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 For Hyunjoo and Paul
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 Korean Horror Cinema
Edited by Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin
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 © editorial matter and organisation Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin, 2013
© in the individual contributions is retained by the authors

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Foreword viii
Julian Stringer
Contributors xi

Introduction 1
Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin

Part I: Classic Korean Horror

1. Family, Death and the wonhon in Four Films of the 1960s 23
Hyangjin Lee
2. Creepy Liver-Eating Fox Ladies: The Thousand Year Old Fox and
Korea’s Gumiho 35
Alison Peirse and James Byrne
3. War Horror and Anti-Communism: From Piagol to Rainy Days 48
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Mark Morris
4. Mother’s Grudge and Woman’s Wail: The Monster-Mother and
Korean Horror Film 60
Eunha Oh

Part II: Contemporary ‘Domestic’ Horror

5. Heritage of Horrors: Reclaiming the Female Ghost in Shadows in
the Palace 73
Yun Mi Hwang
6. Acacia and Adoption Anxiety in Korean Horror Cinema 87
Hye Seung Chung

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 vi con tent s

7. Apartment Horror: Sorum and Possessed 101

Nikki J. Y. Lee
8. The Face(s) of Korean Horror Film: Toward a Cinematic
Physiognomy of Affective Extremes 114
David Scott Diffrient
9. Death Bell and High-School Horror 131
Chi-Yun Shin

Part III: Contemporary ‘International’ Horror

10. Between the Local and the Global: ‘Asian Horror’ in Ahn
Byung-ki’s Phone and Bunshinsaba 145
Daniel Martin
11. Diary of a Lost Girl: Victoriana, Intertextuality and A Tale of Two
Sisters 158
Robert L. Cagle
12. From A Tale of Two Sisters to The Uninvited: A Tale of Two
Texts 173
Leung Wing-Fai
13. Oldboy goes to Bollywood: Zinda and the Transnational
Appropriation of South Korean ‘Extreme’ Cinema 187
Iain Robert Smith
14. Park Chan-wook’s Thirst: Body, Guilt and Exsanguination 199
Kyu Hyun Kim

Glossary 217
Bibliography 219
Index 236
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 Acknowledgements

Alison would like to thank Northumbria University for funding a semester-

long sabbatical during which she was able to work on this book. She would also
like to thank the Film team at Northumbria University for remaining as sup-
portive, amusing and helpful as ever. A special thank you is due to her family,
in particular to Paul Fairclough, Helen and John Peirse, and Sheila and Peter
Fairclough, for providing tea, sympathy and childcare wherever and whenever
needed.
Daniel would like to thank Queen’s University Belfast for giving him
research leave in the autumn of 2011 to work on this collection, and Lancaster
University for giving him a post as Visiting Researcher during the same
period. For their friendship and intellectual support, thanks are due to
Stefano Baschiera, Gary Bettinson, Haery Kim and Mark Morris; and to Mark
Jancovich for the continued inspiration.
We would both like to thank Gillian Leslie, our editor at Edinburgh
University Press, for her encouragement and enthusiasm for this project; our
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

copy-editor, Wendy Lee, for her diligence; and last but not least, our brilliant
(and yet always patient) contributors, who have made the book what it is.

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 Foreword

On 6 February 1998, film director Kim Ki-young and his wife died in a house
fire at their home in Seoul. One of the most celebrated filmmakers of the 1960s
Golden Age of South Korean cinema, Kim was on the verge of rediscovery
after his reputation had lain dormant for a number of years. A major retro-
spective, ‘Kim Ki-young: Cinema of Diabolical Desire and Death’, had been
staged at the 1997 Pusan International Film Festival, and the couple were
about to travel to Europe to attend a small retrospective at the 1998 Berlin
International Film Festival. They never made it. In one of the most gruesome
ends to a filmmaking life imaginable, the fire took hold under circumstances
that have never been properly explained and amid the detritus of the director’s
handmade props for his own films.
As editors Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin note in their Introduction to
this pioneering volume, Kim Ki-young is an extraordinary filmmaker who
holds a privileged position in the genealogy of Korean horror cinema. Yet
there is something about him that makes him a symbolic figure in the history
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

of world filmmaking. Perhaps it is the manner in which the morbid concerns

of his films and personal life persistently shade into one another. Or could it
be because he may have literally perished for his art, engulfed in a fatal con-
flagration fanned by possibly suspicious factors? Either way, the linkage of
aesthetics and death is the important point to emphasise here. From his debut
title, The Box of Death (Jugeom-eui sangja, 1955), to posthumous final work, An
Experience to Die For (Jukeodo joeon gyeongheom, 1990), Kim’s filmography is
splattered with intimations of earthly demise. Seldom has the ephemeral
creativity of moviemaking been more firmly tied to the pitiless permanency of
physical death.
The example of Kim Ki-young demonstrates that engaging with the termi-
nation of existence provides the horror film with its single greatest preoccupa-
tion and attraction. Movie marketeers in South Korea know this. (Consider
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 foreword ix

the taglines of contemporary titles like Shadows in the Palace [Goongnyeo, Kim
Mi-jeong, 2007 – ‘Silence or Death’] and The Cat [Goyangyi: Jookeumeul
boneun doo gaeui noon, Byeon Seung-wook, 2011] – ‘Two Eyes That See
Death’]). So too do many of the contributors to this book. Some proceed on
the understanding that awareness of death takes culturally and historically
specific forms in South Korea. Others point to more universal tendencies, rec-
ognising that horror film spectators protectively mimic the reactions, the looks
of fright and terror, performed by actors. What are such viewers acknowledg-
ing? What are they blocking out? Involuntary chills experienced at moments
of concentrated cinematic force provide a sense of what it must be like to feel
one’s final heartbeat.
Constraints of time and money habitually characterise film production in
South Korea, and creativity, stress and twisted ambition sometimes conspire
to propel filmmakers across the line separating safety from peril. In each
of the historically distinct film cycles discussed in Korean Horror Cinema,
directors, actors and other movie personnel have taken significant risks in
pursuit of art – actions that have potentially brought them one step closer to
death. A woman simulates a knife attack on a baby before starting to throttle
it in a scene in A Public Cemetery under the Moon (Wolha-eui gongdongmyoji,
Gwon Cheol-hwi, 1967): surely that baby’s tears, its distress, are real? A
rowdy man and woman enthusiastically go at it in the drunken murder scene
in Sorum (Soreum, Yoon Jong-chan, 2001), thrashing out, over the course
of a single take lasting five agonising minutes, an astonishingly physical
fight that transcends mere performativity. News reports claim that extras
were subjected to hazardous working conditions on The Host (Gwoemul,
Bong Joon-ho, 2006), made to stand for hours on end in Seoul’s stinking
sewers. Talking to me at the time of the release of the hideous I Saw the
Devil (Angmareul boatda, Kim Ji-woon, 2011), Ralph Tae Young Choi of
Live Tone, the country’s leading audio post-production studio, explains the
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

experiences of sound designers: ‘My staff sometimes have to take a break

after working on horror films. It can be pretty intense. They need to chill
out afterwards, be by themselves or else with the family. Otherwise they
might crack up, you see.’
Watching horror movies certainly brings to mind fascinating yet neglected
questions of cultural analysis: Is filmmaking pathological? Are movie directors
sick? Is horror film production a disease? The genre functions at times as an
allegory of itself, a series of audio-visual documents chronicling the risks and
rewards that mark its own production. The empirical thus adds another level
of complexity to the various generic ambivalences – all linked to the contradic-
tory pleasures of terror – identified by contributors to Korean Horror Cinema.
Films conjure nightmares, but making them can itself be a daymare; death may
be confronted through aesthetic risk-taking; achieving cinematic immortality
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 x forewo rd

provides one means of resisting the endless sleep that waits patiently for each
and every one of us.
This book’s appearance may demand an investment of precious time on the
part of readers eager to catch up on titles with which they are unacquainted.
The sacrifice is well worth it. Many of the Korean horror films discussed in
these pages are compelling and provocative, as well as scary and enjoyable. My
own indispensables include The Housemaid (Hanyeo, Kim Ki-young, 1960),
The Devil’s Stairway (Maeui gyedan, Lee Man-hee, 1964), A Devilish Homicide
(Salinma, Lee Yong-min, 1965), The Thousand Year Old Fox (Cheonnyeonho,
Shin Sang-ok, 1969), Iodo (I-eo-do, Kim Ki-young, 1977), Memento Mori
(Yeogogoedam dubeonjjae iyagi, Kim Tae-yong and Min Kyu-dong, 1999),
Blood Rain (Hyeol-ui-nu, Kim Dai-seung, 2005), Epitaph (Gidam, Jeong
Sik and Jung Bum-sik, 2007), Chaw (Chau, Shin Jung-won, 2009) and The
Howling (Hawoolling, Yu Ha, 2011) – fabulous movies all, conceived and
assembled by the martyred dead or else by living souls destined not to outlast
the next seventy years. These are examples of cinematic art produced by
people who made smart decisions about what to do with the brief amount of
time allotted to them. Facing up to life’s ultimate taboo, they open our eyes
and ears to the facts of death.
Julian Stringer
September 2012
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 c on tribu to rs

Contributors

James Byrne is a funded PhD student at the University of

Northumbria, UK, where he is writing a thesis on the history of Korean horror
cinema.
Robert L. Cagle is the Cinema Studies Specialist for the University of Illinois
Library, US. He writes about film, television and popular culture, and is pres-
ently at work on a project examining the use of melodramatic conventions in
popular South Korean feature films and television dramas.
Hye Seung Chung is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the
Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, US. She
is the author of Kim Ki-duk (University of Illinois Press, 2012) and Hollywood
Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance (Temple
University Press, 2006), as well as numerous articles on Korean cinema and
Asian American identities in US popular culture. Her writing has appeared in
such academic journals as Asian Cinema, Cinema Journal, Historical Journal of
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film
and Television and Post Script.
David Scott Diffrient is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in
the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University,
US. His articles on international cinema have been published in such jour-
nals as Cinema Journal, Film & History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio,
and Television, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Journal of Film and
Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television and Post Script, as well as in the
edited collections East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections
on Film (2008), New Korean Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005)
and Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema
(State University of New York Press, 2007). He is the author of a book on

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 xii con tr ibuto r s

the television series M*A*S*H (Wayne State University Press, 2008) and
the editor of a volume on the ‘screwball’ TV series Gilmore Girls (Syracuse
University Press, 2010).
Yun Mi Hwang is a teaching fellow at the University of Ulsan, South Korea.
She received her PhD on South Korean historical dramas from the University
of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. Her research interests include Asian cinemas
and costume genre, and creative industries and heritage consumption. She has
contributed to the journals PARADOXA and Journal of Japanese & Korean
Cinema, and edited the collections Film Festival Year Book 2: Film Festivals
and Imagined Communities (St Andrews Film Studies, 2010) and Transnational
Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas: The Reel Asian Exchange (Routledge,
2012). She is currently working on her monograph ‘Heritage on Screen: South
Korean Historical Drama 2002–2013’.
Kyu Hyun Kim is Associate Professor of Japanese and Korean History at
University of California, Davis, US. He received a PhD in History and East
Asian Languages at Harvard University, specialising in modern Japanese
history, and has since been an Edwin O. Reischauer Postdoctoral Fellow
and a recipient of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship.
He is the author of The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism
and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Harvard Asia Center
Publications, 2007), in which he examines the development of the parliamen-
tarian and constitutional movement in the late 1870s and early 1880s, against
the existing view that Japan’s modernisation was primarily a state-directed
affair. He is currently working on the second book project, tentatively entitled
Treasonous Patriots: Colonial Modernity, War Mobilization and the Problem of
Identity in Korea. Kim has written many articles on the political and intel-
lectual history of modern Japan, the Korean colonial experience, and Korean
cinema and popular culture. He is Academic Adviser and Contributing Editor
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

to [Link], the oldest English-language webpage devoted to

Korean cinema.
Hyangjin Lee is a Professor of Sociology in the College of Intercultural
Communication at Rikkyo University, Japan, and an honorary researcher
of East Asian Culture at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her publica-
tions include Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics
(Manchester University Press, 2000) and Sociology of Korean Wave: Women,
Family and Fandom (Iwanami, 2008). Her work has also been published in
Spanish, Japanese and Italian. She organised and worked as the director of
the UK Korean Film Festival with the support of the Showroom Cinema in
Sheffield between 2001 and 2006. Her current research projects are on histori-
cal memories and transnational Korean cinema.

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 contributors xiii

Nikki J. Y. Lee is a Lecturer in English, Culture and Media at Nottingham

Trent University, UK. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths
College, University of London, UK. Her research interests cover transna-
tional East Asian cinemas and popular culture. She has published several arti-
cles on Korean films and directors in edited collections, as well as in Cinema
Journal and Transnational Cinemas. She is co-editor of a forthcoming volume,
The Korean Cinema Book (with Julian Stringer, BFI, 2013).
Leung Wing-Fai is Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies, University
College Cork, Ireland. She was previously at the University of St Gallen,
Switzerland, co-authoring a book on the contemporary media landscape and
urban culture in Shanghai. She obtained her doctoral degree at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her publications include
East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (co-edited
with Leon Hunt, 2008); ‘Multi-media Stardom, Songs and Performance in
Hong Kong Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies (2011); ‘Importing
Genre, Exporting Cult: The Japanese Zom-com’, Asian Cinema (2011); and
‘The Transnational Journey of O Ren Ishii: The American Cultification of
the Asian Female Avenger’, in Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific
Cinemas: The Reel Asian Exchange (Routledge, 2012).
Daniel Martin is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea. His recent
research concerns the international circulation of films from South Korea
(as well as Japan and Hong Kong). His work has been published in Cinema
Journal, Acta Koreana, Film International, Asian Cinema and New Review of
Film & Television Studies, and is forthcoming in the edited collections The
Korean Cinema Book (BFI, 2013), East Asian Film Noir (I. B. Tauris), The
Blackwell Companion to the Horror Film, Superheroes on Screen and East Asian
Film Stars (all forthcoming).
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Mark Morris teaches Japanese and Korean film, and Japanese literature in the
Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. His earlier
research concerned pre-modern Japanese literature and modern Japanese
fiction. More recently, he has been writing about the connections between
contemporary South Korean film and earlier film genres. Online versions
of some of this work are available via the Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
website: [Link]
Eunha Oh completed her first degree in English Language and Literature
at Yonsei University, South Korea, before undertaking an MA in Media
Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, US as a Fulbright Scholar. She
then completed a PhD in Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern
Illinois University Carbondale, US. Her dissertation, ‘Monster Mothers and
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 xiv con tr ibuto r s

the Confucian Ideal: Korean Horror Cinema in the Park Chung Hee Era’,
explored the patriarchal unconscious in the Confucian family. Her research
interest also lies in Korean popular culture; she is the author of Manhwatopia
(Hankyoreh, 1999), and has contributed to the Encyclopedia of Social Movement
Media (Sage, 2010).
Alison Peirse is Programme Leader in Film and Television Studies at the
University of Northumbria, UK, where she writes on and teaches British,
East Asian and American horror film and television. She is the author of After
Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film (I. B. Tauris, 2013) and recently edited a
special issue of Asian Cinema (2011) on horror and cult cinema. Her recent
publications include ‘Ocularcentrism, Horror and The Lord of the Rings Films’,
Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (2012), ‘Tracing Tradition in
Korean Horror Film’, Asian Cinema (2011) and ‘A Broken Tradition? British
Telefantasy and Children’s Television in the 1980s and 1990s’, Visual Culture
in Britain (2010).
Chi-Yun Shin is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam
University, UK. She is co-editor of New Korean Cinema (Edinburgh
University Press, 2005), and has contributed to Seoul Searching: Identity and
Culture in Korean Cinema (State University of New York Press, 2007), Horror
to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (Hong Kong University
Press, 2009), Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley–Blackwell,
forthcoming), and journals such as Paragraph, Jump Cut and Transnational
Cinemas. She is currently co-editing East Asian Film Noir for I. B. Tauris and
is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Japanese and Korean
Cinema.
Iain Robert Smith is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of
Roehampton, UK. He is the author of The Hollywood Meme: Global
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Adaptations of American Film and Television (Edinburgh University Press,

forthcoming) and editor of Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking,
Transformation (available at [Link]
[Link], 2009). He has published articles in a range of international jour-
nals, including Velvet Light Trap, and is currently a co-investigator on the
Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network ‘Media
Across Borders’.
Julian Stringer is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at
the University of Nottingham, UK. He has published widely on East Asian
cinema, film festivals and transnational cinema. His books include Movie
Blockbusters (ed., Routledge, 2003), New Korean Cinema (co-ed., Edinburgh
University Press, 2005), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (co-ed.,
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 contributors xv

Routledge, 2007) and The Korean Cinema Book (co-ed., BFI, forthcom-
ing, 2013). He recently organised academic conferences at Shanghai Expo
(October 2010) and the China National Film Museum, Beijing (January
2011).
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 Introduction
Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin

In August 2008, the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) launched a screening series
entitled ‘The Special Space, the Special Horror’. KOFA made available to
stream on demand a selection of eight horror films (gongpo yeonghwa) picked
from across five decades of cinema, proclaiming ‘Summers are for the horror
film!’ and that the exhibition was designed to ‘cool down the midsummer’s
sweltering heat’ (Seong 2008). The regular KOFA special screenings – which
have also included a series on classic horror films (July 2008) and monster
movies (July 2009) – provide a useful entry point for our discussion of the
history of Korean horror cinema and demonstrates some of the cultural spe-
cificity of Korean horror cinema in its industrial contexts.1 As Seong notes,
the horror films are designed to ‘cool’ the audience; traditionally, horror films
are screened domestically during the summer months, as they are thought
to be effective at lowering body temperature by providing ‘chills’. In addi-
tion, a great deal of pre-1990s Korean horror film remains accessible only in
print form at KOFA’s archives in Seoul. By mining this archive, KOFA is
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

able to bring to light otherwise unknown or unavailable horror films such as

You Become a Star Too (Neo ttohan byeoli doei, Lee Jang-ho, 1975) and The
Haunted Wedding Dress (Mangryeongeui waedingdeuraeseu, Park Yoon-gyo,
1981). The films chosen include the productions of such cinematic luminaries
as Shin Sang-ok and Kim Ki-young, demonstrating that the most prominent
of national cinema directors have worked in the genre, while all of the films
included in the various screening series date from 1960 or later, revealing
the horror genre’s origins in this decade; similarly there are notable clusters
of films from the mid-1960s and the early 2000s, demarcating high points of
production.
The film narratives themselves are revealing; often preoccupied with han
(a sense of agonising grief at unfair suffering) and embedded in melodramatic
plots – the single genre which underpins nearly all filmic moments of horror
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 2 alison p e i rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

– they move in space and time between contemporary urban locations and
Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) settings reminiscent of classic morality literature
(gongan soseol). Regardless of the setting or time period, many, including Song
of the Dead (Manglyeong-eui gog, Park Yun-Kyo, 1980), embed their stories in
female relationships that, in turn, are rooted in Korean Confucian tradition
and the emphasis on blood / biological familialism (hyeolyeon juui); in this
scenario, the avenging female ghost (wonhon) returns from the grave, often to
protect her children (if she has been fortunate enough to become a mother), to
take vengeance on her murderers and oppressors, and to right the (perceived
social) wrongs wrought upon her. One of the most interesting things that
KOFA’s various screening series reveal is how many of these films have their
pre-cinematic roots in Korean folklore and ghost stories. Narratives of animal
transformation are at the heart of Korean culture; as the following section will
now explore, they are not merely present in Korea’s horror films, but they are
also part of an established and extensive lineage that goes back as far as the
country’s own creation myths.

as i an f o l k l o r e : t h e e me r g e n c e of k or ea n
ho rr o r
According to the tale of Dangun (Tangun), a bear and a tiger begged Hwanung,
son of the celestial Emperor Hwanin, to transform them into human beings.
Hwanung promised them transfiguration into a man and a woman if they
could remain in a cave for a hundred days, surviving by eating only garlic and
the mugwort plant. The impatient tiger – who was to be the man – gave up and
ran away. The patient bear became a woman, and then wed Hwanung and gave
birth to Dangun, who became the great king of Korea’s first kingdom (Riordan
1994: 2; Leeming 2010: 167; Chung 2007: 41). In other influential folklore, the
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fox, like the tiger, is considered to be a crafty animal, sly and magical. Foxes
appear in tales across East Asia, including the Japanese story of the fox family,
the Korean fox girl and the eighth-century Chinese tale of the fox physicians
(Bush 2001: 50–1). These animal motifs are thus specifically Korean, yet share
significant commonalities with other pan-Asian folklores and myths.
Indeed, while scholarship on contemporary Korean horror cinema is often
quick to point out the genre’s obvious influences in the form of American
slasher films and Japanese horror cinema, traces of international cinema are
evident in its films from its first formative cycle. Shin Sang-ok’s Madame
White Snake (Baeksabu-in, 1960) is taken from the traditional Chinese folk-
tale ‘The White Snake’ and tells the tragic tale of a thousand-year-old snake
who turns into a human and falls in love with a young pharmacist. Japanese
popular culture has also always played its part. As Chua Beng Huat and
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 3

Koichi Iwabuchi have pointed out, the bitter memory of Japanese colonisation
led to an official ban on the importation of all Japanese cultural products in
1945, a ban not lifted until 1998. However, Korea did not remain impervi-
ous to Japanese popular culture, which instead found its way into the country
through a ‘constant stream of underground importation’ that involved the
copying, partial integration, plagiarism and reproduction of Japanese cultural
motifs in Korean products (2008: 4). Indeed, the influence of the Japanese
kaibyo eiga (ghost cat film) can be seen in a number of Korean horror films
of the 1960s, including blood-drinking vengeance cats in A Devilish Homicide
(Salinma, Lee Yong-min, 1965) and A Ghost Story of the Joseon Dynasty (Ijo
gwoedam, Shin Sang-ok, 1970).
Thus, what we see here is how the ingrained tales of animal transforma-
tion prevalent in Korean popular culture permeate their way into the nation’s
horror cinema. This is particularly evident during the 1960s, when multiple
traditions begin to emerge, and Korean horror cinema established its first
recurring tropes. Films such as The Thousand Year Old Fox (Cheonnyeonho,
Shin Sang-ok, 1969) were released, whose narrative revolves around the
gumiho, the (usually female) nine-tailed fox spirit. Yet while folklore is one
key strand of the genre, there is no single canon or definitive type of Korean
horror film, and the examples discussed in this book should be understood
within specific cycles of production rather than simply as part of a homog-
enous horror film genre. Following Amanda Ann Klein’s work on film cycles
(2011), part of what this book aims to do is to consider how specific cycles
were formed within the horror genre. Much of our analysis questions the
meaning and purposes of the films and locates them within their historical
and production context: what type of film is the studio trying to make? How
does this relate to or depart from recent or current horror film conventions?
How is this communicated in the promotional material? How are these ideas
publicly received?
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a hi s to r y o f ko r e a n ho r r o r fr om t h e 1 9 6 0 s
Histories of Korean horror invariably begin with the 1960s, when the genre
entered its first truly fertile period. Though ghosts had appeared in Korean
film as early as 1924, when the first adaptation of the moralistic ghost fable
The Story of Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon (Kim Yeong-hwan) was released,
charting the history of the genre in this early period is problematic. Indeed,
this is an issue shared by historians of Korean cinema more generally, due to
the particular circumstances under which filmmaking began in Korea. From
1910 until the end of the Second World War, Korea was under the colonial
rule of the Japanese, and all cultural production was strictly controlled. Films
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 4 alison p e i rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

made during this period often necessarily contained propagandist messages in

support of the Japanese colonial government, and attempts at producing artis-
tically or politically independent films were blocked; as Hyangjin Lee notes,
in this period ‘Koreans could not develop their own film industry’ (2000: 18).
Post-liberation, Choi In-kyu’s Hurrah, For Freedom! (Jayu manse, 1946) is
often considered a starting point for truly ‘Korean’ Korean cinema, yet the
film industry in the late 1940s had little chance to develop, and production was
interrupted by the division between North and South, and then the Korean
War of 1950–3. It was only after rapid modernisation and Westernisation
began in South Korea that its cinema entered its first ‘Golden Age’, and the
mid- to late 1950s proved to be a formative period for popular melodrama
(McHugh and Abelmann 2005).
Due to these factors, and the overwhelming scarcity of horror-themed
films produced prior, this collection begins its consideration of Korean
horror film in the 1960s. Specifically, The Housemaid (Hanyeo), released in
1960 and directed by Kim Ki-young, is widely credited with initiating the
first cycle of modern Korean horror. A gothic melodrama of infidelity and
infanticide, the film was inspired by a real-life murder case, and caused a
scandal on its initial release. Contemporary Korean critics described The
Housemaid as ‘vulgar’, ‘excessive’ and ‘grotesque’, but the reception was far
from one-sided and there was also strong praise from those who immediately
recognised the film’s power and artistry (see Lee 2009). The film is horrific
and scandalously erotic in its depiction of a husband’s affair with his maid
and the murderous repercussions of her unplanned pregnancy, yet the film is
also strongly influenced by both censorship and contemporary moral values,
ending with an absurd return to the status quo so unexpected it seems almost
satirical.
The Housemaid and its director have since been the subject of significant
academic and critical attention: Kyung Hyun Kim (2004; 2005) has written
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about the film’s enduring legacy and thematic richness; Chris Berry on the
film’s gender and sexual dynamics (2007); Nikki J. Y. Lee and Julian Stringer
on Kim’s ‘Housemaid Trilogy’ (2012); and the Korean Film Council’s series
of short books on individual directors inevitably included a volume dedicated
to Kim Ki-young (Kim Hong-joon 2007). Undoubtedly, The Housemaid had
a huge influence, both on Korean cinema in general and on the psycho-sexual
cycle of women’s revenge horror that would follow. Critic Lee Yeon-ho,
playing tribute to the film on the occasion of its Korean Film Archive DVD
release, wrote that the film is ‘unprecedentedly perfect’ and that simply ‘there
is a “before” and “after” The Housemaid in Korean film history’ (Lee 2009).
In spite of Kim’s towering reputation as a master of horror (he is nicknamed
‘Mr Monster’), it has often been argued that his films are notably unlike those
of his contemporaries, deviating from generic norms in interesting ways; as
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 5

