Kung Fu Deadly Interview | Fantastic Fest 2026
Kung Fu Deadly Team on Martial Arts, Jiangshi Mythology and Finding the Heart Beneath the Chaos
Kung Fu Deadly has a lot going on.
It’s a buddy comedy, a martial-arts movie, a supernatural horror story and a collision of Irish filmmaking with Asian folklore and genre cinema. On paper, that combination could easily become unwieldy. For director and co-writer Fergal Costello, however, the project was almost irresistible from the moment it landed in his inbox.
At Fantastic Fest 2026, Horror Movies Uncut sat down with Costello, co-writer Patty McDonald, Steven He, who plays Danny, and Gemma Chua-Tran, who plays Leanne, to discuss how they grounded those influences in character, built the film’s martial-arts sequences, approached jiangshi mythology with respect and found comedy without sacrificing the danger surrounding their characters.
Finola G. Xie also joined the group during our Fantastic Fest conversation.
Finding the Movie Inside the Genre Mash-Up
Costello’s introduction to Kung Fu Deadly immediately established just how many different genres the filmmakers planned to combine.
“The subject line of the email I got said, ‘Untitled jiangshi action-horror-comedy vampire movie,’” Costello recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’”
Saying yes was the easy part.
Once Costello began developing the film with McDonald, the challenge became finding something sturdy enough to support its constant shifts between comedy, horror, action and the supernatural.
Initially, Costello admitted that was intimidating. The solution was to stop treating the film’s collection of genres as its foundation. Instead, they built everything around the relationship between its central characters.
“The anchor of the movie was the relationship between the two guys,” Costello said. “If that was solid, you can fit anything else around them — anything fantastic or anything scary or anything comedic.”
If that relationship worked, Costello believed the rest of the movie could work around it.
McDonald agreed, emphasizing that beneath the fights, monsters and comedy, the film still needed something to say. The relationship between the characters and the humanity underneath the spectacle became essential to making all of the other ingredients fit together.
For the filmmakers, the genre elements could be layered around that foundation. The characters had to come first.
Steven He Grounds Danny Before the Supernatural Chaos Begins
That philosophy extends directly to Steven He’s Danny.
Danny and Frank enter the film far removed from polished action heroes. They’re friends reaching a point in life where questions about responsibility, purpose and growing up are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
For He, grounding Danny before the supernatural chaos takes over was crucial.
“You’re just someone who feels like you are destined for something,” He said. “You’re true to yourself. You’re facing those challenges and eventually you’re taking on that responsibility.”
Once that foundation existed, the movie could become as outrageous as it wanted.
“All of the flair, all the flavor, all the cool spinny kicks — without the heart of the movie, it wouldn’t have worked,” He said.
Without that humanity, the action risks becoming little more than a collection of cool moments. With it, the supernatural elements, martial arts and comedy become increasingly ridiculous circumstances through which Danny has to grow.
For He, that distinction turns the film into a journey rather than simply a showcase.
Gemma Chua-Tran Had to Learn to Fight — Fast
When Leanne arrives, the physical energy of Kung Fu Deadly changes considerably.
Chua-Tran carries some of the film’s most demanding early action despite coming into the production without a traditional stunt or martial-arts background.
“This was the first kind of role that I had to learn these things,” she said.
She also didn’t have much time.
Chua-Tran had just finished another project before Kung Fu Deadly began shooting, leaving her with only a handful of days to absorb as much of the choreography as possible.
“It was kind of like cram everything in until, like, four days and just figure it out.”
She supplemented that crash course with regular training to develop the fundamentals. Interestingly, some of the martial-arts material she initially learned wasn’t ultimately used in the finished film.
“It was a lot to learn,” Chua-Tran said.
The finished sequences, however, don’t attempt to hide the performers beneath frantic editing — something Costello considered essential.
“A Big Pet Peeve of Mine Is When You Can’t See the Fight”
Costello wanted audiences to actually watch the martial arts.
“A big pet peeve of mine is when you can’t see the fight,” he said.
Rather than constructing action primarily in the editing room, the team approached the choreography with the idea that each fight should already work before additional coverage and cutting were introduced.
Costello had previously directed action in shorts and other projects, but Kung Fu Deadly represented his first opportunity to tackle more extensive physical martial-arts choreography.
The process began with rehearsals.
Costello and the action team would watch the fights develop, adjust individual beats and continue refining them until the choreography worked as a complete sequence. Only then could the filmmakers determine where additional shots would strengthen the action rather than disguise it.
“That was a huge focus,” Costello said. “Keep it on the action.”
The result is a style that gives the performers room to move. Kicks, exchanges and physical interactions remain legible instead of being manufactured through rapid cutting.
