by Tri Aphirum, previously filmed as three television series. Inherit is the first feature film version.

How do you modernize a Thai classic?

Pisanthanakun remembered watching the first television version more than 30 years ago. "It was very scary, but my impressions of it now are faded. The CGI is maybe a bit outdated," he said. His solution was to place the demon firmly in the present. "I had a very clear vision of her wearing a bikini, sunbathing by the pool in the beginning of the story, with a centipede tattoo on my arm," he said — a vision of a grandmother living in the age of "cell phones and TikTok."

He shot the film like an old-time horror picture, using zoom lenses and period techniques. Every prior version contains an iconic vomit ritual, which current CGI allowed him to stage fully. He also pushed the violence without restriction. "Blood will be splattering in your face," he said.

What shaped Woranart?

Hoorne's reference, sent by the director, was Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct — "very sexy, but funny, too, in the way she manipulates every single character in the film." Pisanthanakun also cited Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs via Hoorne, who studied how Lecter manipulates while remaining still.

Hoorne described the rare pleasure of the role. "It's fun when you sit on top and look down on all the people whose minds you will be playing with," she said. "Normally I'm the one who always obeys, someone passive." She noted there are few such roles in Thailand.

The wardrobe carried the character. The gold Gucci dress cost roughly three million baht ($90,000), lent by the house Hoorne works with. "I think this Halloween you will be able to dress as me," she said. Her ghost makeup took seven hours to apply for a few seconds of screen time.

What does the story change for audiences?

The film's men are uniformly terrible — a father who poisoned his factory workers, a pedophile eldest son, a boyfriend chasing the daughter — and the director said the anti-patriarchal stance comes straight from the novel. "It's against the patriarchy," Pisanthanakun said. Hoorne added: "So Grandma does the right thing." The men's deaths, in the director's words, are "their karma."

The ending is new, departing from the book. Hoorne outlined it: Woranart, thwarted 15 years earlier when her sister helped the mother escape, returns to inherit the daughter — a ritual requiring the girl's menses and the vomited centipede.

Production relied on practical stunts over effects, with CGI reserved for the centipedes. The Orlan family house combined several locations; an abandoned mall served for the escalator killing; an acrobat played the crawling corpse in a basement scene shot in a studio in about ten takes.

Pisanthanakun, whose credits include Shutter and the comedy Pee Mak (2013), one of Thailand's highest-grossing films, shows no genre limits. Hoorne, who played a vacuum cleaner in her last project, A Useful Ghost, chooses scripts by environment and people rather than genre. With a Busan crowd roaring at its jump scares, Inherit positions Thai horror as exportable spectacle with a fashion icon at its center.