Hyangjin Lee notes in her chapter for this collection, The Housemaid is a ghost
film without a ghost, concerned more with family drama than supernatural
possibilities.
Indeed, the strong streak of melodrama in Korean horror is one of the defin-
ing characteristics of the genre. Melodrama is the default narrative mode in
Korean cinema, and it underpins the majority of films produced in all genres.
This is due in large part to the enduring legacy of shinpa, now regarded as an
exaggerated subgenre of cinematic melodrama but originally a Japanese theat-
rical tradition of the late 1880s, imported to Korea during the colonial period
and a widely dominant cinematic trend by the 1920s (Choi 2010: 9; Min et
al. 2003: 33; Paquet 2007: 44). Shinpa connotes tragic tales of romance and
female suffering, defeatist narratives with inevitably sad endings, designed
as quintessential ‘tear jerkers’. So influential is the melodramatic mode in
Korean cinema that its narrative qualities frequently emerge in horror. As
Jinhee Choi (2010) has argued, this is true of the contemporary cycle of high-
school horror, the predominant tone of which is sadness rather than fear; yet
even the most exploitative films from the genre’s classic cycle have a tragic /
melodramatic dimension. Thus, as The Housemaid led the way for a cycle of
supernatural revenge tales, focusing primarily on cruelly murdered women,
Korean horror in the 1960s continued to diversify without losing its melodra-
matic edge.
Notably, the 1960s saw the emergence of the Korean giant monster movie, in
obvious imitation of the Japanese daikaiju cycle that began with Honda Ishiro’s
truly iconic Godzilla (Gojira, 1954). Space Monster Wangmagwi (Woojoogoein
wangmagwi, Kwon Hyeok-jin, 1967) introduced Korean audiences to a ram-
paging, wedding-crashing, city-destroying alien beast; the more memorable
Yongary, Monster from the Deep (Taegoesoo Yonggari, Kim Kee-deok, 1967)
followed shortly after. Yongary presents a familiar narrative: an impossibly
enormous bipedal lizard ploughs through a city, destroying property while
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government and scientists frantically try to foil the creature. Yongary is like
Godzilla in so many ways (not least the creature’s visual design), yet the film
is distinctly Korean both in its setting (Seoul) and its strong element of tragic
melodrama. The monster Yongary befriends (and even dances with) a young
boy, revealing his fundamental innocence; it is tempting to read this film as
a companion piece to Kim’s earlier The Barefoot Youth (Maenbaleui cheong-
choon, 1964), a (non-horror) melodrama about misunderstood youth whose
desire for freedom from society seals their fates.
These melodramatic monster movies extended beyond the national borders
of South Korea, and in fact represented the first wave of K-horror exports
to the Western world. Yongary was released in the US (in a poorly dubbed
version) and was followed in 1976 by Ape (aka A*P*E) (King Kong-eui dae-
yeokseub, Choi Yeong-cheol and Paul Leder), an international co-production
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 6 alison p e i rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

between South Korea and the US with a predominantly English cast and
a monster (in essence, King Kong) more familiar to Western audiences.2
Additionally, North Korea produced its own ideologically specific giant
monster movies, most notoriously with Pulgasari (Boolgasari, Shin Sang-
ok, North Korea, 1985), a remake of a South Korean film from 1962
(Songdomalnyeoneui Boolgasari, directed by Kim Myeong-jae). North Korea’s
metal-eating monster serves as a vivid propagandist metaphor for the exploita-
tion of the proletariat, and also demonstrates the genuine symbolic power of
the Korean giant creature film.
The cycle(s) of Korean horror that emerged in the 1960s and continued
throughout the 1970s served to establish some of the enduring traits and tropes
of the genre. As explored in many of the chapters that follow, classic Korean
horror is a cinema of folklore and ghosts, of gumiho and wonhon, primarily
if not exclusively supernatural (though gory horror in a more realist mode
was manifest in non-genre films, as Mark Morris argues later). In the classic
Korean horror film, when good people die, they return from the dead to seek
revenge; when bad people commit evil, they are punished by permanent death.
Suffering is shared by all parties, but justice ultimately prevails. Thus, Korean
horror films of this period present a clear worldview with consistent rules and
outcomes, reflecting contemporary moral values, societal and cultural pres-
sures, and a vested interest in han. At the end of the 1970s, as the Korean
horror film entered a new phase, it continued to be profoundly shaped by
contemporary cultural and political developments.

k o r e a n c i n e ma st u d ie s a n d t h e h or r or fil m
In 2005, two prominent edited book collections on Korean cinema were pub-
lished: New Korean Cinema (Shin and Stringer) and South Korean Golden
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Age Melodrama (McHugh and Abelmann). Prior to these, there had only
been a handful of publications on Korean cinema, including monographs
(Lee 2000; Min et al. 2003; Kim 2004), an edited collection on director Im
Kwon-taek (James and Kim 2001) and a catalogue of the festival held at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1994 (Rayns 1995). McHugh
and Abelmann’s contribution is of central importance, as melodrama is the
single genre underpinning the majority of Korean cinema, but also offers a
reminder of the scant examination to date on Korean film genres. In response
to this, this book not only reveals the generic hybridity of Korean horror
cinema in its constant fusion with melodrama, science fiction and comedy,
but extends this analysis into a focused study of a popular genre that has
a great deal of currency in the global marketplace. Similarly, New Korean
Cinema offers a field-defining analysis of contemporary Korean cinema.
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 7

Two of the chapters engage with very different notions of Korean horror
film – Kyu Hyun Kim on Park Chan-wook’s ‘extreme’ films, and Andrew
Grossman and Jooran Lee on the haunted high-school film Memento Mori
(Yeogogoedam dubeonjjae iyagi, Kim Tae-yong and Min Kyu-dong, 1999).
The writers in our collection build on the foundational work in this volume
to consider how the contemporary Korean horror film continues to trans-
form, while still reflecting a rich heritage of nationally specific thematic and
stylistic preoccupations.
Horror is now long established as an important area in Film Studies;
though Robin Wood was not the first to take horror seriously, it was his
seminal article in Film Comment in 1978, ‘Return of the Repressed’, that
inaugurated the academic study of the genre.3 Some twenty-six years after
the publication of this article, Wood provided a thoughtful foreword for the
edited collection Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare,
revealing that he had little sense in the 1970s that his work (or that of his
fellow writers Richard Lippe and Andrew Britton) would assume ‘historic
importance’, and, ever determined to encourage new avenues of intellectual
inquiry, was resistant to claims that his theories were definitive (Wood 2004:
xiii). Wood’s writing was born out of leftist political commitment, utilising
Marx and Freud to read the horror films of the late 1960s and 1970s from
a radical perspective. Yet, as he notes with some surprise, the main criti-
cisms of his approach ‘concentrated not on politics but on psychoanalysis,
which to us was a valuable weapon that could be used politically’ (ibid.).
Despite Wood’s overarching interest in the political, it is indeed his use of
psychoanalysis that has been prominently brought to bear on the study of
horror film; until very recently, theoretical frameworks indebted to Freudian
psychoanalysis were used to unearth the gendered dynamics of horror film
spectatorship. While the 1980s was a relatively fallow period for horror film
scholarship – bar Linda Williams’s article ‘When the Woman Looks’ (1984)
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and the horror-orientated issue of Screen (1986) which published Pete Boss
and Philip Brophy’s articles on contemporary body horror – the 1990s wit-
nessed a revival of interest in the study of the genre, and much of the writing
was dominated by feminist critiques and / or a preoccupation with issues of
gendered representations. Scholars included Williams (1991), Barbara Creed
(1993) and Carol Clover (1992), and all responded, in their different ways,
not only to Wood but also to Laura Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure; they
concerned themselves with the representation of the woman, of her body,
the way that she is looked at, and the oscillating sadomasochistic pleasures
inherent in watching her perform roles of terror, pleasure and pain. Yet these
studies of horror have focused predominantly on a Western canon of film and
filmmakers, and until recently the majority of work in this area excluded East
Asian cinema entirely.
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 8 alison p e i rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

d ar k ti me s, r e b ir t h a nd r e in v en t ion : k or ea n
f i lm pr o d uc t i o n f r o m t h e 1 9 8 0 s
While Western theories of the horror film were well established and increas-
ingly refined in the 1980s, and the Hollywood slasher film was enjoying its
most commercially vital period, this decade is typically descried as a ‘dark
time’ for South Korean cinema. Audiences were increasingly attracted
by imports from Hollywood and Hong Kong, and domestic production
resorted to cheap and exploitative fare. Likewise, the Korean horror of this
decade is largely forgotten and ignored by historians and academics, due to
the artistically rich waves of horror that preceded and followed this appar-
ently fallow period. Yet production on genre films continued throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, and the horror produced at this time is often just as
thematically meaningful and creatively dynamic as the best films from the
‘Golden Age’.
The strongest factor influencing the style and content of these films
was the ‘3S’ policy adopted by the Chun Doo-hwan government in 1980.
Intended to distract the populace and keep them entertained in spite of
political turmoil and human rights abuses, the ‘3S’ policy promoted the pro-
duction and consumption of ‘sports, screen and sex’; for the film industry,
this meant relaxed censorship on sexual content and the first boom of the
Korean erotic movie. Horror followed this trend, and an emblematic film of
the period saw the genre returning to its origins with a reinvention of The
Housemaid, in the form of Suddenly a Dark Night (Gipeun bam gabjagi, Ko
Yeong-nam, 1981). More explicit but not necessarily more erotic, Suddenly
a Dark Night is just as reflective of its times as was Kim’s original film. The
hyperbolic retelling of the tale adds copious amounts of narratively unjusti-
fied nudity, and a (distinctly Korean) supernatural element in the form of
a small shamanistic totem that grows to human size and goes on a murder-
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ous rampage. Where the original housemaid had murderous designs on the
patriarch and his children, the maid in the later film victimises only her love
rival, the wife. Imitating the Hollywood slasher film in many ways, Suddenly
a Dark Night is told primarily from the wife’s perspective, as her sense of
paranoia and fear culminates in her desperate efforts to escape the impossibly
monstrous killer.
Not all Korean horror of this period was concerned with erotic fantasies
and exploitative violence; as Eunha Oh notes in her chapter for this collection,
several films from the 1980s examined family dynamics in profound ways and
continued the trend of the earlier period in reflecting Confucian ideals and
traditional beliefs. In 2011, the Korean Film Archive in Seoul hosted a retro-
spective of Korean horror from the 1980s, a rare opportunity to see many of
these films. Due to their perceived inferior quality and problematic political
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 9

context, the majority of horror from this period remains unavailable, in stark
contrast to the unprecedentedly wide distribution that the most recent wave of
Korean horror has enjoyed.
Just as Kim’s The Housemaid is credited with instigating the horror cycle of
the 1960s, the high school-set ghost film Whispering Corridors (Yeogo gwedam,
Park Ki-hyung, 1998) is widely acknowledged as reinvigorating Korean horror
at the end of the 1990s. The film connected with local audiences and struck
a balance between scares, melodrama and engaging with culturally specific
themes (Black 2003; Choi 2010). Whispering Corridors also succeeded in emu-
lating the Hollywood pattern of franchising horror, and has produced four
sequels to date. The contemporary cycle has seen the emergence of clear pat-
terns of production and distribution: horror films are typically (but certainly
not always) helmed by first-time directors and, as noted above, released during
the summer months to provide ‘chills’ during the hot weather. The current
cycle also demonstrates recurring narrative tropes that suggest a strong sense
of audience expectations and a refined commercial formula.
None the less, the Korean horror produced in and after the late 1990s
demonstrates experimentation and considerable diversity. To list just a few
examples, recent years have seen restrained gothic horror in Kim Ji-woon’s
masterful A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon, 2003), the gory excesses
of Bloody Reunion (aka To Sir, With Love) (Seuseungeui eunhye, Im Dae-woong,
2006), radical gender identity in The Wig (Gabal, Won Sin-yeon, 2005), slap-
stick horror-comedy in To Catch a Virgin Ghost (Sisilli 2Km, Shin Jeong-won,
2004), ‘underground’ independent horror in Teenage Hooker Became a Killing
Machine (Daehakroaeseo maechoonhadaga tomaksalhae danghan yeogosaeng ajik
Daehakroae issda, Nam Ki-woong, 2000), pan-Asian productions such as
the Vietnam-set Muoi: Legend of a Portrait (Meui, Kim Tae-kyeong, 2007),
and the appropriation of iconic Western monsters by Korean filmmakers in
the zombie films The Guard Post (GP506, Kong Soo-chang, 2007) and The
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Neighbour Zombie (Iwootjib jombi, Hong Yeong-geun, Jang Yoon-jeong, Oh

Yeong-doo, Ryoo Hoon, 2010), the vampire movies Thirst (Bakjwi, Park
Chan-wook, 2009) and Vampire Cop Ricky (Heubhyeol hyeongsa nadoyeol, Lee
Si-myeong, 2006), and finally a reimagining of the werewolf film The Howling
(Hawoolling, Yu Ha, 2011).
The Korean horror boom in recent years has seen fluctuating patterns of
success, from a peak in 2002, when Ahn Byung-ki’s Phone (Pon) broke the
year-end top ten at the domestic box office, to a low in 2007, when none of
the summer’s horror releases struck a chord with local audiences. Yet even
more significant is the international success of Korean horror, as numerous
films enjoyed unprecedented visibility overseas, as part of broader patterns of
increased consumption of Korean cinema in general, and a renewed Western
interest in Japanese and other East Asian horror.
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 10 alison p ei rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

Indeed, no film is more representative of the success of Korean cult

cinema abroad than Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003). Awarded the Grand
Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, Oldboy has become one of the
most widely distributed and most enthusiastically appreciated Korean films
of all time. Yet Oldboy, in spite of its dark theme and violent content, is not
a horror film; rather, Park’s film and many others are part of a genre that at
once incorporates, expands and discards horror. The ‘Asia Extreme’ brand,
an invention of British distribution company Tartan Films, was designed
to capitalise on trends and audience tastes operating beyond the bounds
of specific genres. This company, wildly influential among audiences and
critics in the US and UK, grouped together films of disparate genres from
Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and South Korea under a single banner. The
company’s marketing tactics revolved around Orientalist perceptions of the
Far East as morally and culturally alien and exotic, and thus emphasised the
violent and sexual content of the films it released (Shin 2009; Martin 2011).
Many contemporary audiences in the US and UK will have first encountered
a Korean horror film in this context. As this collections serves to demon-
strate, the few Korean horror films released in the West are hardly repre-
sentative of the diversity of the domestic genre; yet the Asia Extreme brand
proved profitable. Thus, many of the most visible contemporary Korean
films are known for their transgressive violent and / or sexual content, and
it is within this transnational cycle that the industry has returned, again, to
The Housemaid.
The 2010 version of The Housemaid (Hanyeo, Im Sang-soo) is as much
a sign of the times as Kim’s original film and Ko’s Suddenly a Dark Night.
Im’s film is an opportunistic remake, capitalising on international expecta-
tions of Korean extreme cinema and the newly raised profile of the 1960
film (which was restored by the World Cinema Foundation and screened
at festivals worldwide in 2008, championed by Martin Scorsese as a classic
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of world cinema). The controversial 2010 film discards supernatural ele-

ments and even the trappings of the horror genre, creating instead a sexually
explicit drama of infidelity and attempted murder, dwelling on scenes of
hedonistic pleasure and spiteful vengeance. The film seems made with the
international market in mind, and it was invited to compete for the Palme
d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. Indeed, the genre is interna-
tionalising even more, with Korean directors working on English-language
Hollywood productions: Park Chan-wook’s vampire thriller Stoker (2013)
and Bong Joon-ho’s apocalyptic action film Snowpiercer (2013) are just two
examples. Korean horror, therefore, is enjoying a period of unprecedented
domestic success and worldwide visibility, yet its identity is arguably in need
of precise definition.

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 i n t r o du c t i o n 11

korean horror cinema a nd it s p l a c e in k or ea n

c i ne m a st ud ie s
As we write this introduction in 2012, it seems evident that scholarship on
Korean cinema continues to build momentum. There have been four mono-
graphs dedicated to Korean cinema published in the last two years alone, cov-
ering a range of material from North Korea (Schonherr 2012), film production
during the occupation (Yecies and Shim 2011), film festivals (Ahn 2012) and
cinema’s contribution to hallyu (the Korean Wave) (Kim 2011). Even within
these four volumes, a range of methodologies is also apparent from analyses
of industrial, economic and exhibition practices, ethnographic investigation,
formal-led text / context approaches and theoretically rigorous readings that
draw upon philosophers including Gilles Deleuze. More recently, as Asian
cinema has become more internationally recognised and globally distributed,
horror studies has also turned its attentions to the East, including analyses of
the production, circulation and reception in films from Thailand (Ainslie 2011;
Ancuta 2011), Hong Kong (Yeh and Ng 2009), the Philippines (Lim 2009) and
mainland China (Willis 2011). However, it is predominantly Japanese horror
film that has received the most extensive English-language analysis, not only
in journal articles (Martin 2009; Wee 2011) but also in several book-length
studies (McRoy 2005, 2008; Balmain 2008).
As such, Korean Horror Cinema is published at a time when Korean cinema
has become an important area of study in its own right, and at the same time
that the global interest in the academic study of horror film, particularly East
Asian horror film, has grown significantly. Korean Horror Cinema is the first
edited collection that bridges the gap, bringing a critical depth and historical
breadth to Korean cinema and horror film studies. It is also the first sustained
English-language book on this subject, and here we must acknowledge the
excellent Korean-language scholarship already available on the topic. While
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there are a raft of articles available to read online in Cine 21, South Korea’s film
and entertainment magazine, two books in particular have influenced the con-
tributors to our volume: Soyoung Kim’s Ghosts of Modernity: Fantastic Korean
Cinema [Pantaseutik hanguk yoenghwa: geundaeseong-eui yuryeong-deul] (2000)
and Baek Moon-im’s Sorrowful Screaming: A History of the Female Ghost in
Korean Films [Wolha-eui yeogokseong: Yeogwi-ro ingneun hanguk gongpo yeong-
hwasa] (2008). More recently, KOFA has published the less scholarly but
still valuable Memories of the Ghost: Korean Horror Films from the 1960s to the
1980s [Mangryeong-eui Gieok: 1960–80 nyeondae hanguk gongpo yeonghwa] by
Heo Ji-woong (2011). In demonstrating the range of Korean-language mate-
rial on the topic, it is hoped that this book accesses and reveals a far broader
range of films and approaches to studying film than has been dealt with to date
in English-language publications. Our contributors, many of them Korean
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 12 alison p ei rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

speakers, draw together a wide range of material from Korean studies, Korean
cinema and horror film studies; they engage with the academic scholarship
on horror film – including Wood, Williams, Creed and Clover – while at the
same time systematically pointing out the cultural specificity of the texts,
their recurrent motifs, their historical and contextual positioning and their
industrial context, both domestically and internationally.
The methodologies employed in this book are rigorous but wide-ranging,
from theoretical and contextual analysis through to production and reception
studies. Similarly, the films chosen demonstrate the scope and ambition of the
volume: those covered include some of the most widely seen and best-known
contemporary Korean films such as Oldboy, A Tale of Two Sisters and Phone.
The collection also returns to the genre’s origins in the 1960s, covering A
Public Cemetery under the Moon (Wolha-eui gongdongmyoji, Gwon Cheol-hwi,
1967) and The Devil’s Stairway (Maeui gyedan, Lee Man-hee, 1964). The
canon of classic Korean horror is further expanded through the inclusion of
the horrific war films of the 1960s and 1970s with works such as Rainy Days
(Jangma, Yu Hyun-mok, 1979). The as-yet-uncharted 1970s and 1980s (in
English publications at least) are explored with analyses of Mother’s Grudge
(Eommaeui han, Lee Yoo-seob, 1970) and Woman’s Wail (Yeogokseong, Lee
Hyeok-soo, 1986). It also covers some of the most domestically significant
films that have not yet seen theatrical or DVD release in the West, includ-
ing The Fox With Nine Tails (Gumiho, Park Heon-su, 1994) and Shadows
in the Palace (Goongnyeo, Kim Mee-jeong, 2007), as well as considering the
international appropriation of Korean horror cinema in often surprising con-
texts: both the remake of A Tale of Two Sisters as The Uninvited (Charles and
Thomas Guard, US, 2009) in Hollywood and the remake of Oldboy as Zinda
(Sanjay Gupta, 2006) in India.
In bringing together this range of films, approaches and writers, Korean
Horror Cinema is a collection that aims to be informative and educational. It
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

attempts not only to define and explore a canon but also to illuminate previ-
ously invisible films, intending to strike a balance between accessibility and
obscurity, an idea that has become a constant preoccupation in editing this
volume. In a number of chapters, particularly the opening section on classic
Korean cinema, our writers have the great privilege of describing and analys-
ing films that are almost completely unknown; their words are required to
paint a picture for those who will not have the possibility of viewing them.
As such, this book is not simply about contemporary popular cinema, but
seeks to trace a path through a history of Korean horror, one uncharted by
English-language publications. While we would like to suggest that our col-
lection is wide-ranging, we would certainly never describe it as complete;
we offer merely one path through this fascinating period of horror film
history. There are far more films to be discussed and industry personnel
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 13

to examine: for example, we would have loved to include chapters on Lee

Yong-min’s A Flower of Evil (Agui kkot, 1961) or an exploration of Park
Yoon-kyo’s han horror films A Young Lady’s Resentment (Nangja han, 1974),
Ok-Nyeo’s Resentment (Oknyeo-eui han, 1972), The Resentful Spirit of the
Juvenile Bridegroom (Kkomasinlang-eui han, 1973) and The Magical Sword of
Skeletal Spirit (Baekgollyeong-eui mageom, 1969). And while, in this volume,
Robert L. Cagle tackles Lee Yoo-seop’s Jang-Hwa and Hong-Ryeon: A Story
Of Two Sisters (1972), there still remains a great need for analysis of his other
films, including Grudge Woman (Hannyeo, 1981). It almost goes without
saying that the dearth of material on North Korean cinema had meant a noted
absence in our collection, and it is hoped that the material covered here will
inspire more writers to take up the study of this area – for, as Julian Stringer
has suggested, to describe a body of films as ‘Korean cinema’ is near enough
a linguistic faux pas, for the majority of the work in this area refers to the
industry of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), not the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea (North Korea) (2005: 3). Notwithstanding such caveats,
this book does still offer a comprehensive portrait of the domestic market for
South Korean horror and, by acknowledging how the international and tran-
snational film market has affected the marketing and positioning of these films,
it promises to yield new knowledge and insight in examining a wide range of
Korean films across five decades of cinema. As such, it is hoped that readers of
Korean Horror Cinema will gain a well-informed and accurate depiction of the
Korean horror film, including its industry and aesthetics, and a sense of what
makes this national film genre genuinely unique. The guiding principle of the
collection has been to gather insightful, original discussions of Korean horror
that, collectively, offer an authoritative overview of the genre.
Korean Horror Cinema opens with a section on classic Korean horror, and
attempts to establish some parameters for the origins of horror filmmaking
in South Korea in the 1960s. Hyangjin Lee’s chapter provides the founda-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

tion for this section; she analyses the wonhon (vengeful female ghost) in The
Housemaid, The Devil’s Stairway, A Devilish Homicide and A Public Cemetery
under the Moon. While The Housemaid is now better known internationally,
the other films remain relatively anonymous, and The Devil’s Stairway, in
spite of being directed by the masterful Lee Man-hee, is presently entirely
unavailable on DVD format. The most important element of Lee’s chapter
– and that which so usefully sets up the collection – is her discussion of the
wonhon as a uniquely Korean creation that follows generic conventions quite
distinct from not only Western but also other East Asian horror films, par-
ticularly as represented by the Japanese onryo- (vengeful spirit). In Chapter 2,
Alison Peirse and James Byrne discuss an equally important but quite differ-
ent tradition that emerged in the 1960s: the interplay of traditional Korean
folktales and the horror film. Beginning in 1969 with The Thousand Year Old
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 14 alison p ei rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

