Are you hungry for a new fantasy-thriller series? Check out upcoming Netflix show The Ghost Bride, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Yangsze Choo.
According to Netflix, the show is set in 1980s Colonial Malacca. A woman named Li Lan (Peijia Huang) is asked to marry the son of the wealthy Lim family. Aside from the fact that it's basically an arranged marriage, she's going to be a "ghost bride" for the family's recently-deceased son Tian Ching (Kuang Tian)!
This means that Li Lan's family "will be saved from a lifetime of debt, but she'll spend the rest of her life being haunted by the Lim family's son." Li Lan does everything in her power to save herself and get out of the situation.
The last time I witnessed this tradition in a fictional setting was in the K-drama Hotel Del Luna, when the ghost of a woman had to marry a living man in order to move on to the afterlife. In 2017, there was also a Filipino horror film called The Ghost Bride, which starred Kim Chiu.
According to the BBC, "ghost weddings" in certain Chinese cultures were performed to ensure that those who died unmarried were not alone in the afterlife. BBC writes: "Originally, the weddings were strictly for the dead—a ritual conducted by the living to wed two single deceased people—but in recent times some have involved one living person being married to a corpse."
P.S. You can start streaming The Ghost Bride on January 23, 2020.
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