Karang Guni: The Cursed Collection

Step into Karang Guni: The Cursed Collection, where every trinket in the shop carries a curse and the collector is the most cursed of all, at Universal Studios Singapore’s Halloween Horror Nights 14.

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This article contains spoilers. Photos from Halloween Horror Nights 14 are featured here in a special showcase.
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Overview and Thoughts

Growing up in Singapore, plenty of us were warned that the karang guni would take us away if we misbehaved. Karang Guni: The Cursed Collection is the moment that warning comes true. HHN reimagines the familiar door-to-door collector as a man who has spent years taking in what nobody wants, never knowing that some of it carried the ill fortunes of its former owners. The curses have been working on him ever since, and you meet him in three forms as you go deeper into his shophouse, each one further gone than the last.

Three objects lie at the heart of the curse: a Samsui woman’s hat, a payal anklet and a Toyol. The choice is deliberate, with each one drawn from a different community in Singapore, and each gets a room of its own. What I liked most is how the house handles them. The shop rooms stay grounded, cluttered and believable, but the moment you get close to a cursed item, its story pulls you into another world entirely. In effect, it’s Singapore’s own museum of cursed objects, and every exhibit wants out.

The house reads in three parts: rooms that build up the character, the three cursed items, then the aftermath of the curse, where the things he has finished with are discarded, wrapped up and finally burnt. Each stage of the journey also shifts colour, from the red of his work room to the sickly green of the broken dolls, the cold blue of the scrapyard and a fiery finale. The scare design leans heavily on misdirection. Again and again, something big and strange draws your eye one way while the real scare comes from the other.

If there’s a weak spot, it’s the corridor of plastic sheets near the end. After the detail packed into the earlier rooms, it doesn’t carry the same atmosphere or effects, and it feels more like a passage between scenes than a scene of its own. The burning room that follows more than makes up for it, closing the house with a dramatic set piece hanging above.

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Karang Guni: The Cursed Collection Photo Tour: The Full Haul

An archway of old newspapers and stacked cardboard marks the way in. Everything here was once thrown out by someone.

The alley grows darker with every step, littered with things nobody came back for. At the end stands shophouse No. 14, with a trishaw parked outside. It isn’t always parked there. Upstairs, windows swing open and bang shut again. Below the roof, a yellow banner offers to buy, sell and collect all items, with no refunds after possession.

The signboard names the shop 福記, promising fortune to all who enter. Between the two characters sits its motto, 奇貨可居. It’s an old saying about rare goods worth hoarding, taken from the story of a merchant who saw his fortune in a person, not a thing. But if you read 居 as “to dwell”, the motto says something else entirely: strange goods, with something living inside.

The couplets on either side of the door, 萬象森羅幻無窮 and 魑魅魍魎驚天動, hide a sinister message. Read together, they describe a shop of every curio under the sun, but none of them are what they seem. Every item has something inside that could shake the heavens.

…Unnerving. Then, from somewhere behind the doorway curtain, comes the honk of a karang guni’s horn. The shop is open for business, and it wants you inside.

The karang guni waits behind his glass counter, hemmed in by cabinets and goods stacked to the ceiling. He calls out the cry you may remember from your childhood: “Karang guni… 旧报纸, 衫裤, leh-dio, 电视机” (old newspapers, clothes, radio, television).

Then the lights go out, and when they return, he isn’t where you left him.

With him out of sight, the shop is yours to browse, though it never feels like you’re alone. A cabinet of dolls and doll heads watches you squeeze past a wall of vintage hand-painted plates and old portraits, faces from a Singapore long gone. Past them, the path turns left, deeper into the shophouse and towards the back room

A cabinet of dolls and doll heads watches you squeeze past a wall of vintage hand-painted plates and old portraits, faces from a Singapore long gone. Past them, the path turns left, deeper into the shophouse and towards the back room.

The back room is where the ordinary junk ends. Skulls and skeletons, animal bones bound in rope, masks, candlesticks, urns and jars of things best left unopened. Nobody normal keeps a collection like this.

Not everything on these shelves stays on the shelves. A horned beast rises from the pile of animal relics, and the crates on the other side hide a man draped in trinkets, as obsessed with the collection as its owner.

The path leads to darkness and the shop falls away. You see a Samsui woman’s face, as large as a statue, split in two, and her red hat looms behind it. You have to walk through the shattered halves.