Fox, and moving on to The Fox With Nine Tails and The Fox Family (Gumiho
gajok, Lee Hyeong-gon, 2006), Peirse and Byrne map the transformation of
the gumiho across thirty-seven years of filmmaking, and consider how each
film is emblematic of the specific historical context from which it emerges. In
Chapter 3, Mark Morris offers a provocative account of the war-horror cycle
prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s. In considering a range of films that deal
with the experience of the Korean War, including The General’s Son (Daejwa-
eui adeul, Lee Kang-cheon, 1968) and Park Sang-ho’s DMZ (Bimoojang jidae,
1965), Morris convincingly argues that the extreme violence depicted on
screen, and perpetuated by Communist invaders from the North – known not
only as the Inmingun (People’s Army) but also for many years as the bukgwigun
(Army of Northern Demons) – offers a profound level of viscerality unseen
in other horror films of the period. In the final chapter of this section, Eunha
Oh offers a valuable and enlightening account of the role of motherhood in
Korean cinema, exploring the dichotomy whereby motherhood is celebrated
as a Korean virtue, yet mothers of many kinds (stepmothers, mothers-in-
law, sacrificing mothers) occupy central positions of cinematic monstrosity.
Examining two little-known films of the 1970s and 1980s, Mother’s Grudge
and Woman’s Wail, Oh utilises Creed’s work on the monstrous-feminine while
arguing that Confucian patriarchy shapes how Korean cinema works through
the mother–child and mother-in-law relationships.
The second section of the book is concerned with the domestic context of
horror, and examines films that have struck a chord with local audiences by
appealing to specifically Korean cultural concerns. While some of these films
have achieved distribution in the West, many have not; these texts deserve
close examination precisely because they are thematically rich but largely
ignored outside Korea. In discussing Shadows in the Palace, a contemporary
film set during the Joseon Dynasty, Yun Mi Hwang proposes that we consider
texts that combine the yeogwi (female ghost) films and wangjo sageuk (royal
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

court dramas) as a form of ‘heritage horror’. Hye Seung Chung’s chapter con-
textualises the family horror films Acacia (Akasia, Park Ki-hyung, 2004) and
Uninvited (4-in yong siktak, Lee Soo-yeon, 2003) in terms of the still-taboo
topic of adoption. She persuasively reads the films as a critique of the ideology
of ‘blood familialism’ (hyeolyeon juui), which for many years has been a largely
silenced subject in Korean society and, for Chung, remains a corrosive part
of Korean life. In Chapter 7, Nikki J. Y. Lee locates her analyses of Sorum
(Soreum, Yoon Jong-chan, 2001) and Possessed (Bulsinjiok, Lee Yong-joo,
2009) in terms of architectural space and place, in order to explore the poten-
tial horror of apartment living. She argues that the decaying buildings in the
two films demonstrate how the ideology of the modern apartment often fails to
reflect the reality of living conditions for many Koreans. Turning away from
a contextual approach, David Scott Diffrient then offers a Deleuzian reading
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 15

of Oldboy, Cello (Chello hongmijoo ilga salinsagan, Lee Woo-cheol, 2005) and
The Red Shoes (Boonhongsin, Kim Yong-gyoon, 2005). In a theoretical tour de
force, he examines close-up images of the face, suggesting that their physiog-
nomy offers an embodied form of spectatorial participation and a way of think-
ing through ‘affective extremes’. The final chapter in this section, Chi-Yun
Shin’s study of Death Bell (Gosa, Yoon Hong-seung, 2008), locates the film
in terms of the internationally significant cycle of ‘haunted high school’ films
inaugurated by Whispering Corridors. Panned by critics, the film was none the
less a hit with teen audiences and defied industry expectations. Shin’s detailed
textual analysis draws on earlier Korean cinema, as well as Clover’s work on
the American slasher film, in order to consider the specifics of Death Bell’s
formula.
The final section of the book features some of the internationally best-
known Korean films, exploring how they are marketed, distributed and con-
sumed in their inter- and trans-national context. In Daniel Martin’s case study
of director Ahn Byung-ki, he draws attention to his subject as one of the few
Korean directors whose career has been spent exclusively making horror films.
In particular, Martin explores Ahn’s strategy for international success, and
analyses four of his films, including Phone and Bunshinsaba (aka Witch Board,
2004), in order to interrogate the distinctions between ‘Korean’ and ‘Asian’
horror film. Perhaps one of the best-known and most successful of all contem-
porary Korean horror films, Kim Ji-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters is explored
in very different contexts in the following two chapters. In Chapter 11, Robert
L. Cagle demarcates a crucial link between the film and a Victorian sensibility,
one manifested at an aesthetic and industrial level, a relationship which in turn
informs the film’s preoccupation with melodrama and the gothic, something
also present, as he notes, in 1940s Hollywood women’s films. While Cagle’s
analysis offers an insistent return to the past, Leung Wing-Fai’s analysis
situates the film in relation to the future: namely, its American adaptation as
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

The Uninvited. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, she

illuminates how the moments of intertextual transformation imbued in the
process of adaptation directly relate to the films’ historical and production
contexts. Continuing the process of adaptation, Iain Robert Smith then exam-
ines the transnational appropriation of Oldboy as the Indian film Zinda. Taking
inspiration from Koichi Iwabuchi’s work, Smith locates the remake in terms
of intra-Asian interaction, and what this means for the global circulation of
horror imagery. The final chapter of the collection returns to Park Chan-wook
and his vampire film Thirst (Bakjwi, 2009). Kyu Hyun Kim offers a magiste-
rial study not only of the film, but also of the international perceptions and
reception of the director himself, orchestrated through ‘internal exoticism’, art
cinema and religious imagery. In his analysis, Kim argues that ‘there should
be no conflict between reading Thirst in the context of Korean culture, history
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 16 alison p ei rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

and society and assessing its merit and power in terms of its relation to the
horror film genre’: this is precisely what we hope, as editors, we have achieved
with this volume as a whole.

a no t e o n l a n gu a ge
In focusing entirely on non-English-language cinema, this volume has neces-
sarily arrived at several editorial conventions for dealing with Korean words,
expressions, titles and names. Firstly, as noted above, the book observes
the problematic but justifiable practice of referring to South Korea simply
as ‘Korea’. Thus, unless specifically indicated otherwise, all references to
postwar ‘Korean cinema’ are about the cinema of the Republic of Korea. When
North Korean cinema is mentioned, its national origin is clearly indicated.
In Romanising Korean words to English, this volume follows the ‘Revised
Romanisation’ system as much as possible; this new method of transpos-
ing Hangeul into English was developed by the Ministry of Culture, Sports
and Tourism (MCST) and has been the prevailing convention for around
a decade, replacing the previously dominant (though still in occasional use)
McCune–Reischauer system, which is less intuitive and relies on increasingly
uncommon apostrophes and breves. Exceptions are made in the case where
a Korean person (or film character)’s name is officially (or widely recognised
as) Romanised differently. All Korean, Japanese and Chinese names given in
this volume are presented surname first, with the exception of our authors
and other academics cited whose work has been published in English. A brief
glossary of Korean terms can be found at the end of this volume.

no te s
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

1. The screening series is available from: [Link]

vod_enMain.asp; accessed 13 August 2012.
2. The original version of Yongary is still available on DVD, and is some-
thing of an enduring cult classic. The film was remade with an English cast
for the international market in 1999 by director Shim Hyung-rae. This
version of the film was released (non-theatrically) in the US as Reptilian
but enjoyed more success domestically, winning audiences in 1999 on its
initial release as Yonggary and then again in 2001 with updated special
effects as Yonggary 2001. Ape, meanwhile, is an obvious imitation of King
Kong (Merian C. Cooper, US, 1933), presumably produced to coincide
with the 1976 remake (directed by John Guillermin); the US theatrical
poster prominently displays the text ‘Not to be confused with King Kong!’
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 17

to achieve precisely the opposite effect, while the Korean title of the film
literally includes the words ‘King Kong’.
3. Academic-orientated articles on the horror film have been published since
the 1950s. In this formative period, the (entirely male) writers on the genre
tended to focus (but not exclusively so) on auteurist studies of (male) direc-
tors such as Mario Bava, Roman Polanski and Terence Fisher. For a collec-
tion of the pre-Robin Wood, ‘early’ horror scholarship, published 1952 to
1975, see ‘Part 1 – Seminal Essays’ in Silver and Ursini (2000).

wo r k s c i t e d
Ahn, Soojeong (2012), The Pusan International Film Festival: South Korean
Cinema and Globalisation, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Ainslie, Mary (2011), ‘Contemporary Thai Horror: The Horrific Incarnation
of Shutter’, Asian Cinema, 22: 1, pp. 45–57.
Ancuta, Katarzyna (2011), ‘Global Spectrologies: Contemporary Thai Horror
Films and the Globalization of the Supernatural’, Horror Studies, 2: 1,
pp. 131–44.
Baek, Moon-im (2008), Sorrowful Screaming: A History of the Female Ghost
in Korean Films [Wolha-eui yeogokseong: Yeogwi-ro ingneun hanguk gongpo
yeonghwasa], Seoul: Chaeksesang.
Balmain, Colette (2008), Introduction to Japanese Horror Film, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Berry, Chris (2007), ‘Scream and Scream Again: Korean Modernity as a
House of Horrors in the Films of Kim Ki-young’, in F. Gateward (ed.),
Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, New
York: State University of New York Press, pp. 99–114.
Black, Art (2003), ‘Coming of Age: The South Korean Horror Film’, in S. J.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Schneider (ed.), Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe,
Godalming: FAB, pp. 185–203.
Boss, Pete (1986), ‘Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine’, Screen, 27: 1, pp. 14–24.
Brophy, Philip (1986), ‘Horrality – The Textuality of Contemporary Horror
Films’, Screen, 27: 1, pp. 2–13.
Bush, Laurence C. (2001), Asian Horror Encyclopedia: Asian Horror Culture in
Literature, Manga, & Folklore, Lincoln, NE: Writers Club.
Choi, Jinhee (2010), The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers,
Global Provocateurs, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Chung, Kiyul (2007), The Donghak Concept of God / Heaven: Religion and
Social Transformation, New York: Peter Lang.
Clover, Carol J. (1992), Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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 18 alison p ei rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and

Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.
Heo, Ji-woong (2011) Memories of the Ghost: Korean Horror from the 1960s to
the 1980s [Mangryeong-eui Gieok: 1960–80 nyeondae hanguk gongpo yeong-
hwa], Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Huat, Chua Beng and Koichi Iwabuchi (2008), ‘Introduction: East Asian TV
Dramas: Identifications, Sentiments and Effects’, in C. B. Huat and K.
Iwabuchi (eds), East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave, Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 1–12.
James, David E. and Kyung Hyun Kim (eds) (2001), Im Kwon-Taek: The
Making of a Korean National Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
Kim, Hong-joon (2007), Kim Ki-young, Seoul: Seoul Selection / KOFIC.
Kim, Kyung Hyun (2004), The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
— (2005), ‘Lethal Work: Domestic Space and Gender Troubles in Happy End
and The Housemaid’, in K. McHugh and N. Abelmann (eds), South Korean
Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema, Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, pp. 201–28.
— (2011), Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Kim, Soyoung (2000a), Ghosts of Modernity: Fantastic Korean Cinema
[Pantaseutik hanguk yoenghwa: geundaeseong-eui yuryeong-deul], Seoul:
Ssias-eul ppurineun saram-deul.
Klein, Amanda Ann (2011), American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening
Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lee, Hyangjin (2000), Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, and
Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lee, Nikki J. Y. and Julian Stringer (2012), ‘Remake, Repeat, Revive: Kim
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Ki-young’s Housemaid Trilogies’, in C. Perkins and C. Verevis (eds),

Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 145–63.
Lee, Yeon-ho (2009), ‘Re-Birth of the Classics: The Housemaid’ (English-
language booklet included in the Region 3 South Korean DVD release),
Seoul: Korean Film Archive, pp. 1–39.
Leeming, David Adams (2010), Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopaedia,
2nd edn, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC.
Lim, Bliss Cua (2009), Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal
Critique, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Martin, Daniel (2009), ‘Japan’s Blair Witch: Restraint, Maturity and Generic
Canons in the British Critical Reception of Ring’, Cinema Journal, 48: 3,
pp. 35–51.
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Korean Horror
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 i n t r o du c t i o n 19

— (2011), ‘Categorising Korean Cult: The Reputation and Reception of Save

the Green Planet!’, Asian Cinema, 22: 1, pp. 138–49.
McHugh, Kathleen and Nancy Abelmann (eds) (2005), South Korean Golden
Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
McRoy, Jay (ed.) (2005), Japanese Horror Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
— (2008), Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema,
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Min, Eungjun, Jinsook Joo and Han Ju Kwak (2003), Korean Film: History,
Resistance, and Democratic Imagination, Westport, CT: Praeger.
Paquet, Darcy (2007), ‘Christmas in August and Korean Melodrama’, in F. K.
Gateward (ed.), Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary
Korean Cinema, Albany, NY: State University of New York, pp. 37–54.
Rayns, Tony (1995), Seoul Stirring: 5 Korean Directors, London: BFI.
Riordan, James (1994), Korean Folk-tales, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Schonherr, Johannes (2012), North Korean Cinema: A History, Jefferson, NC:
Macfarland.
Seong Sae-ron (2008), ‘The Special Space, the Special Horror’, Korean
Films Video On Demand Special Screening, 1–31 August, Korean Film
Archive; [Link] accessed
1 August 2012.
Shin, Chi-Yun (2009), ‘The Art of Branding: Tartan “Asia Extreme” Films’,
in J. Choi and M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing
Boundaries in Asian Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
pp. 85–100.
— and Julian Stringer (eds) (2005), New Korean Cinema, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Silver, Alain and James Ursini (2000), Horror Film Reader, Pompton Plains,
NJ: Limelight Editions.
Stringer, Julian (2005), ‘Introduction’, in C. Y. Shin and J. Stringer (eds),
New Korean Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–12.
Wee, Valerie (2011), ‘Patriarchy and the Horror of the Monstrous-Feminine’,
Feminist Media Studies, 11: 2, pp. 151–65.
Williams, Linda (1984), ‘When the Woman Looks’, in M. A. Doane et
al. (eds), Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Frederick, MD:
American Film Institute, pp. 83–9.
— (1991), ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44: 4,
pp. 2–13.
Willis, Andy (2011), ‘Painted Skin: Negotiating Mainland China’s Fear of the
Supernatural’, Asian Cinema, 22: 1, pp. 20–31.
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 20 alison p ei rs e a n d d an ie l m ar t i n

Wood, Robin (1978), ‘Return of the Repressed’, Film Comment, 14: 4,

pp. 25–32.
— (2004), ‘Foreword: What Lies Beneath’, in S. J. Schneider (ed), Horror
Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. xiii–xviii.
Yecies, Brian and Ae-Gyung Shim (2011), Korea’s Occupied Cinemas,
1893–1948: The Untold History of the Film Industry, London: Routledge.
Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu and Neda Hei-tung Ng (2009), ‘Magic, Medicine,
Cannibalism: The China Demon in Hong Kong Horror’, in J. Choi and
M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in
Asian Cinema Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 145–60.
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 p a rt i

Classic Korean Horror

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 c h apter 1

Family, death and the wonhon in

four films of the 1960s
Hyangjin Lee

This chapter examines the relationship between family, death and the wonhon,
the iconic vengeful spirit found in early Korean horror films, including The
Housemaid (Hanyeo, Kim Ki-young, 1960), The Devil’s Stairway (Maeui
gyedan, Lee Man-hee (Lee Man-hui), 1964), A Devilish Homicide (Salinma,
Lee Yong-min, 1965) and A Public Cemetery under the Moon (Wolha-eui
gongdong myoji, Gwon Cheol-hwi, 1967). The wonhon is a definitive motif
of Korean horror and initiates generic conventions quite different from its
Asian or Western film counterparts. The wonhon is not the personification
of a demon, god or monster; it is a human spirit, typically a young, innocent
woman for whom family conflict and sexual violation are the common causes of
an early death (Baek 2008: 51). The lingering bad memories can be described
as han (deep resentments at injustice), but in this case, the human spirit’s
intentions, even after being separated from its body by death, are manifested
as hon (Park 2005: 140). According to folklore, when a human being dies,
hon separates from baek; the spirit leaves the body (Yi et al. 2010: 22). The
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

resentful hon becomes an unfulfilled ghost wandering in this world, seeking

revenge and a way to fulfil its worldly desires (Kim 1991: 144). Revenge is a
healing process, and in resolving han, the deceased (the hon) restores its lost
ties with the living. The cultural definitions of the wonhon are complex, and
this chapter explores how the female spirit functions as a powerful social alle-
gory in 1960s Korean horror cinema, itself a multi-faceted and hybrid genre
that oscillates between family melodrama, crime thriller and classical morality
literature (gongan soseol).
The revenge of a female ghost is a cliché of Asian horror films. With the
global success of Ring (Ringu, Nakata Hideo, Japan, 1998), a female ghost in
a white gown with long black hair has come to be regarded as a specifically
Japanese icon of horror by Western audiences. Yet Japanese horror explores
transnational film cultures to articulate the national experience of otherness,
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 24 h y an gjin l e e

informed by the cultural and religious traditions of the Japanese people,

such as Buddhism and Shinto (Balmain 2008; Lowenstein 2005). Similarly,
Korean horror has evolved using generic experimentation informed by other
national cinemas in order to communicate the shared anxiety and traumatic
experiences of its local communities. And as with Japanese cinema, the
representations of the Korean vengeful spirit relate to the complex cultural
beliefs of the specific nation, in this case based on Shamanism, Confucianism,
Buddhism, Taoism and the newly introduced Christianity (Yi et al. 2010).
The Korean wonhon can be understood to represent the notion of otherness in
familial society (Baek 2008: 67), as symbolised by her appearance. Her white
gown is a social signature of the chastity of a widow, as well as functioning as
mourning clothes; it is a seal of loyalty to both the living and the dead. On the
other hand, her long black hair implies youth, a life-force that defies sexual
restraint and control. In contrast to the neat hairstyle of a married woman, the
wonhon’s long, uncombed hair signifies an uncontrollable energy that rejects
Confucian orthodoxy.
Korean horror cinema during this period is equally informed by traditional
views about socially acceptable sexual and familial behaviour: virginity and
chastity are the ultimate conditions of marriage, whereas infertility, adultery
and jealousy are fatal attributes. These moral strictures binding the female
body are very different from those in Japanese horror films, which are often
concerned with the unfulfilled sexual desires of women, as seen in Ugetsu
(Ugetsu Monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, Japan, 1953), where their resentments
take the form of a restless erotic fantasy between the dead and the living. In
Japanese cinema the motif of reproduction is not explicitly expressed, but
in Korean cinema horror emerges from the home and reproduction: the
woman loses her place in the family and is considered an outsider if she fails
to reproduce. Often, Korean ghost stories also have a familial moral based
on a traditional idiom, Gwonseonjingak. In essence, good is rewarded but evil
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is punished; if you harm others, your children will suffer the consequences.
Teaching patriarchal norms is a function of the ghost in Korean horror. A
wonhon wrongly accused of sexual violation should prove her innocence, her
maternal authority invoked to protect her child from evil forces; indeed, her
own anxiety about her child often prevents her from moving on to the next
world. When her revenge is achieved, the patriarch then admits his moral
inadequacy in acknowledging the wonhon’s motherly instincts. Corporal
repression is also much more severe; in Japanese horror, the violation of
virginity or remarriage is not considered a social stigma for a woman, but
in Korean horror, the widow must maintain her chastity or kill herself to
demonstrate her faithfulness to the family. Even after death, she should
continue to work for the patriarchal family, as an old saying admonishes:
‘Should you die, serve your in-laws as a ghost.’ In this sense, the wonhon is a
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 family, death and the wonhon 25

victim of familial norms but also threatens the patriarchal system, and as such
this chapter suggests that the wonhon’s triumph demonstrates the impotency
of patriarchy and reveals the dysfunctional nature of the traditional family.

p oe t i c j u st i c e : the housemaid a n d the devil ’ s

stairway
The political repression and social unrest associated with the Park Chung-
hee military regime (1961–79) provided the trigger for the burgeoning horror
genre in 1960s Korea. The films discussed in this chapter are some of the
most representative works of this period, emphasising prevalent cultural
beliefs about social justice as realised by the ‘good’ dead spirit, the wonhon.
The Housemaid is a masterpiece of Korean horror, a psycho-crime thriller
loosely based on a real case of a housemaid murdered in a middle-class family
home and set against the turmoil of compressed modernisation. The film
expresses fear about the demise of patriarchy as a result of the advent of
Western capitalism, a fear expressed through sexual delusion and persecution.
Housemaid Myong-ja becomes the victim of the sadistic desires of music
teacher Dong-sik, the father and head of the newly middle-class family.
Initially, she is a status symbol but she also signifies the family’s changing
power dynamic: the successful seamstress wife is freed from domestic labour
and takes control of the family, while Dong-sik loses his authority as the
breadwinner. He then relieves his frustration through sexual violence directed
at the housemaid, impregnating her before his wife demands that she abort her
baby by throwing herself down the stairs. The desires of the couple symboli-
cally transform the housemaid into a monster; she becomes a dangerous threat
to family life (Kim 2000: 92). Myong-ja then performs her appointed role by
behaving increasingly erratically and murderously; she kills the elder son by
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arranging for him to fall down the stairs and then steals the couple’s newborn
boy from his mother’s arms, threatening to kill him. Poison is then required
to close the film narrative. Western poison is a common motif of Asian horror
as a whole, as seen in Japanese horror film Kwaidan (Kaidan, Kobayashi
Masaki, 1964), in which the faithless husband uses poison imported from the
West to kill his faithful wife; the poison disfigures her, and this deformed
face signifies her transformation into a demonic spirit (Goldberg 2005:
24–5). Poison becomes suggestive of the danger of foreign influences; in The
Housemaid, Dong-sik chooses to drink poison with Myong-ja and they both
commit suicide, Dong-sik thus protecting his family from her curse.
The narrative of The Housemaid is built around a framing story and flash-
backs, in which the patriarch reads out the report of a domestic murder case
from the social columns of the newspaper. By locating the object of fear outside
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 26 h y an gjin l e e

of the family space, the framing story then relieves the audience of the fear of
her revenge in a form of a wonhon; it effectively ends the narrative before it
takes a supernatural turn. At the same time, the film warns the audience that
the nightmare was a ‘real’ story and it could happen to their own families.
Many 1960s and 1970s films follow the same basic narrative structure, in
which a strange woman intrudes into the private family space, substituting for
the domestic labour of the wife. Her presence transforms the familiar space
of the home into something bizarre and strange; she demands to be a part of
the family and attempts to steal the wife’s place. Ultimately, her death leads
to the collapse of the family. Though not about an actual wonhon – the narra-
tive is closed down by the final twist and reverts to the status quo – the potent
metaphor of The Housemaid emphasises otherness in a Korean fashion, the
housemaid taking the role conventionally filled by the wicked stepmother in
ghost stories.
The Housemaid and its imitators, then, are not ghost films per se, but
exploit the culturally learned fear of the wonhon, a figure that becomes
mapped on to fears about moral decadence brought about by the materialism
of the West. This is apparent in The Devil’s Stairway, both a crime thriller
and a ghost story without a ghost, whose narrative is based on poetic justice.
A doctor, Gwang-ho, decides to end his long-time relationship with a nurse,
Jin-sook, when the hospital director offers his only daughter, Jeong-ja, to him
in marriage. The pregnant Jin-sook threatens to reveal their relationship to
the director and, in a fury, Gwang-ho pushes her down the hospital staircase,
aborting their child. Gwang-ho then attempts to murder Jin-sook and dis-
poses of her body in the pond in the hospital grounds, constructing a build-
ing on the site. It is symbolic of Jin-sook’s gravestone and publicly enables
him to demarcate his past memories from his future life with the daughter
of the hospital director. But then Gwang-ho starts to see Jin-sook’s wonhon
everywhere. Jeong-ja tells a psychiatrist about his paranoia and Gwang-ho
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pushes her down the same staircase. He then performs surgery on Jeong-ja
but sees Jin-sook in a nurse’s gown; he flees in horror but, in a final irony,
falls down the same staircase. The police subsequently arrive to arrest
Gwang-ho for the attempted murder of Jin-sook, and it is revealed that the
head nurse saved the dying woman from the pond, their collective identity
articulating a female bond accrued in the exploitation of their class and sex.
Her saviour then helped her bring about her revenge; Jin-sook explains that
she attempted to drive Gwang-ho to his death, as the law would not punish
him.
The Devil’s Stairway was released at a time when Western products and
popular culture were being rapidly diffused into Korean society. Portraying
the hospital as a microcosm of familial society, the film offers domestic horror
as social commentary; the director’s house and hospital buildings remind the
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 family, death and the wonhon 27

audience of the Westernised lifestyle of the newly rich class that emerged
in the Japanese colonial period (1910–45), and the Western-style municipal
building with a staircase can be understood as a variant of the middle-class
family house, as seen in The Housemaid and other films of the period. The
hospital is a private space belonging to the director. Upstairs scenes depict
the intimate conversation of his family, but the lower-ranked employees
and patients occupy the ground floor; the nurses eat and sleep together in
one room under the supervision of the head nurse, just as housemaids do
in a yangban (the traditional ruling class) household. The depiction of the
young women’s communal life in the dormitory of a factory, hospital, public
baths or some other service industry is a familiar and sympathetic narrative
deployment in Korean films produced between the 1960s and 1980s, empha-
sising the hardship of female urban workers mobilised for the state-led
compressed modernisation. The lower floor becomes a female space, where
the nurses make fun of Jeong-ja’s Western-style fashion and gestures, and
openly reproach Gwang-ho, taking Jin-sook’s side. Similarly, the pond can be
interpreted as a feminine space (implying the maternal qualities of Jin-sook,
who has lost her unborn baby), just as the building with the staircase signifies
the patriarchal masculinity of Gwang-ho (who killed his unborn child in order
to climb socially). In this sense, when the rejected mother floats in the pond,
it becomes a moment of abjection, of the abandoned child in her womb. The
pond becomes a metaphorical space of birth and resistance, implying the circle
of life and death, and the relationship between mother and child (Cho 2004).
Through the ritual of a figurative return to the mother’s womb, Jin-sook
acquires a new, pre-natal life in order to punish the social evil, Gwang-ho,
who has become the personification of unrestrained and amoral Western
capitalism. The film’s title, then, has a dual meaning. It not only signifies the
site of the crime but also functions as a metaphor for Gwang-ho’s immoral
desires; he is punished by the wonhon for his obsession with social status. The
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Devil’s Stairway thus uses a male doctor (a man in a white gown) to signify the
evilness of Western influences on society. This is typical of a number of films
made during the 1960s, as we will see in A Devilish Homicide. These wicked
men administer poisons to women; they sexually abuse or seduce the heroines
and manipulate women, encouraging conflict between them, which in turn
leads to the collapse of the family. What the wonhon does in this context is
fight against the Western influences personified by male doctors; she does not
rage at the woman who is her substitute. The sense of poetic justice pursued
in this film is the triumph of the wonhon, the embodiment of human values
over Western materialism, but equally the dismantling of the male-centred
moral justification of a repressed and controlled femininity in a traditional
society.

