Ko Meng-jung, known for his dyed blond hair and earring, carries a small notebook with him wherever he goes. In it, in a dense script illegible to everyone but himself, he jots down scene and shot ideas as they pop into his head. Born in 1983, Ko is currently a junior in the Department of Communication Arts at Fu Jen Catholic University and is hard at work on his first feature film, The Voice. Ko has already terrified audiences with The Print, a short he shot on digital video while just a freshman, and is generally considered one of Taiwan's new generation of horror experts.

"When I was a kid," says Ko, "I was responsible for renting the videos my family watched." Ko loved horror flicks, and had always wanted to make movies. When he took Taiwan's university entrance exam, he applied to communications departments because, he says, "I wanted to be a director and make movies."

At university, Ko was assigned to shoot a scene for one of his classes. The professor didn't specify the subject matter--it just had to be a chase scene and it had to be three minutes long. Ko ended up turning in a frightening ten-minute short in which a group of people is pursued by a ghost. Titled The Print, the short made the rounds on the Internet and eventually attracted the attention of the indie-focused Pure 16 Film Festival. When the organizers invited Ko to screen an extended 30-minute version of The Print, he became the youngest director ever to participate in the festival.

In contrast to most other directors of his generation, who are trying to learn to emulate the great foreign directors, Ko says that he never really watched either art-house films or Taiwanese films before he started university. Instead, he was interested in commercial films of all types. "Horror movies in particular," he says. "I went to see pretty much everything that came out. For one thing, I just enjoyed them. For another, I wanted to learn their shooting techniques."

Though The Print's plot is very simple--a vacationing group of young people are cursed by an evil spirit and must flee for their lives--the shots, sound effects, and editing are all beautifully done. These are all areas in which Ko is self-taught, having picked up his skills from repeated viewings of ghost films from around the world.

If ghost films are to be frightening, the shots and the sound effects have to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. Then, after bringing the audience to a fever pitch of fear and curiosity, they have to quickly and precisely scare the pants off of them. Flash Forward Entertainment's Patrick Huang says that Ko is a skilled manipulator of the elements of the genre, and is preparing to invest in Ko's first feature film, The Voice. This US$1.2 million film will focus on the voices of the dead, giving Ko room to exercise the full scope of his talent with sound effects. Filming while going to school has taken its toll on Ko--he was in danger of failing half his classes this semester, which would have meant expulsion from university. But Ko is prepared to see his graduation delayed if that's what it takes to realize his dream. "You're only young once," he says. "And I'm going to do my utmost to make a good film."

Ko Meng-jung carried his notebook everywhere he went, jotting down thoughts on how to scare audiences as they popped into his head.