Digging Into Jiangshi Folklore
Underneath the comedy sits a surprisingly substantial supernatural mythology.
The film draws from jiangshi folklore, incorporating ideas surrounding the dead, ancestors, elders and responsibility passing between generations.
For McDonald, that meant the research couldn’t be superficial.
“It went pretty deep,” he said.
The filmmakers spent considerable time researching the traditions they were drawing from and consulting with others during development to make sure those elements weren’t being used carelessly or disrespectfully.
At the same time, McDonald noted how much of the modern understanding of jiangshi has also been shaped by cinema itself. That gave the filmmakers room to establish their own internal mythology, but only after understanding the traditions that inspired it.
The guiding principle became clear: understand the source material first, then determine where Kung Fu Deadly could create its own rules.
Comedy Without Telling the Audience When to Laugh
One of Kung Fu Deadly’s trickier balancing acts is how quickly it can move from ridiculous comedy into legitimate danger.
For Chua-Tran, the solution wasn’t necessarily to approach Leanne as though she were performing comedy.
“I feel like the comedy comes from the situation,” she said.
Leanne isn’t constantly making jokes. Her mannerisms, timing and reactions to the increasingly strange circumstances surrounding her create much of the humor naturally.
He similarly found that the actor’s performance is only one piece of what determines whether a moment becomes funny.
“A lot of the comedy, a large part, is not landed by me,” he said, pointing to elements including the score, cinematography and construction of the scene.
That becomes especially complicated when the film asks its performers to move almost immediately from genuine emotion into humor.
He remembered one sequence in which Danny experiences a significant loss. He had been crying in one scene, only for the next scene to require Danny to make a joke connected to what had just happened.
As an actor, He wasn’t initially sure how to bridge those two emotional states.
He turned to Costello for direction.
Costello gave him two words:
“Tony Stark.”
Suddenly, the scene clicked.
The comparison gave He a model for someone who could recognize that everything around him was falling apart while still responding with humor.
That became another key to Kung Fu Deadly’s unusual tone. Comedy doesn’t necessarily mean the danger has stopped being real.
An Irish Film Drawing From International Genre Cinema
The international nature of Kung Fu Deadly is impossible to ignore.
It’s an Irish production drawing heavily from Asian martial-arts cinema and supernatural traditions, with performers and filmmakers carrying additional cultural influences into the project.
For Costello, there was an important distinction between being inspired by something and simply borrowing it because it looked cool.
“I was so focused on it not being a borrow,” he said. “Everything had to be correct.”
The references came first.
The filmmakers wanted to understand what they were drawing from and approach those elements respectfully before introducing their own variations.
The design of the film’s jiangshi provides a clear example.
Costello said the team began with recognizable references to Asian cinema before developing mythology specific to Kung Fu Deadly: their jiangshi had been pirates.
That creative decision gave the filmmakers a way to build their own visual identity around established imagery. The creatures could take on a drowned, sunken appearance, including distinctive turquoise and blue tones, while still retaining a connection to the genre traditions that inspired them.
“We always start with the references first and make sure we’re doing it the right way and the most respectful way,” Costello said. “And then we make our own after.”
Keeping Kung Fu Deadly Irish
For McDonald, respecting the film’s international influences also meant making sure the production never lost sight of where it came from.
“We’re an Irish film,” he said.
When McDonald wrote the characters, he heard Dublin voices.
That became part of the film’s foundation rather than something that needed to be stripped away to accommodate its other influences.
Once the actors stepped into those roles, however, the characters naturally began evolving beyond what existed on the page.
“As soon as the cast take it over and the director takes it over, it becomes its own thing,” McDonald explained.
That evolution reflects the larger balancing act at the center of Kung Fu Deadly.
The film isn’t interested in separating its influences into tidy compartments. Irish humor, martial arts, supernatural horror, jiangshi mythology, friendship and questions about responsibility are allowed to crash directly into one another.
But Costello and McDonald understood that a genre mash-up alone isn’t enough.
The kicks have to be visible. The mythology has to mean something. The cultural influences have to be approached thoughtfully. The comedy has to emerge from characters who believe what is happening to them. And beneath all the vampires, fights and tonal shifts, audiences still need someone worth following.
As Costello discovered early in development, if the relationship at the center of the movie works, almost anything can be built around it.
For Kung Fu Deadly, that apparently includes friendship, growing up, Irish comedy, martial arts and undead pirates — all in the same movie.
Horror Movies Uncut spoke with Fergal Costello, Patty McDonald, Steven He, Gemma Chua-Tran and Finola G. Xie during Fantastic Fest 2026. Stay tuned to HMU for more interviews, reviews and coverage from the festival.
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