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 28 h y an gjin l e e

a v a m pi r e c a t a nd a f a i t hf u l gisaeng :
a devilish homicide a n d a public cemetery
under the moon
A Devilish Homicide invokes localised interpretations of Confucianism, hypo-
critical views on female sexuality, the Buddhist view on the afterlife and the
historical experiences of Westernisation. It blends a traditional Korean ghost
story with the Western trope of the vampire, manifested in this film as a vam-
piric cat possessed by a wonhon. The film highlights the bond and solidarity
between women as the exploited sex, blending the demonic attributes of the
femme fatale with the virtuous image of a faithful wife. The film’s narrative
revolves around Ae-ja, who is happily married to Si-mok; she is, however,
anxious about her possible infertility. In the traditional yangban family culture,
the purpose of the marital relationship is reproduction, and married couples
sleep in separate rooms from each other. From this perspective, the relation-
ship between Ae-ja and Si-mok accords her a lower status than a conventional
‘good’ wife, as she is unable to conceive. Her cousin Hye-sook works as her
maid and is jealous of her. Hye-sook schemes with Ae-ja’s stepmother-in-law,
resulting in Ae-ja being accused of adultery. The hypocrisy of the two devious
women is clear: the stepmother has an affair with Dr Park, the family doctor,
and Hye-sook seduces a painter, both illicit relationships seen as unacceptable
within Korean culture. The four transgressors then conspire to poison Ae-ja
and, as she dies, the latter is forced to defend herself against attempted rape by
the painter. She chooses to kill herself rather than be violated; her suicide is
a faithful cinematic representation of the then-typical social rules that forced
chastity exclusively on women. With her dying words, she swears her revenge
to a cat. As if breast-feeding a baby, the dying Ae-ja feeds the cat her blood,
finally proving her maternal instincts. Ten years later, Ae-ja reappears as a
wonhon with the possessed cat – her baby, their relationship formed through a
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pseudo-mother–child dynamic designed to curse patriarchy. Their symbiotic

relationship is suggestive of Ae-ja’s resentment not only of the pressures put
upon her to bear a child, but also, as a result of her inability to conceive, of
the ensuing rejection of her femininity and social standing within the family.
Unlike the more common evil fox or snake, the cat is not a familiar animal
in Korean folklore; its foreignness, then, demonises the wonhon, who in turn
functions as a manifestation of anxiety over patriarchal expectations around
womanhood.
The female characters in this film – the infertile wife, the sexually active
stepmother-in-law, the scheming cousin / housemaid seeking to supplant
Ae-ja and take her place in the household – personify the causes of divorce and
family rejection in traditional Korea: infertility, jealousy and adultery. They
demonstrate that, in 1960s Korean horror cinema, sexual provocation, evil or
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 family, death and the wonhon 29

immorality is represented as the preoccupation of the living; the wonhon may

attack bad people but rarely harms the good. They also say much about the
cinematic representation of monstrous women in this period and their con-
flicting relationships with each other. In a traditional Korean sense, the most
striking narrative development is the adultery of the ‘old’ stepmother-in-law,
who sleeps with the family doctor. As with Ae-ja’s contradictory identity as a
loving wife who cannot conceive, the stepmother too is always under threat of
being ousted from the family. She is not the real mother of the patriarch and
is a widow, who is supposed to retain her chastity or choose suicide to follow
her husband. Ae-ja drowns the wicked stepmother-in-law, who then returns
from the dead as a vampire cat under Ae-ja’s control; she licks at the faces of
her sleeping grandchildren, Si-mok’s three children by Hye-sook, drips blood
from the ceiling and tries to kill her son. The warring women are thus united
in death and their female bonds destroy the patriarchal family unit; arguably,
the alliance between the evil woman and the wonhon signifies the plurality of
female voices in a culture designed to repress them. The step/mother-in-
law character is pivotal in Korean family horror and the step/mother-in-law
complex – the fear of a wicked woman substituting for the natural mother
of the patriarch – is one of the ways in which this national cinema reveals its
uniqueness.
In The Devil’s Stairway, the living act like the dead; in A Devilish Homicide,
the dead are portrayed in a liminal state between life and death. Ae-ja
transforms into a cat but also behaves like a living human being sometimes.
For example, when Ae-ja returns, Si-mok takes her to the doctor, who exam-
ines her body. The doctor is convinced she is alive, although her heartbeat
sounds strange and her blood is as thin as water. Her behaviour is also
inconsistent. In most situations, she behaves like a human, walking upright
and entering a room through a door. When she kills Dr Park, she does so
using an electric shock rather than her supernatural powers; she also stabs
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the painter with a knife and hits Hye-sook around the head with a stick. The
comic, atypical representations of wonhon make the film confusing and bizarre,
projecting a distinct sense of the uncanny, something that is apparent from
the opening scenes of the film when Si-mok attends an art exhibition. Si-mok
walks with an umbrella, as if it is raining, but it is a bright, sunny day. He
enters the gallery, only to realise that the exhibition is over. Led by the strange
sound of sinister laughter, he finds a portrait of Ae-ja in a corner. As he takes
the portrait from the wall, her smiling face melts and deforms. The day scenes
abruptly transition into night sequences in a forest; sitting in the taxi envel-
oped in the darkness of the night, Si-mok watches a group of ghosts in white
gowns dancing amongst the trees, their contortions filmed in broad daylight.
The extremely exposed lighting produces a striking contrast between the black
and the white images, making the scenes appear even more bizarre and surreal.
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 30 h y an gjin l e e

The taxi driver takes him to a haunted house, where the painter is waiting for
him; Si-mok hides under the bed when his ex-wife returns from the dead as a
wonhon and murders the painter. He is puzzled and confused, and only realises
the truth when he discovers the painter’s letter, in which the latter confesses
the crimes and misdemeanours of the four people, revealed to the cinema
audience through flashbacks.
The conflicting family relationship is an indispensible theme in Hollywood
horror films, seen in the love / hate relationship between Norman and his
mother in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1961) and the jealousy and violence
between two sisters in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich,
US, 1962). Such films depict nightmare images of monstrous femininity,
demonstrated through the mother complex of a paranoid son and a daughter’s
obsessive desire for her father’s love and recognition. These examples initially
suggest that, regardless of the different cultural traditions, horror films have
a tendency to deny a place to maternal figures in society. Despite this, the
moral stances and traumatic memories that are worked through in the Korean
films discussed here bring a different understanding of abjection and horror
cinema. In her work on the horror film, Barbara Creed argues that ‘the horror
film brings about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes,
the monstrous-feminine) in order, finally, to eject the abject and redraw the
boundaries between the human and nonhuman’ (1996: 46). Through this
process, the horror film works to separate maternal authority from paternal
law. However, these universal ideas are complicated in female-centred Korean
horror films such as A Devilish Homicide, where the conflict between the three
women over the position of a ‘good woman’ within the family requires a spe-
cific cultural and political understanding. The good mother complex is the
thesis and antithesis of this film, where the cat possession expresses solidarity
between Ae-ja and the stepmother-in-law, both of whom failed to observe
their duty: the production of a new patriarch. In this sense, Hye-sook is only
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eligible to claim to be a good woman because she has produced three children,
and this is reinforced as she desperately fights to protect those children from
wonhon Ae-ja, the emasculated and confused patriarch Si-mok not being
strong enough to do so himself.
From a Shamanistic perspective, the wonhon is bad and must be expelled;
otherwise, the family, and in particular the children, will suffer (Yi et al. 2010:
62, 72). However, Shamanism fails to protect the family from the wonhon
or to exorcise the spirit of the stepmother-in-law from the possessed cat,
and the struggle between living and dead women culminates in a Buddhist
exorcism. The narrative is finally resolved when a mysterious woman visits
Si-mok’s house to look after his children, and is revealed to be the bodhisattva
of wisdom, Munsubosal. She protects the children from Ae-ja’s rage, takes
Ae-ja’s dead spirit to the afterlife and helps Si-mok realise the truth about
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 family, death and the wonhon 31

why the women were fighting. According to the Buddhist view, death and
life are connected as a circle (Yi et al. 2010: 144); thought of in this way, the
wonhon is not an object to be expelled but should rather be transformed into a
virtuous state. Munsubosal, then, transcends worldly disputes over good and
evil; saving the weak male patriarch and his children, she preserves the family
unit from total collapse. A Devilish Homicide thus reinterprets old narratives
of domestic horror, blending complex traditional thoughts on death informed
by indigenous religions with Western ideas of demonic possession and blood-
sucking vampires. The end result is an experimental vision in which the living
and dead co-exist.
In A Devilish Homicide, the concurrent solidarity and antagonism between
the suffering women (set against their conflicting relationships with men)
convey a historical and cultural specificity through horror. A similar dynamic
is evident in A Public Cemetery under the Moon, which explores the tragic story
of Myeong-seon, a gisaeng – a female entertainer who used to belong to the state
slave system, one of the lowest classes in old Korea. The Tale of Chun Hyang is
set in the late seventeenth century and is one of the best-known narratives in
Korean history, portraying its central character, the eponymous Chun Hyang,
who is the daughter of a gisaeng, as the paragon of the unyielding spirit of
minjung (the people suffering under an exploitative class system). Likewise, the
gisaeng Non-gae is a popular historical figure representing female patriots; she
meets a dramatic death by sacrificing herself in order to kill a Japanese general
during the Imjin War (1592–8). The gisaeng can, then, be read as a metaphor
for the popular resistance to tyranny or foreign invasion. A Public Cemetery
under the Moon, the story of a former gisaeng wife, betrayed by her rich new
bridegroom and then killed by her housemaid and family doctor, is full of
metaphorical ruminations on memories of collaboration and the secret indul-
gences associated with the colonial modernity introduced during the Japanese
occupation (Kim 2000: 17). It uses the faithful gisaeng to create a horror story,
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in which the selling of her body signifies the vulnerability of women as ‘the
other sex’, her faithfulness the denial of forced sexual subjugation. Produced
in the early period of Park Chung-hee’s military regime, the wonhon in this
film fights against the legacy of Japanese colonial rule, communicating the
re-emerging anxiety of national disappearance or decline.
The heroine of the film has two names: Myeong-seon (a schoolgirl) and
Wol-hyang (a gisaeng). They reflect her split identity as a refined yangban wife
and lower-class gisaeng, and demarcate her dual role in society: on one hand
her function is to reproduce, while on the other she serves male sexual desire.
Myeong-seon is forced to become Wol-hyang to support her brother Choon-
sik and her fiancé Han-soo, imprisoned for fighting for national independence.
Choon-sik takes responsibility for everything they are charged with and, when
Han-soo is released from jail, he marries Wol-hyang and together they have a
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 32 h y an gjin l e e

son, Yeong-jin. With the marriage, she regains her name, Myeong-seon, and
Han-soo becomes a millionaire, ‘the king of gold mines’. The story then takes a
turn for the worse with the administration of poison and the arrival of a house-
maid, Nan-joo, who dislikes Myeong-seon due to her own family’s troubles
with a gisaeng. Tae-ho, who works for a Japanese doctor and is fed up with
‘living like a dog’ under the colonisers and Korean sympathisers / collaborators
such as Han-soo, gives Nan-joo poison to kill Myeong-seon. For Nan-joo and
Tae-ho, the newly rich Han-soo and his family are a social evil and enemies
of the nation. Han-soo betrays the ailing Myeong-seon when he is seduced by
Nan-joo; he then wrongly accuses Myeong-seon of adultery, reproaching her
as a ‘dirty gisaeng slut’. In despair, Myeong-seon commits suicide but her final
words are bitter: ‘bury my body in a sunny spot and engrave my tombstone
with the inscription “the grave of gisaeng Wol-hyang”.’ Choon-sik discovers
what has happened to his sister and is furious at Han-soo’s betrayal; at the same
time, the story of gisaeng Wol-hyang brings shame on Han-soo, who is seen as
a newly rich parvenu betraying his poor nation. Wol-hyang inevitably returns
as a wonhon in order to take revenge on Nan-joo and Han-soo’s stepmother-in-
law Nan-joo’s mother (who both conspired against her because of her gisaeng
background), and to save her son from being poisoned by Nan-joo. The faithful
gisaeng is morally ambivalent in this regard. Her sacrificial actions provoke the
sympathy of the viewers, who see her as a victim of patriarchal social norms, but
on the other hand, her revenge punishes other women – those who revolt against
male authority. As such, when she dies she may escape the strictures of family
obligations but when she returns she continues to serve the patriarchal system.
The beginning and end of the film reveal much about the moral compass
of the narrative. It begins at midnight in a public cemetery. A coffin opens
and beautiful Myeong-seon appears, dressed in a white gown with her hair
tied up in a bun. She may have emerged from a coffin but she gives no hint of
being dead. Instead, she steps into a taxi and politely requests to be taken back
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to her old house; her plan is to return home and save Yeong-jin from Nan-
joo. She finds her baby in pain and cries out, nursing him at her breast. Her
maternal instinct proves her to have ‘a good breast’ (Sceats 1996: 118), which
is in contrast with her ‘corrupted’ body as a gisaeng. The film ends as Han-soo
visits Wol-hyang’s grave with Yeong-jin, the baby brought along to represent
the attributes of three key characters: the pathetic, newly rich Han-soo, the
absent independent fighter Choon-sik and the rejected faithful gisaeng Wol-
hyang. Her husband’s final words, standing at her graveside and clutching her
baby son, express a wish for Wol-hyang to die peacefully. Han-soo promises
to provide their son with a good life, and pledges that Yeong-jin will follow
in the footsteps of his uncle. The final wish of the film is thus rather ironic:
a former collaborator swearing an oath to raise his son to be an independence
fighter. As such, A Public Cemetery under the Moon locates the wonhon within
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 family, death and the wonhon 33

a specific national and cultural framework, one tied intrinsically to the history
of occupied Korea.

c onc l u s i o n
The 1960s Korean horror film uses the female body as a metaphor for a
nation that suffers from repressive expectations about gender, sexuality and
the family. If a woman does not obey Confucian patriarchal law, she cannot
secure a place as a ‘good’ woman in this world, and there will be no place to
rest in the next world either. Therefore, a good woman who was killed while
being wrongly accused of immoral actions or of refuting patriarchal laws
should come back this world to clear her name. Confucian thought teaches
that we should respect the dead spirit but at the same time keep our distance
from her or him (Yi et al. 2010: 109). If we pray for the blessing of the dead,
memorial ancestral rites will consolidate our present social relationships.
This perspective on death creates a popular perception of the wonhon as the
personification of social justice. However, the portrayals of wonhon in the
four films discussed in this chapter betray the unequal moral justification of
families in Korean society. The wonhon and her enemies express their shared
anger and frustration at a hypocritical social order, and the confrontation
between women that is repeatedly played out across a number of 1960s films
is brought about as a result of their communal fate as victims of patriarchy.
Their ultimate enemy is the man, who tends to be portrayed as a helpless child
caught up in the turmoil of women’s war; the return of the wonhon points to
a potential loss of patriarchal power and the symbolic castration of masculin-
ity. One of the most significant attributes of Korean horror cinema, then, is
its function as social commentary: these films explore the (at least temporary)
dissolution of patriarchal law and contrast this with a strong female subjectiv-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

ity expressed by the collective voices of victims (the wonhon and her enemies).
The social evils depicted in Korean horror film – which include the devious
mother-in-law, the stepmother, the housemaid or the husband’s mistress – can
thus be understood to represent the diverse voices of a suffering country: the
voices not only of women, but also of the lower classes or even the idea of the
Korean nation, which finds itself under threat from foreign influence.

wo r k s c i t e d
Baek, Moon-im (2008), Sorrowful Screaming: A History of the Female Ghost
in Korean Films [Wolha-eui yeogokseong: Yeogwi-ro ingneun hanguk gongpo
yeonghwasa], Seoul: Chaeksesang.
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 34 h y an gjin l e e

Balmain, Colette (2008), Introduction to Japanese Horror Film, Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.
Cho, Eunseon (2004), ‘About Sexual Identity and Digital Video Media’ [Seong
Jeongcheseong-gwa dijiteol maecheseong-e daehayo], in Yonsei University
Media Art Centre (ed.), Ghosts Live in School (Film and Perspective
07) [Hakgyo-e guisin-i sanda (Yeonghwa-wa Siseon 07)], Seoul: Igaseo,
pp. 42–61.
Creed, Barbara (1996), ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary
Abjection’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference, Austin: University
of Texas Press, pp. 35–55.
Goldberg, Ruth (2005), ‘The Nightmare of Romantic Passion in Three
Classic Japanese Horror Films’, in J. McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 29–37.
Heo, Ji-woong (2011), Memories of the Ghost: Korean Horror Films from the
1960s to the 1980s [Mangryeong-eui Gieok: 1960–80 nyeondae hanguk gongpo
yeonghwa], Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Jang, Yoon-seon (2008), Joseon Scholars Communicate with Ghosts [Joseon-ui
Seonbi, Gwisin-gwa Tonghada], Seoul: Isub.
Kim, Soyoung (2000a), Ghosts of Modernity: Fantastic Korean Cinema
[Pantaseutik hanguk yoenghwa: geundaeseong-eui yuryeong-deul], Seoul:
Ssias-eul ppurineun saram-deul.
Kim, Yeol-gyu (1991), National Culture Encyclopaedia [Minjok munhwa
baekgwa sajeon], Seoul: Academy of Korean Studies.
Lowenstein, Adam (2005), Shocking Representation: Historical Drama,
National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Park, Seong-gyu (2005), Ghost Theory of Zhu Xi’s Philosophy [Juja cheolhak-ui
gwisin-ron], Seoul: Korean Studies Information.
Sceats, Sarah (1996), ‘Eating the Evidence: Women, Power and Food’, in
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S. Sceats and G. Cunningham (eds), Image and Power: Women in Fiction in

the Twentieth Century, London: Longman, pp. 117–27.
Yi, Chan-su, Jeong Sun-deok, Kim Dong-gyu, Kim U-hyeong, Beophyeon,
Choi Dae-gwang and Oh Mun-hwan (2010), Ghost Theories in Korean
Religion: What are Ghosts to Us? [Hanguk jonggyo-eui gwisin-ron: uri-ege
gwisin-eun mueosinga?], Seoul: Mosineun saram-deul.

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 c h apter 2

Creepy liver-eating fox ladies:

The Thousand Year Old Fox and
Korea’s Gumiho
Alison Peirse and James Byrne

It was arranged that the boy should examine the empress . . .

Pretending to measure her pulse, he quickly whipped off her gloves.
Just as he had expected, her hands were the hands of a fox. He
immediately drew his sword and stabbed the empress. With a shriek
of ‘Kya’, the empress transformed into a fox and died. (Grayson 2001:
397–8)
‘The Fox Empress of China’, Korean folktale transcribed
in the North Kyongsang Province, August 1923

In the religious and folkloric traditions of East Asia foxes are considered
capable of magical feats, including the ability to transform into human beings.
While the Japanese kitsune or Chinese huli jing are often benevolent and wise,
the Korean fox is almost always cunning and evil. For each hundred years that
the fox lives it receives another tail, and when it becomes nine-tailed, in its
thousandth year of existence, it becomes a gumiho. With this, the opportunity
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

arises for it to become human, often on the condition that it eats a human
organ. In these situations it frequently poses as a beautiful young woman in
order to seduce unwitting young men. Although there are several folktales
about the mystical and malicious fox, the one that appears most regularly is
‘The Fox Girl’, in which a wealthy couple are desperate to have a daughter
yet can only produce sons (Lee 2011: 137). When a daughter is finally born,
she becomes the favoured child, but when she reaches adolescence, the farm’s
livestock starts dying out. Her father arranges for his sons and the herdsman
to keep a watch on the livestock. One of the sons is astonished to see the mas-
ter’s daughter creeping into the shed towards a cow: ‘anxiously he watched her
oil her hands and arms with sesame seed oil; then, to his horror, she slipped
her arm into the cow’s belly and pulled out its liver. And she ate it’ (Riordan
1994: 55). The father refuses to accept these reports, and banishes each son as
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 36 alison p ei rs e a n d j am e s by rn e

they report the same event. The master finally orders his last remaining son
to watch over the livestock, only for him to come back with the same account.
Convinced that the son’s jealousy of his own sister has prompted him to lie,
the master banishes the final son. The banished son then consults a monk, who
reveals that his sister either has been possessed by a fox, or has been eaten by a
fox that has taken on her form. He rushes back to the farm to find his parents
and all the animals dead, whereupon his sister tries to eat him and he kills her
using the potions provided by the monk.
The tale of ‘The Fox Girl’ depicts the gumiho as an evil feminine force, and
is underpinned by a Confucian message: traditionally, the patriarchal family
values of Korean society have followed the principle of son preference; the
fate of the son is favoured over that of the daughter. Ultimately, the father was
wrong to believe his beloved (and supernatural) daughter over the testimony of
his sons. Given that the gumiho is a creepy, liver-eating fox lady, it is perhaps
unsurprising, then, that it frequently features in Korea’s cinema as a creature
of horror. In exploring The Thousand Year Old Fox (Cheonnyeonho, Shin Sang-
ok, 1969), The Fox With Nine Tails (Gumiho, Park Heon-soo, 1994) and The
Fox Family (Gumiho gajok, Lee Hyeong-gon, 2006), this chapter considers
three quite different representations of the gumiho, each emblematic of the dif-
fering historical context from which it emerges. It is argued that by mapping
the shifting representation of the female fox across four decades of cinema, we
can reveal a transformation of attitude towards the gumiho as simultaneously a
creature of horror and an unruly female body.

s i l l a ’ s gumiho : the thousand year old fo x

Rejecting the contemporary setting of many 1960s Korean horror films, The
Thousand Year Old Fox is set in the Silla Kingdom, in the ancient period of the
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Three Kingdoms (57 bc to ad 668). It focuses on the spirit of the Thousand

Year Old Fox that lives in a pond in the countryside. The spirit possesses the
bodies of unlucky and desperate women, and through them attempts to rein-
carnate as a human being. The film begins as General Kim Won-rang, a royal
guard, returns after two years away defending the kingdom. Queen Jin-seong
attempts to seduce Won-rang, but he politely rejects her and requests to go
home to his wife Yeo-hwa and their baby. The spiteful Queen banishes Yeo-
hwa, her baby and two servants to the mountains, where bandits attack them.
They kill one servant, rape the other, kill Yeo-hwa’s baby in front of her and
leave her with no choice but to jump into the haunted pond in order to avoid
a similar fate. The next day, Won-rang finds Yeo-hwa floating in the pond,
alive. Ignoring the warnings of the villagers, he brings her home. She seems
unharmed, but is now possessed; as Yeo-hwa sleeps, the murderous fox spirit
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 c r e e p y li v e r - e a t i n g f o x l a di e s 37

takes control of her body. The spirit remains vocalised but otherwise ethe-
real, Yeo-hwa’s possession is made manifest through her animalistic activities
(lapping at water bowls, licking), the use of bright colourful lights on her face
and, most obviously, her ability to fly. She becomes powerful and murder-
ous, killing (it is said) ten men a night; the enchantment allows the fallen
woman and the spirit to seek retribution against the men and the woman that
destroyed Yeo-hwa’s family.
The spirit begins by killing the bandits who murdered Yeo-hwa’s baby, then
turns its attentions to the Queen. The possessed Yeo-hwa arrives at the palace
wearing a white gown; a veil covers her face. The royal guards demand that
she stops but she throws off the veil, revealing deathly pale skin, black eyes and
wild black hair. She performs a gravity-defying reverse somersault, slaying the
two men in the process. She then creeps past the rest of the guards and into the
Queen’s bedchamber. Moving aside the golden voile curtains, Yeo-hwa slowly
and silently moves towards the cowering Queen, but before she can attack,
reinforcements arrive and Yeo-hwa flies through the air, a deadly avenging
angel with her white gown streaming behind her. In her gumiho possession,
Yeo-hwa functions as the archetypal wonhon, the female vengeful spirit. Her
whitened face, coloured with alternating blue, green, red and orange lights,
heightens the horrific effect. Innovative wirework, typical of director Shin’s
style, grants her access to the skies, and she moves through aerial space in a
fantastic manner. Leaving behind numerous male corpses, she flies away from
the palace as her husband Won-rang chases her. She looks back, only once, and
Won-rang mutters ‘Yeo-hwa?’ in amazement before she disappears into the
morning light. It is only as a fox spirit that Yeo-hwa is able to take ownership
of the physical space that surrounds her, her embodied possession redefining
strictly patriarchal and feudal gender relations. Her monstrous status allows
her to transgress patriarchal social strictures, to kill men, and to confront the
jealous and spiteful woman who orchestrated her downfall.
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Later in the film, a priest performs a ritual outside Won-rang’s hut as

Yeo-hwa resides within, struggling internally with the desires of the gumiho.
The ritual is interrupted as royal guards arrive to arrest Won-rang, then they
burn down the hut. Yeo-hwa suddenly stands upright without needing to bend
her knees, her unnatural movement indicating that the fox is once more in
control: a fact confirmed when she performs a standing somersault in mid-air.
In The Thousand Year Old Fox supernatural possession benefits the woman.
As the fox takes control of Yeo-hwa she is no longer trapped; she soars into the
air, jumps out of the burning hut and attacks the royal guards. Won-rang cuts
her arm off, and as she escapes he follows her trail of blood. Eventually he finds
her in the woods, her face cast in pale green light. He tries to stab her but her
aerial expertise makes him utterly impotent; she smoothly jumps out of reach
as he swings his sword. High melodrama then ensues: Yeo-hwa makes her way
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 38 alison p ei rs e a n d j am e s by rn e

to the pond as dawn breaks and the fox spirit leaves her. Won-rang collapses
at the edge of the pond; the now non-possessed Yeo-hwa thinks he is dead and
attempts to commit suicide, and as Won-rang awakens, he sees her with the
sword and stabs her to death. The couple are destined never to reclaim their
happiness together, and as Yeo-hwa lies dying in the grass, she softly whispers
to her husband ‘don’t suffer torment, I was a horrible fox before you killed me.’
Shin’s decision to set The Thousand Year Old Fox in the ancient past
accords with his usual filmmaking preferences; as David Scott Diffrient has
pointed out, Shin was ‘a master of Silla and Joseon era historical epics’ (2005:
156). Indeed, prior to making this film, Shin had already situated a number
of films in the historical past, including the Silla-set Pagoda of Shadows
(Mooyeong tab, 1957) and the Joseon Dynasty era The Youth (Jeolmeun geudeul,
1955) and Prince Yeonsan (Yeonsangoon, 1961), among others. Despite this,
by locating the gumiho in the lush and beautiful imagined Silla countryside,
the film is differentiated from other 1960s Korean horror films by its lack of
engagement with pressing issues in present-day urban Korea. The Housemaid
(Hanyeo, Kim Ki-young, 1960), A Devilish Homicide (Salinma, Lee Yong-
min, 1965) and The Devil’s Stairway (Maeui gyedan, Lee Man-hee, 1964) are
set in the contemporary period and deal with modernity and Westernisation,
their horrors emanating from their trapped women in claustrophobic interior
spaces. Rather than standing in kitchens cradling bottles of poison and plot-
ting the downfall of their female rivals, or being pushed down staircases (as
happens frequently to women of Korean horror), Yeo-hwa flies through the
skies. Her story takes place in forests, lakes and mountains, the lush landscapes
mirroring Kyung Hyun Kim’s comment that the ‘national cinematic aesthet-
ics of Korea are characterised by the thematic motifs of han (pent-up grief),
mise-en-scènes of rural mountainous landscapes, and understated emotions’,
noting that they ‘are frequently projected in the works of Shin Sang-ok and
Im Kwon-taek’ (2004: 240). As such, aside from this being the first cinematic
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

depiction of the gumiho, it is Shin’s lush and beautiful country settings that
mark the film’s distinctiveness.

