Horror Favourites – Bari Kang

For Bari Kang, the horror genre isn’t a lifelong obsession but a relatively recent creative frontier, one that has allowed him to channel a deep-rooted fascination with outsiders, moral ambiguity and human fragility into something far more visceral.

Before stepping into horror with Itch!, Kang carved out his voice through crime and character-driven storytelling, drawing inspiration from masters like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. That lineage is immediately apparent in his work, where mood, restraint and character psychology take precedence over spectacle.

With Itch!, Kang doesn’t abandon those instincts. Instead, he folds them into a stripped-back, pressure-cooker horror that swaps scale for intensity. Set largely within a convenience store during a devastating outbreak, the film follows a grieving father trying to protect his daughter as paranoia and violence spiral. It is a premise rooted in familiar genre territory, yet elevated by Kang’s focus on human behaviour under duress.

We caught up with Kang to talk about the films that shaped him, the horror that lingers, and how those influences fed into his own nightmarish debut.

Horror Favourites – Bari Kang

Horror is actually a newer genre for me as a filmmaker, so a lot of my earliest influences weren’t horror films at all. I grew up obsessed with filmmakers like Scorsese, Tarantino, Michael Mann, and Jean-Pierre Melville. Being an immigrant, I often felt like an outsider, so I naturally gravitated toward antihero characters and stories about people on the margins. One of my favorite films is Le Samouraï. I love how controlled and atmospheric it is, and how much tension it creates without overexplaining anything. That kind of restraint and mood definitely influenced me, even going into a film like ITCH!.

As far as horror goes, the films that really stayed with me are Dawn of the Dead, The Mist, and 28 Days Later. What I love about those movies is that they’re not just about the monsters or infection — they’re really about people under pressure, and how fast everything can unravel when fear takes over. That was a big influence on ITCH!, because I wanted it to feel visceral and physical, but still grounded in character, tension, and the way people behave when things spiral out of control. Since we made the film on a very limited budget, a lot of the creative challenge was figuring out how to make something feel intense and cinematic without relying on scale. In some ways, those limitations helped push me to focus on atmosphere, practical effects, sound, and using a contained everyday setting in a way that felt fresh and unsettling.

With Itch!, Bari Kang proves that horror doesn’t need sprawling set pieces or blockbuster budgets to leave a mark. By grounding the chaos in character and leaning into the suffocating intimacy of its setting, the film taps into something far more unsettling: the unpredictability of people when pushed to their limits.

If this is Kang’s entry point into horror, it feels less like a departure and more like an evolution. And if Itch! is anything to go by, it is a space he is more than comfortable inhabiting.

Itch! is available on digital now in the UK, courtesy of Seven Tales.

Itch! trailer