Inside this realm, the Samsui woman is still at work, reliving the moment she was killed on the building site she gave her life to. Her soul never left the hat.

Her cries fade behind you, but the collection isn’t finished with you yet. You find yourself somewhere else. Marigold garlands hang among the trees, strung with jewellery, beads and other offerings, in a forest where the trunks seem to have faces carved into them. Some of those faces are watching you.

The payal, a gold anklet, was an offering, until a man took something that wasn’t his.

Its owner has come looking for it. She is a Mohini, a female spirit from Indian folklore often likened to the Pontianak, who waits among the trees. Dressed in her finest jewellery, she stares back at you with blank, unblinking eyes…

You stumble out from between the trees, and the forest vanishes as suddenly as it appeared. The vision is over, but the curse isn’t. Back in the shophouse, the work room glows red. Talismans cover every surface, objects are bound and sealed.

Before a ritual altar of tall red candles stands the karang guni, no longer quite himself.

On his table lies an open book of incantations and a chest with its seal broken, fog and firelight pouring from inside.

The collection is hungry, and he knows how to feed it. Slumped in a chair beside him sits his latest offering. In one swift motion, he tears the victim’s head free and thrusts it straight at you. You don’t wait to see what the collection asks for next. You run.

The light turns green in a room of broken dolls, toys and doll parts crammed into every cabinet.

In a tank stands a Toyol, almost the size of a small adult. The smaller jars beside it hold something far too small.

Shards of broken mirror hang overhead, each one adding to the curse. Some of the dolls may come alive. Be careful which one you’re watching.

Out back, the scrapyard is bathed in cold blue. Bicycles, wheels and scrap metal are heaped high, and above them a magnet crane holds its load of heavy chains. Until it doesn’t.

This is where the Karang Guni throws whatever he’s finished with. Lockers lean in on one side, and on the other a mountain of rags, cans and bottles climbs to the ceiling. Not everything in the pile was ever junk. Lightning flashes through the windows at the far end. With every flash, a figure seems to drift a little closer.

Around the corner, a wounded man begs you for help, but he’s not the one you should be watching.

Beyond, the mess gives way to plastic sheeting. Old furniture, lamps and chairs are wrapped up and put away, along with wrapped bodies waiting to be burnt.

Shadowy hands press against the plastic from the other side, twisting and clawing for a way out. The further you go, the more of them there are.

At the end of the corridor, the plastic parts onto firelight. Everything wrapped up back there was waiting to come here. The walls glow through their cracks… charred bodies lie all around, and at the centre, inside a circle of sand, the karang guni has given himself over to the curse completely. He chants as he draws symbols in the sand, then lets it slip through his fingers towards you.

Chains run through every corner of the room, and every one of them leads down into the fire. The curse has bound them all here: the souls who suffered for his collection, the remains strung overhead like a chandelier, and the karang guni himself, shackled to the very thing he fed.

One of the burnt is still alive enough to beg you to save them.

Everything in his collection once belonged to someone else. There are no refunds after possession.

Karang Guni on the Loose

If you made it out, don’t relax just yet. The karang guni doesn’t stay in his shop. He is the star of The Scaremony, and he also appears at his own meet-and-greet sessions at the Scaremony stage, as well as during the private meet-and-greet for RIP Tour guests.

As one of HHN14’s Roaming Horrors, he works his old rounds through the park, from Sci-Fi City through Ancient Egypt to The Lost World, sizing up every guest as a potential new piece for his collection. If you hear his horn, you have been warned.

On his trishaw, he carries his cursed collection, the Samsui woman’s red hat among it, along with his latest victim. Whatever he scavenges eventually ends up in the scrapyard.

You can even take a piece of him home, or at least to dinner. At Goldilocks Fried Chicken, The Karang Guni Feast, the Scavenger’s Midnight Crunch and the Kopi Guni Afterlife Shake all carry his name. The Feast arrives on a tray lined with a newspaper telling the stories of the Samsui hat, the payal and the Toyol, so read it before the gravy does. Find out more in my HHN14 food and drinks guide.

Halloween Horror Nights 14: Select Nights 25 Sep – 1 Nov

HHN14 Full Review

Discover the HHN14 Cursed Collection at my HHN14 MEGA Review, including sneak peeks into all the haunted houses, scare zones, shows, and more!

HHN14 Event Guide

Prepare yourself for the 14th Hour with my HHN14 Event Guide, including the line-up, event calendar, ticketing options, add-ons and the RIP Tour prices.

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