a f o x i n wo l f ’ s c l o t hi ng : the fox with nine

tails
Set in contemporary Korea (for the most part), The Fox With Nine Tails follows
Harah, a fox disguised as a beautiful young woman who uses her exquisiteness
to ensnare men. She convinces her prey to remain chaste; at the same time,
she systematically sucks their souls from their bodies using a mystical marble
which will enable her to become human. Horror and melodrama motivate
Harah’s story; she faces a dilemma when she falls in love with her latest target,
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 c r e e p y li v e r - e a t i n g f o x l a di e s 39

a luckless taxi driver named Hyeok. At the same time, comedy is introduced
through a ‘fish out of water’ character, Agent 69, who – due to a bureaucratic
error – is an emissary sent from Hell to retrieve Harah. Agent 69 struggles with
life in contemporary South Korea to the extent that he is accused of being a
North Korean spy by the first person he encounters on earth, playing to the
stereotype of North Koreans as anachronistic, ‘less educated and more narrow
minded than South Koreans’ (Han and Kim 2004: 130). The film narrative is
largely adapted from the ‘core-tale’ about malevolent foxes, ‘The Jewel of the
Fox’s Tongue’ (Lee 2011: 136), in which a fox sucks the human energy out of
ninety-nine schoolboys; she needs one more to make a hundred and ascend to
Heaven. However, the final boy remembers that:

if a man swallows the jewel which a fox always carries on her tongue,
then if, before it dissolves, he looks up at the sky, he will possess all the
wisdom of Heaven, and if he looks down on the ground he will possess
all of the wisdom of the Earth. (Zŏng 1952: 19)

The boy outwits the fox and swallows the jewel, ‘thereby thwarting the fox and
gaining great knowledge’; the fox is then hunted down and killed in her animal
form (Lee 2011: 136). While this is a different representation of the gumiho to
the one we have seen in ‘The Fox Girl’, a common narrative thread binds the
stories: the fox is almost always masquerading as a woman; she is a femme fatale
who uses her beauty to lure men; and her malevolent force is then usually
thwarted by a superior man, the story concluding with her death.
The Thousand Year Old Fox has few, if any, connections with Western
cinema, but The Fox With Nine Tails owes a significant debt to a number of
subgenres from American horror film. It uses countryside settings drawn from
the rural strain of horror film (Bell 1997); at the same time, it emphasises the
use of sound over the depiction of graphic violence to imbue fear in a manner
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

reminiscent of Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, US, 1942), as well as much of

Tourneur’s collaboration with Val Lewton at RKO in the 1940s. Most impor-
tantly for our purposes, it explores the relationship between lunar cycles,
bodily transformation and sexuality in similar fashion to the werewolf film, a
relationship marked from Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, US, 1935) to
the remake of The Wolfman (Joe Johnston, US, 2010). The opening scenes
are particularly useful for exploring the dynamic between Korean folklore
and American horror. Agent 69 arrives on earth and opens a scroll, revealing
the picture of Harah. This transforms into a close-up of her running through
a forest as a man pursues her; the first horror archetype is manifested as the
female victim attempts to evade the male monster. The man catches her,
throws her down on to her back, rips off her clothes and hits her. He strips
off and tells her ‘now we will play by my rules. I’m sick of playing with the
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 40 alison p ei rs e a n d j am e s by rn e

marble.’ Harah seemingly gives in, telling him ‘just do it’; as he climbs on
top of her, she bites her lip and grips his shoulder. Yet a close-up of her face
reveals that while this scene begins with the rape of a woman, this is not how it
will end; her eyes glow red, then a long shot reveals the moon shining brightly
in the sky. The insinuation is clear: Harah’s supernatural ability is akin to
that of the werewolf. Sure enough, she then takes control. She pushes him to
ground and straddles him and bites him hard. As he screams, her eyes glow
red once more and she growls, her large, carnivorous teeth revealed. The man
shrieks, blood splatters across a nearby tree, and the sequence concludes with
an image of the bright white moon.
When compared with examples from American and European horror films,
the sequence demonstrates a propensity for both generic subversion and origi-
nality. The scene opens with the beautiful young woman pursued by a male
transgressor, mirroring the stalk and slash cycle emblematised by Halloween
(John Carpenter, US, 1978); she is then attacked with sexual violence and
retaliates, a premise akin to rape-revenge films such as I Spit on Your Grave
(Meir Zachi, US, 1978). However, female retaliation is far more uncommon in
the Western werewolf subgenre. Certainly, in more contemporary cinema, the
female werewolf is relatively commonplace, from Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett,
Canada, 2000) to Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall, UK / Luxembourg, 2002),
Blood and Chocolate (Katja von Garnier, US / UK, 2007) and beyond. But at
the time of The Fox With Nine Tails in the mid-1990s, the female werewolf had
only featured in very minor roles in The Howling (Joe Dante, US, 1981) and
The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, UK, 1984). As such, Harah performs an
unusual role when she transforms into a beast and punishes a man by death for
his rape attempt and his inability to let her remain chaste. Bearing this in mind,
one of the most interesting things about The Fox With Nine Tails is the way
that it acknowledges the legacy of the Western werewolf film, but utilises the
gumiho of Korean folklore in order to provide a female monster quite unique
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

to the period. It goes against the grain of male werewolf films, which Chantal
Bourgault Du Courdray points out find ‘expression primarily in the murder-
ous hunger for flesh and blood’ (2006: 114), and also against the longstanding
representation of the female werewolf in literature and culture, which Du
Courdray acknowledges is often ‘essentially a release for sexual hunger’ (ibid.).
Notably, by working through established werewolf tropes in relation to the
folktale ‘The Jewel of the Fox’s Tongue’, Harah’s bestiality occurs primarily
at moments of sexual duress, where her sensuality and sexual expression are
limited by male attempts at sexual dominance. In Confucian Korean society,
women are expected to adhere to specific moral and social codes of sexual
conduct defined by female chastity and virtue. As Sheila Miyoshi Jager has
pointed out in relation to the morals of the Joseon Dynasty, ‘illicit sexual
relations committed by, or forced upon, women thus constituted a threat to
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 c r e e p y li v e r - e a t i n g f o x l a di e s 41

both the stability of the family and the continuity of Korean patriarchy’ (2003:
68). Harah is thus forced to quash male sexual hunger in an effort to remain
chaste, a fact central to engendering audience sympathy for her character. This
sympathetic angle is crucial to her character and as the film progresses her
representation as a deadly femme fatale becomes increasingly unstable. Harah’s
wickedness emerges solely from her desire to become human, underscored by
her love for Hyeok. This sympathetic reading of the gumiho is then confirmed
in the film’s final scenes, when Harah chooses to sacrifice herself to save
Hyeok. Harah confesses to Hyeok that she is a fox, seduces him and lets him
think they are about to have sex. She climbs on top of him, pins him down and
forces him to swallow the marble. By demanding that he consumes the marble,
the scene can be read in terms of female sexual aggression, an interpretation
reinforced in the placement of the camera, which looms high over the couple
and foregrounds Harah’s physical dominance over Hyeok. But in essence it is
emotional manipulation that drives this scene; melodrama plays upon audi-
ence emotion and creates compassion for the cursed female character, while at
the same time it subverts audience expectations regarding the gumiho narrative
in which the evil female fox is tricked by an intellectually superior male adver-
sary. Forcing Hyeok to swallow the marble means that Harah relinquishes her
quest to become human, and will now die.
As the death of the female transgressor remains imperative to concluding
the narrative, this particular gumiho tale can hardly be called feminist. It is
perhaps something, however, that it is Harah alone that decides her own fate.
Defined by her sexuality, beautiful and murderous Harah is a femme fatale
worthy of any classical American film noir, but the Korean folktale element
gives the film a melodramatic underpinning. The melodrama then provides
the basis for the central plot points as Harah falls in love with Hyeok, ulti-
mately choosing self-sacrifice over her much-longed-for humanity. In her
study of film noir, Jans B. Wagner has noted that the woman in these films
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

constantly fights against the dominance of the man, whether that be economic
or social, and as a result often loses her freedom, or sometimes her life: ‘she
is murdered, tortured, jailed, or at the very least curtailed by marriage in the
final reel of the film. The femme fatale’s resistance is always fatal, sometimes
by the men who fall for her, almost always to herself’ (2005: 4). Wagner’s com-
ments resonate with Harah’s predicament, the film’s final moments of sacrifice
suggesting a fundamental limitation to the potential emancipatory principles
of the gumiho. Indeed, as transformations often occur in response to sexual
aggression and anxiety, Harah is still defined in relation to men’s desire for
her. The gumiho may enable female characters to take charge of men and to
transcend traditional Confucian patriarchal boundaries, but their release is
only temporary; both Yeoh-wah and Harah die, their malevolent femininity
contained by the films’ closure.
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 42 alison p ei rs e a n d j am e s by rn e

ci r c u s t r i c k s: the fox family

The Fox Family’s narrative returns to the ‘The Fox Girl’ folktale and follows
the premise that the fox can become a human being in its thousandth year if it
eats a human liver. However, in this film, it is not just the (expected) twenty-
something beautiful daughter who intends to make the transition; the whole
family of foxes is eager for the change. They abandon their home on Mount
Nam (Namsan) and set up a circus in contemporary Seoul. Their aim is to
attract the homeless and destitute in order to train them as performers and
then eat their livers during the lunar eclipse. Unlike The Thousand Year Old
Fox, The Fox Family expressly distinguishes between ancient legends and
modern ways of thinking. It suggests that traditional Korean ways of life are
out of sync with modern urban Seoul, whose cityscapes are defined through-
out the film in relation to landmarks such as the Han River and the Seoul
Tower. The elder daughter and only son frequently complain about having
come down from the mountain too early, and the behaviour of the whole
family draws parallels with Agent 69 of The Fox With Nine Tails, as they make
constant social faux pas that are related not only to their incapacity to ‘pass’
properly as humans (they frequently forget to hide their tails and sharp teeth),
but also to their inability to cope with fast-paced urban life.
The Fox Family explicitly combines horror, melodrama, comedy and,
unlike the other two gumiho films discussed, musical performance. The film is
a knowing and self-referential play on Korean folklore, and the performative
element is central to the film’s treatment of the gumiho. This is manifested not
only in the passing of the foxes as humans, or the spectacle of the circus per-
formances, but also in the breakout song-and-dance routines played directly
to camera. The musical numbers punctuate key plot points and articulate the
desires and ambitions of the family in a manner reminiscent of The Happiness
of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no kôfuku, Miike Takashi, Japan, 2001), itself a
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

reworking of the Korean horror film The Quiet Family (Joyonghan gajok, Kim
Ji-woon, 1998). Early on in the film, the father fox turns to a photograph of his
dead wife, and tells her how much he misses her and needs her help in seeing
his family through the transition to humans. In a moment that can be read as
a homage to Han Hyeong-mo’s cheerful musical–romantic comedy Hyperbola
of Youth (aka Double Curve of Youth, Cheongchoon ssanggookseon, 1956), which
also features a photo of a deceased family member coming to life, the fox
father’s wife turns to him from within the photograph and sings, reassuring
him that everything will be fine. Breaking the fourth wall, the delighted father
turns to the camera and addresses the audience, singing ‘we won’t be mocked
as monsters any more, and not be cast in horror movies any more.’ A big bluesy
saxophone and guitar riff plays out as the father, now dressed in a gold shiny
suit, charges through his house instructing his three children on how best to
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 c r e e p y li v e r - e a t i n g f o x l a di e s 43

entrap humans sexually. In The Thousand Year Old Fox, the ethereal gumiho
spirit was without redeeming qualities, a creature of pure horror. The Fox
With Nine Tails depicts Harah as a sexually slick femme fatale assassin, but
as sympathetic and self-sacrificing protagonist her demise is mourned at the
conclusion of the narrative. In contrast, The Fox Family utilises dark comedy
to rehabilitate the gumiho as warm-hearted creature bound to its family, only to
be feared at the time of the eclipse. It is a significant example of the changing
representation of the Korean monster, its intentions never made more obvious
than when the lovely old father sings of the pleasure he will experience in no
longer fulfilling the role of horror film monster.
A further example of comedic undercutting takes place in the scene follow-
ing the father’s song, when the eldest daughter attempts to seduce a man on
the underground. The scene begins with the camera at floor level in shallow
focus, framed from between the feet of the eldest daughter. As she moves
forward the camera follows, emphasising her legs and objectifying her. She
stalks over to a businessman who sits on his own, wearing a pinstripe suit and
black sunglasses. Standing directly in front of him, the camera positioned
from his point of view, she takes off her sunglasses and looks seductively into
the camera. She then removes her coat, the striptease beginning in earnest
for character and audience. In a diegetic leap reminiscent of the previous
musical number, the underground carriage is lit to resemble a nightclub, with
an accompanying pounding dance beat and dry ice. The daughter dances,
wearing a skin-tight red bodysuit, stockings, suspenders and elbow-length
gloves. She gets on to her hands and knees and crawls along the carriage, then
pole-dances on the handrail and slowly licks its steel shaft. Despite her exer-
tions the man remains impassive, vacant even. In desperation she climbs on to
his seat and gyrates on top of him, and finally falls off ungracefully. She looks
up, still smiling hopefully, but he unfolds his white cane and, tapping the floor,
walks out of the carriage. When her only asset is beauty, the femme fatale has
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

little chance of luring the visually impaired.

As this scene demonstrates, The Fox Family explores gumiho archetypes
through comedy and musical performances that are designed to invite
humorous and sympathetic readings of the family. However, the film does
not eschew the fact that ultimately they are killers, a fact brought home in
the final scenes in the Seoul Tower. The eclipse is imminent, and the family
have congregated at the tower with the vagrants that they plan to kill. At the
same time, Mr Hong, a serial killer who has been murdering prostitutes in
the city, kidnaps the eldest daughter, ties her up and bundles her into the lift.
In a similar fashion to The Fox With Nine Tails, the sequence begins with the
anticipation of rape; Hong mutters about ‘punishing’ women while unzipping
his trousers and undressing. However, expectations are undercut when Hong
reveals his Wonder Woman costume. While the ridiculous scenario dissipates
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 44 alison p ei rs e a n d j am e s by rn e

tension and provides a simple visual joke at the expense of the male killer in a
female superhero outfit, it can also be interpreted as a comment on American
popular culture and its significant inroads into Korean society. The American
cultural connotations are then accentuated in Hong’s weapon of choice – the
chainsaw, evoking Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (US, 1974).
It is intriguing that politically loaded costumes and props are introduced at a
moment of potential rape. It perhaps suggests that American influences are
forced and unwanted, continuing a tradition of cinematic critique of America’s
impact on Korean society, a tradition that can be traced back to Madame
Freedom (Jayu buin, Han Hyeong-mo, 1956). Hong drags the eldest daugh-
ter out of the lift and into the corridor; he is then disarmed by the youngest
daughter, who jumps with supernatural agility on to the ceiling and lands on
top of him. The transformed gumiho father kills Hong by cutting him open
with his fox claws and pulling out his liver. The vagrants look on in dismay,
their reactions mirroring the intended audience response in one of the few
moments in the film played as straight horror. The eldest daughter eats Hong’s
liver and the father and son pursue the two female vagrants in order to extract
their livers, but at the moment of their execution, the youngest daughter’s
watch beeps, signalling that the lunar eclipse has ended. For all of the family
bar the eldest daughter, their only chance at becoming human has passed. The
fox family are partially redeemed at the end of this scene; they do not slay the
vagrants, only the serial killer who had intended to kill them.
Arguably, though, it is the very final moments of the film that have the most
to say about the more recent depictions of the gumiho on screen. Much like the
wonhon, the gumiho is often used in horror films as a warning against abandon-
ing Korean indigenous traditions and the importance of resisting Western
cultural imperialism. Yet The Fox Family concludes with the now-human
eldest daughter, her human husband and their half-human, half-fox daughter
happily settled in Seoul, while the rest of the family remain in their permanent
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

fox form living in the back garden of their Western-style house. This com-
municates two crucial ideas: that even powerful and ancient legends have little
ability to change contemporary urban ways of life, and that foxes and humans
alike have learned to settle in a contemporary scenario that is simultaneously
both Western and Korean.

co nc l usi o n
In August 2008, the public television broadcaster the Korea Broadcasting
System (KBS) made the sageuk (historical drama) series Hometown Legends
(Jeonseoleui gohyang), a remake of the anthology drama series Korean Ghost
Stories, a television programme that initially aired on KBS from 1977 to 1989
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 c r e e p y li v e r - e a t i n g f o x l a di e s 45

(Han 2008). Traditionally, Korean films and television channels have provided
horror programming at the start of the summer, the purpose of which was to
provide ‘chills’ in the hot weather. However, by the 1990s, this occurred more
and more infrequently on television, leaving the cinema to provide goose-
bumps and shivers (Han and Lee 2009). KBS’s return to horror television
in 2008 is thus significant, but its real importance lies in the decision of the
channel to construct the episodes around Korean myths and folktales. The first
episode ‘Return of the Gumiho’ (‘Gumihoeui gwihwan’, Kwak Jeong-hwan),
screened in August, featured the character Lee Myeong-ok, a particularly
vengeful female nine-tailed fox. In August 2009, KBS repeated the successful
Hometown Legends formula with a further ten stand-alone dramas, including
the episode ‘Gumiho’ (Shin Hyeon-soo), while in July 2010 the broadcaster
screened the sixteen-episode series Grudge: Revolt of the Gumiho (Gumiho:
Yeowoonuyidyun, Lee Geon-joon). The Korean folktales ‘The Fox Girl’ and
‘The Jewel of the Fox’s Tongue’ represent the fox as an evil demon: a possible
reason why KBS’s three sageuk series, with their (re)turn to the past, offer
traditional representations of the gumiho as a creature of horror, much in the
same way that Shin’s Silla-set The Thousand Year Old Fox depicts the gumiho
as a malevolent female spirit. However, this chapter has also demonstrated that
the nature and meaning of the gumiho have evolved in contemporary Korean
culture. Amidst the fish out of water humour generated by Agent 69, The Fox
with Nine Tails depicts the fox girl as a tragic and ultimately likeable heroine,
while The Fox Family’s outlandish song-and-dance routines are more con-
cerned with provoking laughter than horror. This is symptomatic of a wider
shift in Korean popular culture, as seen in child-friendly animation Yobi, the
Five-Tailed Fox (Cheonnyeon yeowoo Yeowoobi, Lee Seong-gang, 2007) and
television series such as Forbidden Love (Gumiho weejoon, Kim Hyeong-il,
KBS, 2004) a crime drama that combines the gumiho with organ trafficking,
and the romantic comedy My Girlfriend is a Gumiho (Nae yeojachinguneun
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

gumiho, Boo Seong-cheol, SBS, 2010).

While this may be the case, certain aspects of the gumiho myth do not
change. When the second season of the revived Hometown Legends was
screened in New York, the director of two episodes, Lee Min-hong, was asked
why Korean ghost stories have remained so popular in Korea. One element of
his response was that, ‘although trends, conventions and customs change over
time, there is one particular aspect that does not change, that is the tradition of
Korean storytelling’ (Cho 2009). Similarly, despite the increasingly disparate
depictions of the gumiho, a single thread endures: the connections between the
fox and the unruly female body, an idea that can be traced back to its folkloric
origins. Shin’s film depicts a possessed female body tamed only by the spirit’s
banishment and the woman’s death. In The Fox With Nine Tails the fox girl
is tamed by her own sacrifice, an act mirroring male sexual aggression but
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 46 alison p ei rs e a n d j am e s by rn e

ultimately denying her her desperately desired womanhood. The Fox Family
opens up the legend to encompass a whole family of foxes wishing to become
human, yet concludes with the femme fatale daughter becoming human,
marrying a man and having a child. Echoing Wagner’s earlier comment on the
fate of film noir’s femme fatales, the daughter’s entrapment is seemingly com-
plete. As such, by examining three films spanning a thirty-seven-year period,
we are able to demarcate not only the continuing myth of the gumiho in Korean
culture, nor simply how the legend changes according to wider cultural trends,
but also the enduring message at its heart: that for the creepy, liver-eating
fox ladies, eventual containment (whether that be marriage, prison or death)
remains absolute.

wo rk s c i t e d
Bell, David (1997), ‘Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror’, in P. Cloake and J. Little (eds),
Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality,
London: Routledge, pp. 94–108.
Bourgault Du Coudray, Chantal (2006), The Curse of the Werewolf, London:
I. B. Tauris.
Cho, Yuni (2009), ‘Korean Ghost Stories: An Interview with Episode Director
Lee Min-hong’, The Korea Society, 14 December; [Link]
com/watch?v=44SwjyrM4sg; accessed 10 January 2012.
Diffrient, David Scott (2005), ‘Hanguk Heroism: Cinematic Spectacle and the
Postwar Cultural Politics of Red Muffler’, in K. McHugh and N. Abelmann
(eds), South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National
Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 151–83.
Grayson, James H. (2001), Myths and Legends from Korea: An Annotated
Compendium of Ancient and Modern Materials, London: Routledge.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Han, Miejeong and Sei-Hill Kim (2004), ‘South Koreans’ Perception of North
Koreans and Implications for Public Relations Campaigns’, Public Relations
Review, 30: 3, pp. 327–33.
Han, Sang-hee (2008), ‘Horror TV Programs to Chill Summer Nights’,
Korea Times, 15 July; [Link]
11/201_27606.html; accessed 10 January 2012.
— and Lee Hyo-won (2009), ‘Let Horror Take Control of the Summer
Heat’, Korea Times, 4 August; [Link]
art/2012/04/201_49579.html; accessed 10 January 2012.
Jager, Sheila Miyoshi (2003), Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A
Genealogy of Patriotism, Armonk, NY: East Gate.
Kim, Kyung Hyun (2004), The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Korean Horror
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[Link] 08/02/2013 12:03
[Link]
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 c r e e p y li v e r - e a t i n g f o x l a di e s 47

Lee, Sung-Ae (2011), ‘Lures and Horrors of Alterity: Adapting Korean

Tales of Fox Spirits’, International Research in Children’s Literature, 4: 2,
pp. 135–50.
Riordan, James (1994), Korean Folk-tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wagner, Jans B. (2005), Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Rereading Film Noir,
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Zŏng, In-sŏb (1952), Folk Tales from Korea, Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

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 c h apter 3

War-horror and anti-Communism:

from Piagol to Rainy Days
Mark Morris

I never could figure it out. It’s on a par with their feelings about death:
that to kill a man isn’t too serious but to mutilate his body is terrible.
General William Dean, General Dean’s Story
(Dean 1954: 85)

Having scripted The Ring Virus (Ring, Kim Dong-bin, 1999), the writer–
director Gong Soo-chang went on to direct the Vietnam War ghost-horror
film R-Point (R-Pointeu) in 2004, in which a patrol of South Korean soldiers
are abandoned to a mysterious deadly enemy and the haunting presence of a
long-haired, Vietnamese female ghost. R-Point may owe its narrative frame-
work to previous films such as Rob Green’s The Bunker (UK, 2001), but where
Green’s squad of doomed Second World War German soldiers contend with
the ghosts of dead soldiers from the First World War, Gong’s men have to
face the vengeful spirits of the war dead, as well as one of Sadako’s sisters, who
seems to have wandered in from The Ring Virus. There is, however, a conjunc-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

tion between horror and war that is less obvious, less shaped by genre expec-
tations, than we see in more contemporary films like R-Point. It first appears
as an element in some of the first South Korean films about the Korean War
(1950–3), and it becomes a kind of primal scene, an iconic unit of visual and
thematic grammar for the war films which follow in the 1960s and 1970s. And
strangely enough, it seems to have returned in more recent representations of
that war. I am referring to scenes of extreme violence – visceral, immediate,
face-to-face, implacable violence – horror concentrated on the tip of a bamboo
spear. In order to emphasise the consistency of what I am calling scenes of
war-horror, this chapter discusses examples from war films that are fairly well
known in South Korea, if less so outside the country. This chapter provides
some context for them by considering Korean experiences of the Korean
War, the politics of anti-Communism (bangong), and the general structures of
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 w ar - h o rr o r a n d a n t i - c o m m u n i s m 49

meaning and feeling these primal scenes seem designed to conjure up for their
audiences.

t he i c o no gr a p h y o f w a r -h o r r or
South Korean films about the disastrous Korean War developed mainly
during the 1960s and generally along the lines of the combat film. The glo-
balised genre had been first shaped by Hollywood during America’s fight
against Japan; it later encompassed the American involvement in Europe from
D-Day to the fall of Berlin. Delia Konzett has emphasised how – unlike the
often-ambiguous, if not explicitly anti-war, war films of the 1930s, for which
the social contexts of family and the home-front are crucial – the ‘American
WWII combat films, on the other hand, occur in medias res on the battlefield,
with combat as its only meaningful activity. Whether he is sleeping, gam-
bling, reading letters from home, the combat soldier is always already at war’
(Konzett 2004: 327–8).
Korean filmmakers of the 1960s, such as Kim Ki-duk or Lee Man-hee
(Lee Man-hui), did adapt the main lines of the combat film to Korean con-
texts, but the fit was not always easy to make. For American filmmakers, like
American audiences, the Second World War had happened elsewhere: on far-
flung chains of palm-fringed islands and atolls, in South-East Asian jungles,
or in the battered towns and cities of old Europe. Korean people, North and
South, had no such luxury of distance or exoticism when it came to their war.
It had begun as a civil war of local skirmishes as early as 1946, exploded into
rebellion during 1948, and with the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950,
had become a full-scale international confrontation. The seesaw nature of the
fighting back and forth through cities, towns and villages of the peninsula saw
massacres of prisoners by elements of the ROK (Republic of Korea) police,
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

army and vigilante groups, and vicious examples of local score settling and
revenge taken by Northern DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea)
soldiers and partisans. The US Air Force dropped more bombs on North
Korea than they had during the entire war against Japan, including freely
deploying their new weapon, napalm. All this added up to an experience of
violence, concentrated in time and space, that has few comparisons even in the
bloody history of the twentieth century (Cumings 2010).
So while South Korean filmmakers eagerly adopted styles of narrative and
character types from Hollywood, it is not surprising that several other types
of war film shadow the mainstream combat genre. Many films deal with the
hardships and sufferings of ordinary people in their villages and cities: themes
understandably more familiar in European or Soviet war films than those
made in Hollywood. Among these other Korean War films are a number which
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 50 mark mo rr i s

dramatise the occupation of inhabited places by North Korean troops – the

Inmingun (People’s Army) – or their partisan allies. Even though this phase of
the war lasted only as long as DPRK troops were in South Korea, from late
June until late September of 1950, it left behind a huge legacy of shame, anger
and fear. Atrocities against civilians, usually poor peasants, by the Northern
invaders feature in a number of films. The occupation film gave a particularly
prominent role to scenes of a particular kind of war-horror: poor people lashed
to stakes, shot or stabbed by Inmingun soldiers; or worse still, innocent people
killed by neighbours or family members under dire threats to their own lives;
parents abused by their own born-again Communist offspring; or worse still,
fathers murdered by sons. In The General’s Son (Daejwa-eui adeul, Lee Kang-
cheon, 1968), a Northern army regiment has taken over a small South Korean
town. Yoon-gi, the son of the commander in charge of the unit, joins them
after a period of study in Moscow, and is instantly shocked at the brutality of
the occupation. He finds the officers whiling away the time with vicious dog
fights, and soon witnesses local people being forced to murder one another,
including a mother whose child is forced to look on in horror. Yoon-gi’s father,
the commander, is revealed to be a fervent Communist and a monster, belit-
tling his son and having Yoon-gi’s mother exiled to Siberia. Further examples
of his monstrosity are apparent as the regiment prepares to retreat, as he is
ready to have blood drained from badly wounded men for the sake of active
troops. Yoon-gi is gradually humanised by the ordeals he suffers and through
the love of a local girl, but his father guns him down at the film’s end.
In Rainy Days (Jangma, Yu Hyun-mok, 1979), the good-hearted but weak-
minded Soon-cheol falls in with local Communist auxiliaries when Northern
troops occupy his village. He enjoys his new power to bully his betters, yet
hesitates to betray the hiding place of his anti-Communist brother-in-law.
When the Northern soldiers prepare to retreat, Soon-cheol hopes to follow
them into the mountains and fight as a partisan. Worried that his loyalty will
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

finally be questioned, he betrays his relative, but not before another villager
has already confessed. The soldiers and auxiliaries round up six village nota-
bles and tie them to stakes planted near the riverbank. To save himself from
the accusation of being a reactionary, Soon-cheol seizes a bamboo spear to be
used in the execution of the notables. He hurls himself at one of them, but
it flies past and lands in the sandy earth. He charges at the waiting soldiers
once more and grinds the spear into two men, blood splattering his hands and
face. Most of the scene is shot from behind the bound men, but is none the
less grim, especially the terrified growl of Soon-cheol and the vocalised death
agonies of his victims. Close-ups of Soon-cheol’s face and the spear in his
hands emphasise the mix of sweat, fear and blood that end his final moments
in his native village.
Over-the-top staging and acting, agony-filled close-ups, lashings of blood
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 w ar - h o rr o r a n d a n t i - c o m m u n i s m 51

– they combine to make crucial scenes in such films seem closer to the stuff
of horror films than conventional war films. Such scenes seem to agree with
the observation made by America’s most famous Korean War prisoner-of-
war, General William Dean: ‘to kill a man isn’t too serious but to mutilate
his body is terrible.’ What may make these scenes even more unusual is that
body-horror, or extreme or even very realistic violence, was not an ordinary
part of Korean filmmaking thrills and chills during the long Park Chung-hee
era of military government and tight censorship controls. Ghost horror came
in the form of the domesticated scares of Lee Yong-min’s films, such as A
Devilish Homicide (Salinma, 1965), or in ghost legends like Shin Sang-ok’s
The Thousand Year Old Fox (Cheonnyeonho, 1969) or Gwon Cheol-hwi’s A
Public Cemetery under the Moon (Wolha-eui gongdongmyoji, 1967). In such
films, whatever limited gore or bloodshed might take place is cocooned in an
aura of legend, folklore and fairly rudimentary special effects. Hitchcockian
psychological frissons and suspense were used effectively in Lee Man-hee’s The
Devil’s Stairway (Maeui gyedan, 1964); and beginning with his psycho-drama
The Housemaid (Hanyeo, 1960), Kim Ki-young would for decades explore the
invasion of the bourgeois family by rampant working-class female sexuality
through creepy mise-en-scène. But for horrific violence or attempts at stark
terror, Korean audiences would have to await the horror – or horror-crime
genre-blend – films of more recent vintage. Indeed, the violence on display in
most South Korean combat films of the 1960s and 1970s was much like that of
combat films made elsewhere in the days before exploding blood-squibs and
close-up, slow-motion photography. Soldiers are shot or blown up; they cry
out in agony – some may manage to call out ‘Omoni!’ (mother); they then fall
down / jump back / tumble from balconies / plummet into rivers; they die
instantly and without a lot of mess or fuss. In other films such as those noted
above, however, there is something almost uncanny about the demonic vio-
lence set loose by these Communist invaders from the North – known not only
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as the Inmingun ‘People’s Army’ but also, for many years, as the bukgwigun
‘Army of Northern Demons’.

bangong a nt i -c o mmu ni sm
‘Let’s have a go at making a real bangong film!’ director Lee Man-hee suppos-
edly suggested to scriptwriter Han Yoo-jeong (KOFA 2006: 106). The result
was the 1966 film A Hero Without Serial Number (Goonbeon eobneun yongsa).
Lee had reason to keep his cheerily cynical attitude close to his chest. Only
the previous year he had been arrested for violating the Anti-Communist
Law: his film Seven Female Prisoners (7in-eui yeoporo) was condemned for its
sympathetic portrayal of Inmingun soldiers. The seven women were Koreans
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 52 mark mo rr i s

who had been captured by Chinese soldiers, and a brave Northern officer and
his men rescue them and try to seek refuge in South Korea. The censors were
apparently offended by the fact that the North Korean lieutenant got to drive
around in a nice, new shiny jeep (Heo 2001: 208), and when a version of the
film was eventually released, the censors butchered it (Mun 2009: 153–4). In
contrast, the over-the-top politicking of the 1966 film A Hero Without Serial
Number won its scriptwriter the Best Anti-Communist Screenplay Award
at the Fifth Grand Bell Awards (KOFA 2006: 106; Mun 2009: 180). The
film tells the story of prodigal son Yeong-hoon, who returns home in a new
uniform with medals on his chest and pistol in his holster. The uniform is that
of an officer in the People’s Army but the family is a comfortable, Westernised
middle-class one. It is discovered that Yeong-hoon’s older brother, Yeong-ho,
is leading a band of local anti-Communist guerrillas in the nearby hills; the
unit commander, a strutting automaton, then jails Yeong-hoon’s little sister
and proceeds to torture the father in front of his daughter, demanding infor-
mation about the older brother’s whereabouts. Yeong-hoon tries to intercede,
taking a hot iron prepared for his father and applying it to his own arm,
begging that his father inform on Yeong-ho. During a raid by the partisans,
Yeong-hoon wounds his brother, and by the film’s end Yeong-hoon helps
organise his own father’s execution. He begs him one last time for information,
then has his father strapped to a cross and shot. He receives another medal,
but is fatally wounded during a raid led by his brother and dies in the arms of
his grieving family.
After the success of the military coup led by Park Chung-hee in May of
1960, anti-Communism became an enshrined credo of ROK nationalism. By
July of 1960 the first Anti-Communist Law was decreed:

School lessons and military training disseminated the ideology of

anticommunism . . . Teachers were responsible for the political
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

activities of their students. The idea that national security was under
threat was drummed into every South Korean student . . . The ideology
of anticommunism (and, in particular, anti-North Korean sentiments)
rationalized far-reaching surveillance of the population across time and
space. (Lie 1998: 114–15)

The new regime was fully aware of the power of visual media. In order to
promote the greater production of recognisably anti-Communist films, a
number of sweeteners were offered: lucrative import licences for foreign
(Hollywood) films and special prizes at film ceremonies such as the Grand
Bell Awards (Heo 2001: 208). If sweeteners did not work, the censors – who,
from the early 1970s, examined both scripts and pre-release prints – could
use strong-arm tactics, as Lee Man-hee had discovered back in 1965. Park
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 w ar - h o rr o r a n d a n t i - c o m m u n i s m 53

Sang-ho’s DMZ (Bimoojang jidae, 1965) is one such example of the depiction
of Northern soldiers and spies as cruelly treacherous. In this documentary-
style film, a young boy and girl are lost in the Demilitarised Zone near the end
of the war. They wander through the blasted landscape, hoping somehow to
make their way home to their mothers. Resting in a bombed-out building, they
encounter a suspicious man. He is a Northern spy and tries to take them in the
opposite direction from their quest. The boy resists and accidentally shoots
the man. Only wounded, the man pulls a knife, plunges it into the little boy’s
stomach and escapes, leaving the boy to die.
Some anti-Communist films might make some attempt to show an actual
confrontation of arguments, ideologies embodied in two opposing characters.
This seems to have been the approach of Han Hyeong-mo’s lost 1949 film,
Breaking the Wall (Seongbyeok-eul ddoolgo), the odd case of the Korean War
film that pre-dates, as it were, the actual Korean War. Two men, childhood
pals and classmates, now brothers-in-law, end up on opposite sides of the
struggle that pits Communist activists against loyal South Korean soldiers
at the time of the violent military rebellions of 1948. The soldier begs his old
friend to renounce his beliefs but, no longer open to democratic reasoning, his
Communist brother-in-law guns him down (PIFF / KOFA n.d.: 134). For the
most part, however, as industry veteran Ho Hyeon-chan has observed, most
of the films:

depicted the communists attacking their enemies through destructive

treachery, terrorist methods and violent means, with a touch of action
thrown in . . . Like in [early] American Westerns, the action angle
was emphasized and scenes of fighting made up most of the film. The
differences, black v. white, of the characters were clear: the black,
unconditionally evil, the white, unconditionally good. (Heo 2001: 207)
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Espionage and sabotage featured in some anti-Communist films, but the

Korean War film provided the favoured setting for the demonic Other
from the North. Not every war film, or even all of those referred to above,
would qualify as straightforward, unremitting examples of bangong films. For
instance, the earliest one, Piagol (Lee Kang-cheon, 1955), was made before
censorship and ideology had hardened. The film concerns a group of left-wing
partisans isolated in the Jiri Mountains after the retreat of the main Northern
forces of the DPRK. Growing more desperate for food, they mount raids on
nearby villages. One night, they slip down from their hideout, through the
grounds of an abandoned mountain temple and into the village of their young-
est comrade. His mother is killed, and the group returns to the temple with
their booty, a village official, his hands bound behind, and two other locals.
The female second-in-command condemns the headman as a reactionary
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 54 mark mo rr i s

(bandong) and is about to shoot him when their captain changes the plan. In
an early example of a scene that would become the defining trope of Korean
war-horror, the two locals are handed hastily made bamboo spears and told to
prove their loyalty to the people and the Party by executing the official or be
shot themselves. A brief close-up juxtaposes the two raw-cut spear tips and the
muzzle of a machine gun: the choice is clear. After a few moments of silent sus-
pense, they obey the order. The death is not shown in any detail; the stabbing
takes place from the back and the official falls down out of the shot.
In the scene immediately before the execution described, the hard-nosed
commander has been left alone in the shadowy temple grounds as his comrades
raid the village below. For some five or six minutes, he is alone with his own
thoughts and feelings; the conflict plays across his face. He seems frightened,
then moved to silent tears – of grief? of anger? – before pulling out his well-
worn commission papers for reassurance. This is one of the most remarkable
scenes in any Korean War film – not exactly anti-war but almost from a differ-
ent film to the scene of murder which follows it. The censors of the mid-1950s
did manage to delay the film’s release – signs of Red partisans’ humanity were
deemed unacceptable; but Piagol still went on to win a Best Film and Best
Actress award. Director Lee Kang-cheon played it safer in his next film, which
was one of the first down-to-earth combat films, Beat Back (Gyeogtoe 1956):
here, ROK troops have to take and hold a hill against a Chinese advance. By
the time of The General’s Son in 1968, however, the director had earned the
epithet of ‘standard bearer of the anti-Communist film’ (KMDb: Daejwa-eui
adeul).
Not all war films involved scenes of extreme violence and those that did
might have some claim to simple realism, although the crimes of the ‘Army
of the Northern Demons’ were easier, safer to recall and represent than those
perpetrated by government police and troops or by the American ally. The
planting of a scene of war-horror in a film dealing with more complex issues
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was no doubt often shaped more by cultural–political tactics than by official

political conviction. Consider the 1979 film Rainy Days, described above. Yu
Hyun-mok adapted a remarkably sad yet lyrical short story with that same title
by Yoon Heung-gil, in which the violence is resolutely off-stage. The young
boy narrator experiences war as a plague descending upon his family. One
uncle is brought back for burial; the other disappears into the mountains with
the retreating Northern army. Partisans raid the local town and their bodies
are left strewn around. Yet all we know of the event is what the boy hears from
his father’s report to the family. Yu and scriptwriter Yoon Sam-yook seem to
have taken one passing comment by the boy as their cue to provide the film
with suspense, action and an inoculation of anti-Communist sentiment: ‘From
time to time, from the dark corner of the sky, lightning darted out and pierced
Gunjisan as sharply as the bamboo spear that I once saw being thrust into a
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 w ar - h o rr o r a n d a n t i - c o m m u n i s m 55

man’s chest on the village road beside the dike’ (Yun 1989: 14). This is poetic
and understated, but chilling for all that, registering a primal scene that will
haunt this once innocent boy through the rest of his days. Overall, most critics
agree that the main thing added to Yoon Heung-gil’s story is not the director’s
insistence on the evils of Communism but rather the power of native Korean
beliefs to heal the rift between the warring peoples (KMDb: Jangma).

t he p he no m e n o l o gy o f ko r e a n wa r /h or r or
Having examined a sample of anti-Communist war films, I would like now
to speculate on how war-horror works from the inside – within registers of
meanings and feelings experienced by (imaginary) ordinary South Korean
spectators in the heyday of anti-Communist fervour. On an ideological and
macro-political level, the audience is invited to the grim spectacle of an assault
on the non-Communist, ‘democratic’ political system of South Korea by
agents of an evil regime bent on its complete negation and annihilation. On
the social and familial level, anti-Communist war-horror enacts a violation of
natural, proper relations and hierarchies. Peasant is turned against landlord
(the yangban rural elite). Friend is turned against friend. Natural family rela-
tionships are perverted: brother turns against brother, son against father. On
the existential level, the human body is assaulted and rent by the violent irrup-
tion of a deadly weapon. In Sartre’s terms, the pour-soi – a consciousness in the
world aware of its own being – is brutally rendered en-soi – a mute, inanimate
corpse. The fragile human body is perverted by inversion of inside and outside:
that which must be hidden – blood, organs, tissues – for the individual to exist,
is violently made visible, in an abject fashion. Audience identification may be
invested in the sexuality and gender of characters assaulted by virulently male
assailants – victims who are powerless and unable to avoid being penetrated
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and dominated to the point of extinction.

The prime levels of importance are the first two registers, certainly within
the political consciousness of filmmakers and government censors at the time.
But the second two, those related to psychoanalysis, and sexuality and gender,
are those which gain purchase on our more intimate fears and terrors. South
Korean war-horror even seems to share features that eventually appear com-
monplace in body-focused horror cinema: ‘the obsession with the . . . destruc-
tion of the body; a paranoid or conspiracist tendency in social and political
thinking’ (Boss 1986: 15). Stephen Prince has observed about the violence in
contemporary films that ‘the appeal of violence in cinema – for filmmakers
and viewers – is tied to the medium’s inherently visceral property’ (Prince
2000: 2). As I have tried to indicate above, it is in war-horror films that anti-
Communism may make its ‘viscerality’ quite literal. However, the ideological
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 56 mark mo rr i s

obsessions of anti-Communism are a far cry from the latter-day, postmodern,

playful knowingness about genre and screen violence that Philip Brophy has
wittily summed up as ‘horrality’ (1986). Indeed, as Prince suggests, ‘screen
violence provokes an inherently volatile set of viewer responses. They do not
include catharsis’ (2000: 1). Screen violence can, in certain times and places, be
redirected for political ends: that is the point of the iconography of war-horror.
Indeed, 1960s and 1970s war-horror was not really a means of commemorating
or purging the lived trauma of the Korean War; it was a cinematic mechanism
for the controlled stimulation of ideologically shaped trauma in the here and
now of the viewers. The transgressive violence of these generically hybrid
films was the result of their historical context: the torture, gore and monstrous
murders of the anti-Communist war film contain images far more horrific and
explicit than the most ambitious Korean horror films of the period, precisely
because such images became morally acceptable and politically charged in the
context of the national tragedy that was the Korean War.

co nc l usi o n
The sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War was marked in
2010. Two feature films and two major TV dramas appeared to commemorate
the occasion. John H. Lee’s 71: Into the Fire (Pohwasoguro) was the first major
war film since the highly successful Brotherhood (Taegukgi, Kang Jae-gyu,
2004). The other, Lee Sang-woo’s A Little Pond (Jageun yeonmot), was more
controversial. It depicts a well-documented massacre of innocent civilians by
American soldiers and airmen during the panic and confusion of the early
weeks of the war. Here, the anti-Communist film of occupation is all but stood
on its head; the villagers are mercilessly strafed, bombed and machine-gunned,
but in this case the American perpetrators are frightened and ignorant, not
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driven by a demonic ideology – and the GI does not use a spear.

During the summer of the same year, domestic television channel KBS ran
its twenty-episode drama Comrades (Jeon-u) and MBC challenged with its own
twenty-episode series Road Number One (Rodu neobeoweon). In the eighteenth
episode of Comrades, North Korean and South Korean platoons hold posi-
tions at either side of a bridge. Won-cheol, a People’s Army sergeant, receives
news that the last of his surviving brothers has been murdered; that means
one brother was shot, one was blown up and one was killed by a bayonet.
Won-cheol wraps one arm firmly around the neck of a young ROK captive
and frog-marches him right across the bridge towards the ROK soldiers in
the boy’s former unit. They look on in horror, helpless to intervene, as the
sergeant reaches around with his other arm and slowly drives a bayonet into
the boy’s chest. The terrified boy soldier coughs up blood as he dies. In a key
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 w ar - h o rr o r a n d a n t i - c o m m u n i s m 57

scene from 71: Into the Fire, set on 8 August 1950, ROK troops retreat to the
town of Yeong-deok. Amid exploding shells and whizzing bullets Jang-beom,
a volunteer student soldier, tries to deliver ammunition to a machine-gun post
when Northern soldiers storm the vicinity. He is pulled into a shelter by a
kindly ROK soldier, but the soldier is immediately shot and then bayoneted
by a determined North Korean. The latter drives his bayonet deep, hoists the
ROK soldier up a wall, and twists the blade. Horrified Jang-beom goes to shoot
the enemy soldier but his rifle is out of ammo. Trembling, he fumbles with
cartridges, but it is too late. The enemy runs off and the kind soldier gazes at
him with dying eyes, bleeding profusely.
It may seem quite natural that South Korea should remember the war with
the production of such films and television dramas. But in between the new,
more democratic country of today and the peak era of the Korean War film
came the 1980s era of Chun Doo-hwan’s authoritarian regime. Hye Seung
Chung, who grew up during that decade, has recalled how:

Chun’s notorious ‘3 S Policy’ (a cultural edict encouraging sport,

sex and screen so as to divert the public’s attention from political
oppression) meant that the two rival network channels, KBS and
MBC, filled their holiday and weekend schedules with escapist
Hollywood fantasies. As a unique phenomenon of postcolonial cultural
displacement and historical ventriloquism, television programmers of
the 1980s opted [on 25 June] to rerun Battle Hymn [dir, Douglas Sirk,
1957] rather than domestic films about the war. (Chung 2005: 52)

Whatever the quality of these films and dramas from 2010, the fact that they
were made and seen by millions of South Korean citizens is one obvious sign
of the country’s new openness. Yet I may not be alone in feeling that there is
something atavistic about scenes such as those described above. They do take
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place within combat narratives, not stories of enemy occupation. Still, they
can seem like spectres from a not-yet transcended political past. In a number
of recent South Korean films which deal with the DPRK, especially comedies,
the attitude is more patronising than demonising. Through the twenty epi-
sodes of KBS’s Comrades, we meet a number of Northern soldiers who have
something like real personalities, though they are never quite as complex,
rational or heroic as the characters on the other side. In comparison, 71: Into
the Fire seems politically retrograde, almost a throw-back to the anti-Commu-
nist era, just with computer-generated imagery (CGI) and new special effects.
Here the DPRK soldiers are automata, perhaps too comic-book to be believ-
ably demonic. Their leader, played with grim panache by tall, deep-voiced
Cha Seung-won, fights for machismo, the sheer pleasure of destruction, not
ideology or Kim Il-sung.
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 58 mark mo rr i s

The Lee Myung-bak government elected in December of 2007 has taken a

negative stance towards the kind of openness to the DPRK shown by earlier
presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. The DPRK has responded
with provocations such as the sinking of the naval ship Cheonan in March
2010 and the even more ominous act of shelling Yeonpyeong Island west
of Seoul that November. The same government is also known for a heavy-
handed approach to controlling television, its sacking of heads of the Korean
Film Council and a lack of enthusiasm for supporting independent film; it has
favoured instead major media conglomerates such as CJ Entertainment – the
entertainment monolith instrumental in financing 71: Into the Fire. It is no
doubt very unlikely that even a scene of extreme violence, such as the bayo-
neting of a South Korean soldier enacted so graphically in 71: Into the Fire, is
really intended to deliver the multi-levelled impact of the old anti-Communist
iconography. Ultra-violence – the Asia Extreme syndrome – has, after all,
been a queasily prominent feature of many recent films, such as Kim Ji-woon’s
genre-blending crime–horror thriller I Saw the Devil (Agma-leul boatda, 2010)
or Lee Jeong-beom’s spy–revenge thriller The Man From Nowhere (Ajeossi,
2010). In these two bloody films, it may seem as though on-screen violence
has gone well past a level of physical assault and violation once only tolerated
by censors and / or exploited by filmmakers engaged in the tricky game of
anti-Communist cultural manipulation. Yet there is no doubt that war-horror,
even halfway lost amid the special effects and a climate of violence as cool ludic
‘horrality’, has not been laid to rest. It is a revenant from Korea’s history of
violence which may continue to haunt Korean cinema for some time still.

ac k no w l e d ge me n t
The completion of this work has been made possible by the generous support
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2010-DZZ-3104).

wo rk s c i t e d
Boss, Pete (1986), ‘Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine’, Screen, 27: 1, pp. 14–24.
Brophy, Philip (1986), ‘Horrality – The Textuality of Contemporary Horror
Films’, Screen, 27: 1, pp. 2–13.
Chung, Hye Seung (2005), ‘Hollywood Goes to Korea: Biopic Politics and
Douglas Sirk’s Battle Hymn (1957)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television, 25, pp. 51–80.
Cumings, Bruce (2010), The Korean War: A History, New York: Modern
Library.
Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Korean Horror
PEIRSE Cinema,58edited by Alison Peirse, and Daniel Martin, Edinburgh University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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 w ar - h o rr o r a n d a n t i - c o m m u n i s m 59

Dean, William F. (1954), General Dean’s Story, New York: Viking.

Heo, Hyeon-chan (2001), My Cinematic Journey [Waga shinema no tabi], trans.
Nemoto Rie, Tokyo: Gaifusha.
KMDb (n.d.), ‘Daejwa-eui adeul’; [Link]
asp?nation=K&p_dataid=01656&keyword=Daejwa-eui adeul; accessed 1
December 2011.
KMDb (n.d.), ‘Jangma’; [Link]
ion=K&p_dataid=03373&keyword=Changma; accessed 1 December 2011.
KOFA (2006), Exhibition of the Complete Films of Lee Man-hee: Film Prodigy
Lee Man-hee [Lee Man-hee gamdok jeonjak jeon, Yeonghwa cheonjae Lee
Man-hee], Seoul: KOFA.
Konzett, Delia (2004), ‘War and Orientalism in Hollywood Combat Film’,
Quarterly Journal of Film and Video, 21: pp. 327–38.
Lie, John (1998), Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea,
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mun, Gwan-gyu (2009), Lee Man-hee, trans. Colin A. Mouat, Seoul: KOFIC
/ Seoul Selection.
PIFF / KOFA (n.d.), Han Hyung-mo: The Alchemist of Popular Genres, Seoul:
Korean Film Archive / Pusan International Film Festival.
Prince, Stephen (2000), ‘Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetic
Design and Special Effects’, in S. Prince (ed.), Screening Violence, New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 1–44.
Yun, Heung-gil (1989), ‘The Rainy Spell’, in M. Holman (ed.), The House of
Twilight, London: Readers International, pp. 1–77.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

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[Link]
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 c h apter 4

Mother’s Grudge and Woman’s Wail:

the monster-mother and Korean
horror film
Eunha Oh

Motherhood has long been a celebrated virtue in Korea, yet mothers also
occupy a central position in Korean horror film. From The Story of Jang-hwa
and Hong-ryeon (Janghwa Hongryeon-jeon, Kim Yeong-hwan, 1924) to the
more recent Sorum (Soreum, Yoon Jong-chan, 2001) and Possessed (aka Disbelief
Hell, Bulsinjok, Lee Yong-joo, 2009), all kinds of mothers – stepmothers,
mothers-in-law, sacrificing mothers, benevolent mothers and indifferent
mothers – are monsters. They have unresolved wishes, die wrongful deaths
and return from the grave to take their supernatural revenge (Baek 2008: 51).
By examining two little-known films of the 1970s and 1980s, Mother’s Grudge
(Eommaeui han, Lee Yoo-seob, 1970) and Woman’s Wail (Yeogokseong, Lee
Hyeok-soo, 1986), this chapter attempts to explain this seeming contradiction,
where women are both the oppressors and the oppressed, and cinematic moth-
erhood is depicted as monstrous at the same time that the government hands
out annual awards to celebrate motherhood’s virtues.1
This chapter therefore explores the motivations of the mother-ghosts using
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

psychoanalysis, then grounds them in their cultural context by examining the

ways in which the Confucian belief system has determined the representation
of women in society and in the cinema.2 It utilises the work of Barbara Creed
on the representation of the woman as the monster in Western horror cinema.
Creed coined the term the ‘monstrous-feminine’ to refer to the terrifying rep-
resentations of woman, arguing that when ‘woman is represented as monstrous
it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions.
These faces are: the archaic mother; the monstrous womb; the witch; the
vampire; and the possessed woman’ (1993: 7). This chapter then draws upon
Creed’s concept of the castrating woman and the archaic mother, in order
to provide a helpful perspective in revealing the unequal gender politics in
Confucian culture. The concept of the archaic mother is complicated, taken
as it is from ideas around all-encompassing, pre-Oedipal motherhood worked
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 the mo n s te r - m o th e r a n d k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 61

through in the writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.
There are certain elements, though, in Creed’s description that particularly
chime with the wonhon in classic Korean horror film. Creed argues that this
maternal figure is:

constructed as a negative force, she is represented in her

phantasmagoric aspect in many horror texts . . . the voracious maw,
the mysterious black hole that signifies female genitalia that threatens
to give birth to equally horrible offspring as well as threatening to
incorporate everything in its path . . . it is the suggested presence of the
gestating, all-devouring womb of the archaic mother which generates
the horror. (1993: 27)

Crucially for Creed, the archaic mother is not ‘constructed in relation to the
penis of the father . . . [it] does not depend for its definition on a concept of the
masculine’ (1993: 27–8). While Creed’s ideas are firmly grounded in psycho-
analytic theory, they present many useful ideas for understanding the figure
of the mother in Korean horror film, particularly in the way that the wonhon
rejects the afterlife and returns to the living world in order to inflict vengeance.
Like Creed’s archaic mother, she does not respect the Law of the Father, and
– most importantly for Korean culture – will not follow Confucian models of
patriarchal gender inequality.
Since its introduction in the late fourteenth century, Confucianism deter-
mines Korean culture in general, and a woman’s life in particular. As such,
Confucian hierarchy and gender inequality have governed motherhood and
the mother–child relationship in a fashion that is uniquely Korean. This study
explores the ways in which these Confucian particulars condition Creed’s
model of the monstrous-feminine in Korean horror, arguing that the repre-
sentation of female relationships and motherhood in Korean horror cinema is
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

culturally specific and shaped by the Confucian belief system. In both Mother’s
Grudge and Woman’s Wail, the mothers are simultaneously victims and agents
of Confucian patriarchy, and they both feature motherhood as the primary
motivation of the wonhon, a vengeful ghost. The wonhon is the typical avenger
in classic Korean horror. Like the abject, which signifies a ‘split between two
orders; the maternal authority and the law of the father’ (Creed 1993: 13),
the wonhon occupies the border between this life and the afterlife. Mother’s
Grudge depicts a mother reborn as a wonhon, who exacts revenge on those
who have done her wrong, in order to protect her son who is still living in the
world, while Woman’s Wail introduces a wonhon killed during her pregnancy,
returning from the undead to destroy the murderer and occupy the body of his
mother, then kill the rest of his family.3
The mother-in-law monster is also not unusual; there is a long tradition of
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 62 eu n h a o h

Korean folklore and popular culture that renders the mother-in-law not only
the enemy but also the root of evil.4 Korean proverbs like ‘Three years deaf,
three years mute’ (Lee 1971: 189) reveal the expected attitude of a newly wed
daughter-in-law: the young woman should be docile and ready to accept harsh
verbal reproaches from her mother-in-law (and husband’s family in general),
and should not complain about nor comment on family matters. This has been
taken up in the Korean horror film since the 1960s (Peirse 2011: 38); A Devilish
Homicide (Salinma, Lee Yong-min, 1965) depicts the mother-in-law as a sin-
ister, wicked and lustful monster, while The Hole (Olgami, Kim Seong-hong,
1997) features a mother-in-law who ends up destroying herself, her son and
his new wife. This chapter now turns to Mother’s Grudge, a film that illustrates
the Confucian virtues of a typical Korean mother, and then uses them to
imbue her with monstrous traits.

the ni ght m a r e o f mo t h e rh ood

In Confucian culture, the mother–child relationship is characterised by the
virtue of family lineage and filial piety (respect for one’s parents and ances-
tors). The goal of family life in traditional Korea has been to maintain the
family lineage, through the male child as heir. As such, the mother has a
tremendous responsibility to protect the child and raise him well for the
sake of the family honour; if she fails, her life is meaningless. The only pos-
sible way for a woman to achieve success in this culture is to have a son and
raise him to be a respectful member of society, and to produce heirs of his
own. Consequently, in Confucian society, family honour is one of the most
important values. Notably, ‘family’ is, most of the time, an abbreviation of
‘man’s family’ or ‘husband’s family’ (Cho 1998: 199–203). Therefore, the
most horrifying monster that is possible is the female who destroys the (man’s)
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family lineage and honour, something we will now explore in Mother’s Grudge,
arguing that the vengeance sought by the wonhon Soon-im can be understood
as socially and radically political.
Mother’s Grudge is set in the late Joseon Dynasty, most likely the late nine-
teenth century, judging from a discussion of the Emperor and the characters’
traditional clothing. At first glance, this appears to be a typical tale of a loving
and self-sacrificing mother caring for her child, even after her death. The
film’s narrative focuses on the pregnant Soon-im and her son Gwidong, who
have been abandoned by their husband / father Bong-sam, who lives with his
mistress, the rich widow Suh. Soon-im has been ill for some time, and Suh
poisons her so she can legitimately become Bong-sam’s wife. After Soon-
im’s death, Gwidong moves in with his father and Suh treats the boy terri-
bly, causing Soon-im’s wonhon to abandon the afterlife and return to rescue
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him. Unlike the American horror film, an idiosyncrasy of Korean cinema is

the frequent appearance of more than one type of monstrous-feminine in a
single film. Submissive Soon-im can be interpreted as a castrated mother,
deprived of power as she has lost her husband, because in Confucian culture,
losing one’s husband means foregoing proper membership of society. Suh, on
the other hand, is the castrating female monster, and Soon-im’s wonhon the
archaic mother. This draws parallels with A Public Cemetery under the Moon
(Wolha-eui gongdongmyoji, Gwon Cheol-hwi, 1967), in which Wol-hyang, the
docile wife, is the castrated woman, while the mistress is her castrating coun-
terpart. Wol-hyang’s wonhon then returns as the archaic mother who denies
Confucian patriarchy and keeps her own name. The relationship between the
three female characters in Mother’s Grudge is intriguing in relation to how
they function within or resist Confucian ideals of womanhood and mother-
hood. Suh pursues pleasure and actively satisfies herself; it is implied that her
husband died through excessive lovemaking, leaving her to inherit his wealth.
Traditionally, the Confucian woman is expected to be submissive, much
as Soon-im is, but Suh rejects this role and is sexually assertive and dominant
around Bong-sam. In the first scene in which they appear together, Soon-im
enters wearing a traditional veil, as was the custom for a lady from the privi-
leged class in Joseon, and waits for Bong-sam outside Suh’s residence. She
gently leads him into a dim and shadowy corner. She pleads with Bong-sam to
give her money so she can send Gwidong to school. As Bong-sam looks away,
Suh angrily emerges from the house. Depicted in bright lighting and without
a veil, she grabs Bong-sam’s arm and forcefully leads him back inside. As the
door slams, Soon-im kneels down and cries. Despite their different features,
personalities and circumstances, the two women can be seen as doubles, as
accentuated in their costumes – they wear the same green top and skirt and
accentuate their hair with a green jade clip. Moreover, Bong-sam acts the
same with both women. He is rarely, if ever, seen to smile or laugh. Even
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when being pleasured by the widow, he displays the same facial expression:
sad, unenthusiastic and impotent, and the castrated and castrating women
unexpectedly converge in their twinned desire for Bong-sam.
The twinning of the women then takes on the qualities of possession later in
the film. Suh orders her servant to heat up the furnace underneath Gwidong’s
room and he is almost burnt to death, only rescued by Soon-im’s ghost. The
following day, Bong-sam wakes up hung over outside a bar, and is taken home
by Suh. He finds his son sleeping in the master bedroom and Suh apologises
for her treatment of the boy. She explains that she will treat Gwidong kindly to
earn his forgiveness, and instead of using her typically high-pitched and brash
manner, she speaks softly, in low tones like Soon-im. Her actions make Bong-
sam cry, and even after the father falls asleep, she keeps his child held tight to
her bosom. Her sad face dissolves in a smooth transition to reveal Soon-im’s
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 64 eu n h a o h

ghost holding Gwidong in her arms, deep in thought. This initially suggests
that the two women are momentarily combined, the castrating woman and
archaic mother brought together as the product of each other’s alter ego.
However, the possession can be understood more clearly when related to
Korean ideas of motherhood. Soon-im, Suh and Soon-im’s ghost are differ-
ent dimensions of a single mother, each taking turns to experience an array of
emotions, including love, obsession, dread, fear, guilt, rage and responsibil-
ity. As such, the real relationship of horror in Mother’s Grudge is not between
Soo-im, her wonhon and the adulteress Suh, but between the child Gwidong
and motherhood.
In her research on Confucianism and Korean women, Haejoang Cho illus-
trates the gender inequality in Joseon society that teaches that there are two
conflicting yet harmonising forces in the universe, yin and yang; male yang
advocates dominance and is the bright, productive force, while the female yin
represents submission, darkness and negativity (Cho 1998: 199). Therefore,
by this definition, the male is superior and the female’s submission is natu-
ralised. As a male child represents yang and the female child yin, the male
child is clearly more welcome and celebrated than the female child. Such
Joseon gender values are still somewhat evident in contemporary Korean
society. Cho points out that a Korean mother’s ultimate concern is for her
son, and although Confucian scholars in Joseon suppressed women, they also
praised and idealised motherhood. This dichotomy is evident at the level of
social institutions, where the ‘heavy emphasis on family lineage functioned to
exclude women, particularly daughters and wives, but at the same time accom-
modated them as daughters-in-law and mothers’ (Cho 1998: 199). As a result,
Soon-im over-emphasises the importance of childrearing and trivialises her
own happiness, while Suh invents the cruellest ways possible to torture and
eliminate Gwidong. At the end of the film, Soon-im’s ghost goes even further
by attempting to eradicate his existence in this world. If the victim / monster
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dynamic is considered in this fashion, the three female monsters all emerge as
one single monster confronting the male child.
In the final scenes of Mother’s Grudge, Soon-im’s furious ghost haunts
Bong-sam and causes him to kill Suh accidentally; then Bong-sam drowns as
he chases Soon-im through a river. With the mistress and her husband dead,
Soon-im attempts to lure Gwidong into the afterlife, an act that can be viewed
as radical, as her revenge is an attempt to break the family lineage by remov-
ing the male heir. Soon-im appears to Gwidong as he searches a field for her.
Gwidong asks her if he can come with her and Soon-im replies, ‘No matter
how, I don’t want to leave you again.’ Her decision to take him to the afterlife
has two elements. Soon-im is a devoted Confucian mother who assumes full
responsibility for Gwidong’s life. She wants to take him into the afterlife, as
the mother’s responsibility for the child is an absolute, continuing after death;
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 the mo n s te r - m o th e r a n d k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 65

the child can be understood as a nightmare, a responsibility that never ends. In

addition, by taking her son into the afterlife, she wishes to deny him his place
in the existing world, the world of the father. If Gwidong stays in this world,
he will grow up and have his own family, participate in Confucian patriarchy
and carry on the family lineage. Psychoanalytically, the wonhon Soon-im
wants to return her son to the pre-Oedipal realm, where mother and child are
encompassed in a dyadic relationship beyond the reach of the father’s law.
This chimes with Creed once more in relation to the archaic mother, where
she argues:

the archaic mother is present in all horror films as the blackness of

extinction – death. The desires and fears invoked by the image of the
archaic mother, as a force which threatens to reincorporate what it once
gave birth to, are always there in the horror text – all-pervasive, all-
encompassing – because of the constant presence of death. The desire
to return to the original oneness of things, to return to the mother /
womb, is primarily a desire for non-differentiation. (1993: 28)

Soon-im refuses to recognise that Gwidong must leave her and lead his own
independent life. By attempting to lure him into the afterlife, she negates the
existing living world and tries to create a new order where the deceased can
be with the living, where the mother alone can parent the child, and family
lineage is no longer a concern. However, a Buddhist monk appears and
demands that she stop interfering in the living world, saying that Gwidong
will be taken care of. Soon-im departs for the afterlife but her ultimate goal
is achieved. Gwidong decides to become a monk and his mother thus suc-
ceeds in breaking the family lineage (as monks are celibate and do not marry).
Therefore, the restoration of the status quo hides a more radical result: the
wonhon’s victory.
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t he m o ns t r o us mo t h e r -in -l a w
In Woman’s Wail, Kyeong-jin murders his pregnant concubine Wol-ah to
prevent the discovery of the affair by his wife’s powerful and wealthy family.
Wol-ah then returns from the dead as a vengeful ghost and murders Kyeong-
jin’s three sons on the first night of their marriages, leaving three young
widows, Kyeong-ran, Young-sook and Ok-boon. However, Ok-boon, the
youngest daughter-in-law, has conceived a child before her husband Myeong-
kyu’s death. The wonhon then possesses the mother-in-law’s body, murders
Ok-boon’s sisters-in-law, and attempts to destroy Ok-boon and her unborn
child, once more halting the family lineage.
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 66 eu n h a o h

In Woman’s Wail, the mother-in-law is explicitly cast as a monster, a figure

made all the more potent and menacing by Confucianism. In Korea, the
word ‘mother-in-law’ refers to the husband’s mother (as opposed to a wife’s
mother) because a daughter’s mother has no meaningful role; daughters are
‘married out’ and henceforth ‘belong’ to another family. As such, Confucian
mothers define themselves more as the mothers of sons than in sisterhood
with other women. When their sons are married and form a new generation
in the family, it is their time to enjoy respect from their young daughters-in-
law. Older mothers have already worked hard and suffered harsh treatment,
and the young women (their daughters-in-law) exist to care for them (Wolf
1972: 158–70; Guisso 1981: 57). Mothers-in-law also expect to be revered,
as they have sacrificed their youth for the honour of their (husband’s) family.
Korean mothers earn their revered status through Confucian mechanisms
of filial piety, which teaches that one must have genuine reverence for one’s
parents to understand the origin of one’s own life. Indeed, the success of older
mothers is considered so powerful that even the male head of the family (be
it her husband or son) is expected to respect her deeply. Thus, when her son
marries, the mother-in-law finally sees herself as privileged, as opposed to
feeling solidarity with the oppressed female group of which she was formerly
a part (Cho 1998: 200). It is noteworthy that, despite the openly declared
gender inequality, Confucianism, in a way, gave certain rights to women. The
domestic domain is the woman’s, where she has ‘freedom’ to be creative and
diligent, even if her achievement is focused solely on the honour of her hus-
band’s family (Cho 1998: 192–5). Korean horror films such as Woman’s Wail
explore the strict hierarchy of the domestic realm, where the mother-in-law’s
power and authority are absolute and unquestioned. When this is understood,
the film’s horror can arguably be read in its specific cultural context: while the
bloody representation of Wol-ah’s ghost reincarnated in the mother-in-law is
visually frightening, it is the mother-in-law herself that creates the horrifying
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atmosphere.
In Sorrowful Screaming: A History of the Female Ghost in Korean Films,
Baek Moon-im discusses the Confucian virtues of chastity and family lineage,
noting:

The narrative with woman’s chastity as the main conflict has been
constantly produced and occupied a major portion of Korean popular
culture. It can be largely divided into two groups: one is about a woman
victimized by a violent rape [. . .] and the other is in the mother-in-law
vs. daughter-in-law dynamic, where the former accuses the young of
adultery. It is in a way a modification of the first group, and has been a
constant motif from Janghwa Hongryeon jeon, early modern literature,
shinpa and the 60s melodrama. (2008: 168)
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Baek argues that, for the woman’s revenge to earn the viewers’ support, the
woman has to be chaste, and that the woman’s revenge is ultimately focused
on the destruction of family. A woman’s chastity is not her own, but rather is
the possession of the patriarch, be it the father or the husband, depending on
her marital status. If a woman loses her chastity, it is also a severe loss for the
patriarch, for only when she is chaste is she a proper member of family, and
family lineage is more important than individual people. As such, in horror
films, if a female character died a virgin, or was raped and fought hard to keep
her virginity, it is acceptable for her to seek vengeance, and this motivation will
be supported by the viewers’ sympathies. This is because chastity and fidelity
are what makes a woman a proper member of Confucian society, and resonates
with Carol Clover’s work on the final girl of horror film, who remains virginal
and sexually inactive (1992: 33–4).
This dynamic is evident in the early scenes of Woman’s Wail, which depicts
two opposing generations of women discussing chastity. In an early scene,
before the mother-in-law is possessed by Wol-ah, she reprimands her two
recently widowed daughters-in-law. The frame is clearly divided into two by
a column in the room. The mother-in-law is on the left-hand side, facing the
camera, while the daughters-in-law are on the right; as explicitly represented
by the thick, black column in the middle, they have quite different perspec-
tives on the death of the mother-in-law’s two sons. The mother-in-law insists
on the young women’s celibacy for the sake of the family honour, while
the young widows, especially the younger one, are sexually attracted to the
male house servant. Then, when the third son, Myeong-kyu, dies, the new
daughter-in-law Ok-boon insists on remaining celibate, but the mother-in-
law tries to convince her to return to her family and remarry, as she is from
a lower class. However, once the mother-in-law discovers Ok-boon’s preg-
nancy, she demands that the young woman stays; the mother-in-law oversees
the younger generation in order to protect the family lineage. Writing on the
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competition between the female generations in Woman’s Wail, Baek argues

that their struggle emanates from patriarchal leadership, and that these women
are representatives of males in each generation (2008: 194–208). However, as
I pointed out at the beginning of the chapter, one of the central characteris-
tics of Korean horror film is the power struggle between female characters,
with female monsters and female victims. The generational conflicts between
mother- and daughter-in-law are not a transposition of father and son leader-
ship battles. Men may fight over patriarchal leadership, yet the primacy of the
family lineage is never in doubt. The monstrous mother-in-law in Woman’s
Wail is after Ok-boon’s child, be it the son or grandson, to eradicate the family
lineage itself.
Soyoung Kim has argued that vampirism is not a traditional Korean belief
but a Western influence sometimes used in classic Korean horror films, such
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 68 eu n h a o h

as A Devilish Homicide, to accentuate the power and mysteriousness of the

monster (2000a: 116–17). Kim has aptly pointed out that vampirism in Korean
horror produces a hybrid monster, as:

vampirism connotes the West when it is employed in South Korean

film. It is modern at the same time as it is pre-modern, yielding a
fearful bricolage as it blends with more or less local pre-modern horror
materials. Thus a female ghost with vampiric powers becomes more
threatening and complex than a purely traditional one. What is implied
in this enhanced power is knowledge of the modern social and cultural
machinery, and in particular the vamp sexuality of the femme fatale.
(2000b: 57)

In Woman’s Wail, vampirism has the same function: the mother-in-law takes on
sexualised and vampiric qualities, using her sharp, penetrating fingernails and
teeth to kill her victims, and is thus portrayed as an unsympathetic and almost
invincible monster, a threat to the younger female generation. When the mother-
in-law becomes possessed, she begins to dress sexily, wearing heavy make-up,
colourful clothes and bold jewellery, all of which are banned for the young
daughters-in-law, who must wear simple white clothes during their mourning
period. She spends a long time looking in the mirror while the younger women
do the household chores. The mother-in-law’s sexuality is unnatural and men-
acing, as befits her possession; her make-up gets heavier and heavier, and her
voluptuous body is displayed when she kills a chicken and drinks its blood. She
then fully embodies the vampire when she attacks one of her daughters-in-law
from behind, biting her in the shoulder and drinking her blood.
At the end of the film, Ok-boon fights a battle with this sexualised, vam-
piric mother-monster. In the middle of the night she goes to Wol-ah’s grave
and discovers the truth about her untimely murder at the hands of her lover.
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The mother-in-law appears in the darkness, speaking softly and benevolently.

Yet when her identity is revealed, she tries to kill Ok-boon’s unborn child.
She bleeds from every facial orifice and throws fire at her daughter-in-law;
Ok-boon stabs her with a sword but she teleports, directing beams of searing
light from her eyes and levitating Wol-ah’s gravestone as a weapon with which
to attack Ok-boon. As is commonly the case in classic Korean horror, the
individual person is incapable of defeating the monster without recourse to
higher authorities. Ok-boon’s clothes are ripped, revealing a Buddhist scrip-
ture on her chest that sends a deathly beam at the monster, killing her. As is
the case in A Devilish Homicide and Mother’s Grudge, only the external author-
ity of Buddhism is sufficient to quell the monster. In Mother’s Grudge, the son
Gwidong can be interpreted as the mother’s nightmare, while in Woman’s Wail
the mother figure is the horror: an almost invincible monster.
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 the mo n s te r - m o th e r a n d k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 69

c onc l u s i o n
Drawing upon Creed’s theoretical framework, this chapter has examined the
ways in which Confucian patriarchy shapes the representation of motherhood
in Korean horror film. With a specific focus on the wonhon, the Korean female
vengeful ghost, it has complicated Creed’s reading of the monstrous-feminine
by demonstrating how multiple types of monstrous-feminine (castrating,
castrated, vampiric and archaic) appear in different characters in individual
films, and has argued that Confucianism influences how Korean cinema works
through the mother–child and mother-in-law relationships. The Confucian
celebration of self-sacrificing mothers and the sacred nature of motherhood
forms a crucial apparatus for the oppression of women, a repression that bursts
forth in Korean horror cinema through the culturally unique representation of
monster-mothers.

no t e s
1. An example of which can be found in the ‘Great Mother Award’, presented
annually by governmental institution, the Ministry of Culture, Sport and
Tourism ([Link]
[Link]?pSeq=10599).
2. Confucianism is a worldview centered on the unity between the human
community and Heaven. To achieve its cultural ideal, self-cultivation is of
the utmost importance. Confucianism believes in functional and peaceful
accordance of every member in society, governed by intrinsic hierarchy in
class, gender and age (Tu 1998b: 121–30).
3. It was first released by Cheil-younghwasa in Korea in 1970, and exported to
many Asian markets, including Hong Kong, with the Chinese title guı̌-bào-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

qiú and the corresponding English title Vengeance on the Living. As was the
destiny of most Korean films in the past, no print was kept and archived.
This film existed only in record, until in 2009 a print was found in Hong
Kong and sent to the Korean Film Archive. As the print was circulated
in Chinese-speaking regions, it is dubbed into Chinese and subtitled in
English. This is the only version of the film known to be in existence at
the time of writing. In email correspondence, the Korean Film Archive
explains that the copyright has been handed to the wife of a relative of
the film company’s president, and that she has not yet expressed any plan
to show it in public. This chapter refers to the original Korean names as
recorded in the Korean Film Archive, which are quite different from the
Hong Kong export version: so, for example, Bong-sam instead of Sangku,
Soon-im instead of Eunmae, and so on.
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 70 eu n h a o h

4. For example, the popular name for an endemic plant with a spiky
and bumpy leaf-surface, whose scientific name is Persicaria senticosa, is
Myeoneuri-mitssitgae (Lee 1971: 440), literally meaning ‘toilet towel for
daughter-in-law’, symbolising the mother-in-law’s abusive treatment of
her son’s wife.

wo rk s c i t e d
Baek, Moon-im (2008), Sorrowful Screaming: A History of the Female Ghost
in Korean Films, [Wolha-eui yeogokseong: Yeogwi-ro ingneun hanguk gongpo
yeonghwasa], Seoul: Chaeksesang.
Cho, Haejoang (1998), ‘Male Dominance and Mother Power: The Two Sides
of Confucian Patriarchy in Korea’, in W. H. Solte and G. A. De Vos (eds),
Confucianism and the Family, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 187–208.
Clover, Carol J. (1992), Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and
Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.
Guisso, Richard W. (1981), ‘Thunder Over The Lake: The Five Classics and
Perception of Woman in Early China’, in R. Guisso and S. Johannesen (eds),
Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship, Youngstown,
NY: Philo, pp. 47–62.
Kim, Soyoung (2000a), Ghosts of Modernity: Fantastic Korean Cinema
[Pantaseutik hanguk yoenghwa: geundaeseong-ui yuryeong-deul], Seoul: Ssias-
eul ppurineun saram-deul.
— (2000b), ‘Suri Suri Masuri’, Postcolonial Studies, 3: 1, pp. 53–60.
Peirse, Alison (2011), ‘Tracing Tradition in Korean Horror Film’, Asian
Cinema, 22: 1, pp. 31–44.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Tu, Wei-Ming (1998a), ‘Confucius and Confucianism’, in W. H. Solte and

G. A. De Vos (eds), Confucianism and the Family, Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, pp. 3–36.
— (1998b), ‘Probing the Three Bonds and Five Relationships in Confucian
Humanism’, in W. H. Solte and G. A. De Vos (eds), Confucianism and the
Family, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 121–36.
Wolf, Margery (1972), Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

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 p a rt ii

Contemporary ‘Domestic’ Horror

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 c h apter 5

Heritage of horrors:
reclaiming the female ghost
in Shadows in the Palace
Yun Mi Hwang

Like a CSI: Korea set during the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), Shadows in the
Palace (Goongnyeo, Kim Mi-jeong, 2007) centres on a murder investigation
led by a palace lady, Cheollyeong. Her search for the truth, however, ends
disastrously when she is forced to confront her dark past, while the murder
victim, Wollyeong, rises up as a vengeful ghost and embarks on a killing spree.
A period murder mystery and horror, the film employs a number of themes
and tropes used in contemporary South Korean cinema – the horror genre or
otherwise – that helped Korean films gain popular appeal within and beyond
the nation. At the same time, it shrewdly reworks older genres and cycles for
a modern audience, including the female ghost (yeogwi) films and royal court
dramas (wangjo sageuk).1 In this sense, Shadows in the Palace is an apt case for
studying the issues of acknowledgement, intertext and cinematic heritage in
the Korean horror genre, allowing us to trace the historical links between the
present film and its generic precedents. The question is how, then, while vying
for both local and global attention, does the film resurrect old ghosts and to
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what end? I argue that, in dramatising the hidden lives of women at court, the
film attempts to recuperate a lost history, ultimately exorcising the prescrip-
tive portrayal of women as either the villainous vixens or the passive victims
of history.
Korean horror, which emerged in the 1960s and had more or less disap-
peared by the late 1980s, was a genre dismissed by critics and scholars alike,
until its spectacular comeback in the late 1990s.2 With the domestic triumph
of K-horror and its concurrent international success, film scholars have tried
to chart its generic trajectory and allocate it an appropriate place in the history
of Korean cinema. The crux of the question here is whether to understand the
recent horror cycle as a continuation of and close variation on the old form or
a completely new generation of films that mark a clear break from the tradi-
tion. While the latter has been the dominant opinion to date, this question calls
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 74 y u n m i hw an g

for a broader examination of the issues of memory and historiography within

the national cinema discourse, as I shall demonstrate shortly. Soyoung Kim
(1998), who has written extensively on the subject of national cinema, claims
that:

Even though only fifty years have passed, to the audiences of today
the period from Independence to the 1960s is only remembered in
fragments. As the ‘rediscovery’ of Kim Ki-young, who made his first
film in 1955, and the works of Im Kwon-taek, who has been active
since the 1960s, demonstrate, what Korean cinema has achieved since
Independence is no trivial matter. However, when I examine the
current discourse of Korean cinema, all I see is the rhetoric of the ‘new’
and the ‘unfamiliar’. There really is little discussion on how recent films
succeed or challenge the heritage of Korean cinema.3 (emphasis mine)

What Kim illuminates is that the lost history of Korean cinema and the
belated revisionist fervour account for the somewhat skewed understanding of
films from the past, shrouding them in mystery and further distancing them
from the present. Appropriately, Kim, elsewhere, engages with ‘the fantastic
mode’, evident across different periods of Korean cinema and even in different
genres, including genre movies and nationalist realist films, concluding that
‘[the fantastic mode] offers a frame that cuts across Korean cinema history in
a new way’ (Kim 2000a: 53). Not only does her observation problematise the
dominant melodrama and nationalist realist film paradigm, but it also provides
a missing clue to aid the construction of the new historiography of Korean
cinema.
Returning to the horror genre, however, the idea that older films belong
to an embalmed past and have little reach into the present still survives. For
example, while acknowledging that the female ghost is a common theme in
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

both classical and modern horror, Baek Moon-im distinguishes modern exam-
ples, stating that ‘even at the level of the visual image, the female ghosts in
recent films show barely any continuity with the traditional ghosts except for
the long dark hair and the dress’ (Baek 2008: 268). Similarly, a short survey of
Korean horror published by the Korean Film Archive includes the following
passage:

The Korean horror genre almost disappeared in the mid- to late 1980s
and then saw a revival with Whispering Corridors. Therefore, it is safe
to consider the horror films of the 1960s to the 1980s as a kind of
island. These films only existed then and do not exist any more. Their
subversive qualities continue to bewitch us like some dark magic from
this ruptured history and forgotten memory. (Heo 2011: 10)
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 heritage of horrors 75

While the idea that past horror films are an island, a deserted one at that, may
be compelling, such a notion simplifies or even disregards the subtle yet inevi-
table process of the dissemination of images and ideas within a culture and the
various discursive practices that surround it, which enables what Robert Stam
calls ‘intertextual dialogism’ (Stam 2000: 226). Hence, rather than endorsing the
idea that the recent horror cycle stands at a distance from tradition, it is more
productive to study any textual similarities, as well as differences, in order to
examine the ‘genrification’ of Korean horror over time (Altman 1999: 52–4).
Using Shadows in the Palace as a case study, therefore, I shall demonstrate how
the film successfully reinvents the traditional female ghost genre in order to meet
the demands of the expanding film market and shifting audience expectations.

s i tu at i ng shadows in the palace in c on t ex t :

t he m e s , g e n r e a nd h e r it a g e h or r or
Shadows in the Palace was released in October 2007 on 370 screens, after the
summer high season for the horror genre had ended in Korea. The film claimed
the highest booking rate for a Korean film in its opening week and eventually
sold 1.3 million tickets nationwide, which is a moderate box-office success for
an 18-rated period horror.4 It is the debut feature of Kim Mi-jeong, one of
the few woman directors working inside the male-dominated Chungmuro (the
traditional hub of the Korean film industry). While her female contemporaries
often hone their skills on family dramas and romantic comedies, Kim took on
the challenge of a sageuk horror for her first film, a decision that may have par-
tially derived from her experience working on the sets of mega-hit historical
drama King and the Clown (Wang-eui namja, Lee Joon-ik, 2005) as an assistant
director.5
Shadows in the Palace employs a number of popular motifs and conventions
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

as a way to connect with contemporary-set horrors and mainstream cinema

and, effectively, with their audience. Firstly, it features the female ghost, a
‘dominant supernatural prototype’ (Seo 2009: 166), which also appears in:
the Whispering Corridors series (1998, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2009), The Ring Virus
(Kim Dong-bin, 1999), Uninvited (4inyong siktak, Lee Soo-yeon, 2003), Muoi:
Legend of a Portrait (Kim Tae-gyeong, 2007), the Death Bell series (Gosa, 2008
and 2010), Possessed (Bulsinjiok, Kim Yong-joo, 2010) and all four films by
Ahn Byung-ki – Nightmare (Gawi, 2000), Phone (Pon, 2002), Bunshinsaba (aka
Witch Board, 2004) and Apartment (APT, 2006). In fact, the theme of the dead
interacting with the living has crossed over from the horror genre and can now
be witnessed in supernatural comedies such as Ghost House (Gwisin-i sanda,
Kim Sang-jin, 2004), To Catch a Virgin Ghost (Sisilli 2Km, Shin Jeong-won,
2004) and sleeper hit Hello Ghost (Kim Yeong-tak, 2010).
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 76 y u n m i hw an g

Secondly, by zooming in on the court ladies’ life of confinement in the late

seventeenth century, the film unveils injustice and cruelty in a society con-
trolled by power. It uses the physical setting – the royal palace – to convey the
claustrophobic and horrific ambiance, rendering it a site ‘where trauma and
death are relived’ (Seo 2009: 244, n6). In this sense, Shadows in the Palace curi-
ously resembles Whispering Corridors, a film which erases the individuality of
each student in an all-girls high school to the point that the identity of the real
ghost becomes the mystery among the group of uniformed schoolgirls. Both
films deal with a twisted female camaraderie and rivalry within an oppressed
setting and with tragic consequences. Other recent horrors, such as R-Point
(Gong Soo-chang, 2004), centred on a military operation during the Vietnam
War; Antarctic Diary (Namgeuk ilgi, Yim Pil-seong, 2004), about a group of
explorers faced with extreme circumstances; and Epitaph (Gidam, Jeong Sik
and Jeong Beom-sik, 2007), set in a hospital in colonial Seoul, all rely heavily
on the background setting to advance the horror narrative.
In addition, Shadows in the Palace constructs the relationship between the
investigator Cheollyeong and the victim and subsequent ghost Wollyeong
along similar lines to other K-horror films. Studying a number of post-1990s
female ghost films, Baek Moon-im defines the female protagonist in relation to
the ghost as a ‘sympathiser’ and ‘double’ (Baek 2008: 270). She adds:

On the surface, the young female protagonist, at first, seems to have

no relation to the ghost. [. . .] As the heroine tries to solve the mystery,
however, she becomes sympathetic to the ghost, and then ‘remembers’
the ghost’s trauma through her own experience. By repeating the
ghost’s trauma, the female protagonist finds herself turning into a
monster in the end. (Baek 2008: 269)

While Cheollyeong and Wollyeong appear to have very little in common,

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except for being ladies at court, the two are connected by their traumatic
experience of motherhood, as Wollyeong was forced to give up her child and
Cheollyeong had to kill hers. The film reveals that this unthinkable infanticide
makes Cheollyeong as monstrous as the ghost. The two ladies do indeed form
a special bond in the end, one that is based on blood, secrecy and power, as
suggested in the scene after the Queen Mother’s funeral.
Lastly, what the ghost Wollyeong desires is, unsurprisingly, revenge. The
theme of bloody retribution has been prevalent not only in K-horrors featur-
ing ghosts but also in the so-called ‘extreme’ films that push the limits of
screen violence and gore. In the extreme genre, there is an almost obsessive
return to the revenge motif, often involving the gangster underworld and /
or psychotic serial killers, as seen in A Bittersweet Life (Dalkomhan insaeng,
Kim Ji-woon, 2005), Park Chan-wook’s award-winning Vengeance trilogy
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 heritage of horrors 77

(2002, 2003 and 2005), The Chaser (Chugyeokja, Na Hong-jin, 2007), I Saw
the Devil (Angmaleul boatda, Kim Ji-woon, 2010), and a film set in a provincial
backwater with a rape-revenge twist, Bedevilled (Gimbongnam sarinsageonui
jeonmal, Jang Cheol-soo, 2010). What is more, the violent ghost Wollyeong
escapes punishment for her deeds, echoing films that do not advance a moral
message of good prevailing over evil. Robert Cagle observed that a number of
South Korean extreme films, such as A Bittersweet Life, H (Lee Jong-hyeok,
2002) and Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003), refuse to tell a moral tale, thereby
subverting the typical Hollywood ending and frustrating some reviewers in
America (Cagle 2009: 125–6). While Cagle attributes the bleak ending in
these films to the specific social and historical contexts of modern Korea, I
shall also engage with the cultural memory and generic baggage of the horror
genre in order to explicate the narrative strategies in Shadows in the Palace.
In all, the film reflects a contemporary horror sensibility within a period
setting by incorporating these recognisable and marketable generic tropes and
themes. Its unique position as a costume horror, moreover, enables the film
to ride the tides of two distinct genres in Korea that have put up a strong
performance in recent years.
Just as horror has been in demand, historical dramas have seen a palpable
revival since the early 2000s, whereby a number of expensive, visually strik-
ing and successful costume pieces have been showcased to the audience. The
genre, alongside sports drama and films depicting animals, once occupied a
disreputable place in the triumvirate of box-office poison in Korean cinema
(Paquet 2003); yet, the runaway successes of Untold Scandal (E J-yong,
2003) and King and the Clown, and more recently a stylish royal court drama
Masquerade (Gwanghae, Choo Chang-min, 2012) and period war drama
Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon (Choejongbyeonggi hwal, Kim Han-min, 2011),
have elevated the status of the genre and prompted filmmakers to venture
into the past and to depict it in dazzling colours. Shadows in the Palace clearly
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belongs to this new cycle of period drama, characterised by its high production
values and contemporary sensibility. In other words, while the film is framed
within the horror and mystery genre, stylistically, it contains features of the
heritage aesthetic in which established costume and production designers
display their talents in creating a compelling historical setting.6 As such, the
camera lingers on the artifacts and costumes from the carefully crafted period
mise-en-scène, such as the historically authentic autopsy equipment, while still
giving the audience a good number of chills and thrills. Heritage aesthetics, in
effect, combined with the shock of the ‘body genre’, create a peculiarly jarring
sense of fascination and repulsion (Williams 1991). For this reason, Shadows
in the Palace is an instance of what I term ‘heritage horror’, together with the
gory murder mystery Blood Rain (Hyeol-eui nu, Kim Dae-seung, 2005), tradi-
tional ghost film The Evil Twin (Jeonseol-ui gohyang, Kim Ji-hwan, 2007) and
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 78 y u n m i hw an g

retro medical horror Epitaph. The cross-fertilisation of ‘horror’ and ‘histori-

cal’ not only resuscitates these once-marginalised genres but also generates an
effective synergy for the Korean film industry.

horror-ing t h e p e r io d d r a ma : t h e fil m t ex t
The Korean title of Shadows in the Palace is goongnyeo, a generic term for
palace women. Historically, during the Joseon Yi Dynasty, the royal court
housed a few hundred ladies who attended to the royal family and oversaw
the general running of the place. JaHyun Kim Haboush notes that ‘service
in the palace was one of very few salaried professions open to women’ in
dynastic Korea and the surviving palace literature written by anonymous
women of the court attests to the level of education they were given (Kim
Haboush 2008: 293). As the film portrays in detail, these skilled individuals
were modern-day career women, who devoted themselves to duties such as
delivering letters, embroidering silk and supervising young apprentices. As a
result, from the outside, palace women were viewed both as ‘figures of fantasy
and envy because [of] their nearness to power, [and] their access to the court’s
pomp and luxury’ and as tragic figures living a life of self-denial and life-long
confinement (Kim Haboush 2008: 294). These somewhat contradictory views
of the court ladies, in turn, reveal the fact that very little is known about their
actual lives, heightening the mystery and curiosity they arouse in an external
public. The obscure realities surrounding these palace women have sparked
nationwide interest, especially after the phenomenal success of the television
drama Jewel in the Palace (Daejanggeum, MBC, 2003–4). The bleak tone and
tragic ending of Shadows in the Palace present an antithesis to the possibilities
for self-fulfilment in court life as depicted in the television series.
In an interview, director Kim stated that her mission with her film was to
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

‘remember the lives of those who are forgotten and buried in history’ (Cine 21,
2007). Hence, after conducting extensive research into the historical material
and archival documents, she not only wrote the film script herself but also later
shared her broad knowledge of these traditional women in the DVD director’s
commentary. Effectively, Shadows in the Palace is not so much focused on the
unravelling of the murder mystery as it is concerned with taking a fresh look
into the lives of the ladies-in-waiting and setting a scene where the past can
haunt the present in the figure of a ghost. In this sense, the characterisation of
the female ghost Wollyeong and her relationship with other court ladies lie at
the heart of the narrative development.
A personal maid to Royal Consort Hui, Wollyeong is poisoned due to a
dark secret surrounding the infant Crown Prince. A recent mother and a being
that transgresses the border between the real and the unreal, Wollyeong is an
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 heritage of horrors 79

emblem of monstrosity and Barbara Creed’s concept of the ultimate abject

(Creed 1993: 253). As a constant reminder of her material presence, her corpse
is left on the examination table, anticipating her ghostly return. Finally, the
hovering spirit leaves the body, wandering freely inside the palace to eliminate
anyone who hinders her access to her son.
One of Wollyeong’s final victims is the Queen Mother, a cruel mother-
in-law figure. In the latter’s death scene, Wollyeong first slips into the
Queen Mother’s embroidered gown and then strangles her victim. With her
extremely pale face and long dark hair, Wollyeong, at first, seems to fit the
iconography of a feudal ghost, frequently seen in the popular television series
of the 1970s and 1980s, Hometown Legends (Jeonseol-eui gohyang, KBS). One
of the best-known Korean horrors, A Public Cemetery under the Moon (Wolha-
eui gongdongmyoji, Gwon Cheol-hwi, 1967), a film that features maternal ghost
Wol-hyang, is notable for inscribing the signature look of the female ghost,
draped in a traditional white costume, or sobok, on our collective psyche. A
recent sageuk horror, The Evil Twin, recycles this quintessential image of the
feudal female ghost in the film poster. In Shadows in the Palace, however,
Wollyeong refuses the humble white robe but rather appears in the Queen
Mother’s luxurious garment, at which her victim protests, ‘How dare you steal
the Queen Mother’s robe!’ This scene is pivotal, marking Wollyeong’s identity
as not only a vengeful ghost but also a power-hungry one. Wollyeong’s choice
of costume and her motivation to return connect her, in turn, to the ambi-
tious femmes fatales of past historical dramas and period horrors, who mani-
fested explicit desires to ascend the political ladder. In other words, the ghost
Wollyeong is at once familiar and new, evoking memories of earlier represen-
tations of women in different film genres and cycles. By tracing the ghost’s
cultural ancestry, I will now examine how the film makes direct reference to
the royal court dramas and horror movies of the 1960s.
A subgenre of the historical drama, ‘royal court sageuk’ refers to films that
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foreground the conspiracy and intrigue inside the palace, where the power
struggles amongst royalty, faithful servants and rebellious retainers are played
out. The genre, which requires large production budgets, cutting-edge tech-
nology and historical research, reached the height of its popularity in the 1960s
with works like Lady Jang (Janghuibin, Chung Chang-wha, 1961), Queen
Dowager Inmok (Inmok daebi, Ahn Hyeon-cheol, 1962) and The Sino-Japanese
War and Queen Min the Heroine (Cheongil jeonjaenggwa yeogeol minbi, Im
Won-sik and Na Bong-han, 1965). Royal court sageuks from this period show-
cased satisfying spectacle, thanks to the introduction of colour and cinema-
scope to Korea, and these became two of the essential ingredients of expensive
‘period’ blockbusters (Kim 2003: 231).
Director Shin Sang-ok, in particular, pioneered the genre, ambitiously
producing expensive and colourful pieces. His Prince Yeonsan (Yeonsangoon,
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 80 y u n m i hw an g

1961), which portrays a historical tyrant from the sixteenth century, became
a box-office hit and won several awards at the first Grand Bell Film Awards
(Daejongsang). Together with its sequel, Tyrant Yeonsan (Pokgun yeonsan,
1962), Prince Yeonsan features shiny, silken garments, spacious and beautifully
decorated palace buildings, and dynamic camera movements including high-
angle shots and canted shots in deep focus. The dramatic orchestral music
with its percussion base advances the ominous mood of the narrative, while
the strong colour palette emphasises the decadence of the monarch. Shin thus
refined the look of the sageuk, by balancing convincing historical narrative with
imaginative spectacle.
In his later royal court dramas, such as Eunuch (Naesi, 1968) and A Court
Lady (Goongnyeo, 1972), he would venture into more audacious and risqué
territory. For instance, in Eunuch, an aristocratic girl, Ja-ok, is taken into
the palace as a royal concubine against her will and ends up murdering the
King in bed before killing herself. Many tragedies occur inside the palace
walls, including castration, miscarriage, massacre, rape and suicide. The
King has no redeeming features and the palace is ruled by the domineering
and adulterous Queen Mother, who eventually dies of complications after a
secret abortion. Upon hearing the news of the King’s and Queen Mother’s
deaths, the Queen orders a violent suppression of the scandal, brutally mur-
dering the lowly eunuchs and palace women who may be aware of the royal
deaths. The figuring of space – layered windows, sliding doors, secret pas-
sages through a well, and long and confined corridors – defines the palace as
a claustrophobic and perverse place. A Court Lady, starring Yoon Jeong-hee
(who played Ja-ok in Eunuch), dramatises the tension between Bok-nyeo
and the Queen Mother, who tries to instate Bok-nyeo’s illegitimate child as
heir to the throne in order to strengthen her own power. In these palace-set
family melodramas, women are often reduced to mere vehicles for the provi-
sion of an heir to the family, or are subjected to inhumane edicts concerning
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their chastity and filial piety.

Shin Sang-ok also made royal court dramas with an added horror motif: The
Thousand Year Old Fox (Cheonnyeonho, 1969) and A Ghost Story of the Joseon
Dynasty (Ijo gwoedam, 1970). Taking place in a typical royal court sageuk
setting, these films are marked by vengeful female spirits who harbour an
excessive desire for power. In The Thousand Year Old Fox, the titular animal
possesses a military general’s wife, Yeo-hwa, and then tries to harm Queen Jin-
seong, a monarch from the ancient Silla Dynasty.7 A Ghost Story of the Joseon
Dynasty is a reworking of the infamous Yeonsan narrative with a female ghost
motif grafted on. By presenting women who turn into power-mongering,
sexualised monsters, the two films symbolically reinstate order by punishing
and dispelling the evil spirits. What is particularly interesting is that both
films attribute evilness to the feminine, promulgating the didactic message
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 heritage of horrors 81

that restoration of the patriarchal order is possible through the expulsion of

dangerous females.8
Similarly to the traditional royal court dramas, in Shadows in the Palace it
is the obsession with power and the succession of a royal heir that drive the
women to such abject cruelty. Wollyeong is killed by a pseudo-stepmother
figure, Shim, who fears that the former’s existence would threaten her power
over the Crown Prince. In this oppressive milieu, the women’s only means
of survival is to compete with the other females and acquire that symbol of
power, the Crown Prince. Even the sexual act is not for pleasure, in the case
of the Queen, but rather the means of securing her status (that is, by the con-
ception of an heir). The presence of the King, one of the few male characters
to appear in the film, is diminished in this domestic battle between females
(Hwang 2006: 378).
Moreover, the royal palace is portrayed as a tightly enclosed space brim-
ming with jealousy, conspiracy and lust for power; even its spatial arrange-
ment is complicit in the system of deceit and violence. For instance, in the
scene where a mute palace lady, Ok-jin, is accused of stealing precious gold
threads from the workshop, the other court women make sure that the doors
are tightly closed, lest a woeful cry from the victimised maid be heard; then,
the suffocating torture chamber is instantly transformed into an open, airy
space where the maids calmly attend to their embroidery simply by opening
the folding blinds. The traditional sliding doors offer keyholes through which
the characters can indulge their voyeuristic desires, just as another maid,
Jeong-ryeol, peeps through to watch the royal consummation. In addition,
in the scene where Ok-jin is once again interrogated, shards of light come
through the decorative lattice windows against strong backlighting, giving the
effect of noir-ish Venetian blinds. The utilisation of mise-en-scène in Shadows
in the Palace, especially the architecture, evocatively conveys the illicit and
dangerous atmosphere, effectively augmenting the threat that the female ghost
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

poses to the royal court. In such a way, Shadows in the Palace evokes the simi-
larly daring use of space and period mise-en-scène in Shin Sang-ok’s historical
dramas, as seen in the Yeonsan diptych and Eunuch. Even the original Korean
title, Goongnyeo, references Shin’s 1972 film, A Court Lady (Goongnyeo). Yet
Shadows in the Palace departs from conventions of the sageuk horror first estab-
lished by Shin, most notably in the ending, underscoring its difference from
both the female ghost genre and the royal court drama.
In her valuable research on Korean female ghost films, Baek Moon-im
notes that two types of ancient folk story later influenced the forging of the
genre: the ‘public security / gongan story’ and ‘Arang-type myth’.9 These
female ghosts were either framed by evil stepmothers and forced to commit
suicide, or killed under the threat of a sexual assault. Traditionally, the ‘public
safety story (gongan)’, most famously represented by ‘A Tale of Jang-hwa and
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 82 y u n m i hw an g

Hong-ryeon’, features a virgin ghost, who would visit the local magistrate at
night to relate her sorrowful stories in order to clear her name and punish
the perpetrator. Effectively, the main focus of such cautionary tales was the
hearing of the ghost’s lamentable pleas by a male intercessor (Baek 2008:
149–66). The ghosts in the second type of story, the ‘Arang-type myth’, were
more violent and horrific, and posed such a threat to the innocent public that
an exorcism was called for. In the end, a powerful Buddhist monk reinstates
the peace by successfully dispelling them (Baek 2008: 167–85). The two nar-
rative motifs have been frequently deployed in ghost films since the 1960s.
For instance, in contemporary horror A Devilish Homicide (Salinma, Lee
Yong-min, 1965), a mysterious woman, who turns out to be a bodhisattva,
protects the children of the house from the evil spirit who exacts her revenge
on the new wife, the evil mother-in-law, and the painter who tried to rape her.
In a 1980s ghost film, Woman’s Wail (Yeogokseong, Lee Hyeok-soo, 1986), the
new bride’s Buddhist swastika tattoo serves as mystic symbol that is power-
ful enough to dispel the ghost who has possessed her mother-in-law. By
repeating the appearance, condemnation and exorcism of evil females, these
narratives confirmed the message of the restoration of peace and the purging
of social anxieties during the period of South Korea’s pursuit of accelerated
development.
As mentioned, Shadows in the Palace recontextualises these existing sageuk
formulas and conventions, and thereby updates the horror narrative for the
contemporary audience. Firstly, with the appearance of a female ghost in
the royal palace, the film is ripe for an ‘exorcism’ or an ‘intercession’ scene;
however, neither sagacious monk nor intercessory substitute appeases the
malevolent spirit of Wollyeong.10 Even though Cheollyeong, the investigator-
cum-appeaser character, solves the murder case, the ghost is not satisfied
(unlike Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon, who disappeared afterwards) and freely
exacts her own revenge regardless. After the funeral ceremony, by which time
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Wollyeong has killed four people and has possessed the Royal Consort Hui,
Wollyeong / Hui holds the infant prince in her arms and gives a ‘knowing’ look
at the camera. Then the three-tiered wooden gates of the palace shut, one by
one, sealing the ghost inside the palace walls. There is no symbolic closure, as
the ghost will continue to wreak havoc and threaten the succession of the mon-
archy. In other words, instead of getting rid of the evil ghost, the film allows
Wollyeong to stand triumphantly, holding the token of power, the Crown
Prince. The visual motif of ‘three shutting doors’ deserves special attention, as
this was used in almost exactly the same way in the aforementioned Eunuch.11
In that film, as Ja-ok’s dead body is taken out of the palace, the heavy wooden
gates shut firmly; the image of the doors is then repeated two more times. The
ending is particularly bleak, as the Queen Mother’s illegitimate pregnancy, the
Royal Consort’s miscarriage and the death of an heirless King all threaten the
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 heritage of horrors 83

continuation of the royal bloodline. Even so, the monarchy manages to veil the
truth by sealing its doors; ultimately, the function of the gates here is to protect
the order. However, in Shadows in the Palace, the visual motif previously used
to safeguard the monarchy now curses the royal palace in perpetuity, as the
ghost will continue to prowl inside the walls.
The film thus explodes the buried secrets and hidden crimes committed
inside the royal palace through the figure of the ghost. In doing so, it symboli-
cally recuperates the oppressed women’s history as the obliterated records of
the anonymous palace women similarly resurface through the horror narra-
tive. Even though the film is fictional, it makes the audience re-examine the
historical realities of subaltern lives and further savour the thrill of revenge,
an attempt to which classical sageuks like Eunuch could have only alluded. To
borrow Lim’s words, the film functions as an ‘allegorical frame in which an
almost-forgotten history becomes newly meaningful as a kind of haunting
or ghostly return’ (Lim 2001: 289). In sum, Shadows in the Palace revises the
iconographies and generic motifs of traditional genres, in order to derive a new
meaning from the female ghost narrative. Its subversive ending is recognisable
to contemporary audiences, who are familiar with the intertextual referencing
and generic trajectory of the historical drama. The film thus participates in
the strengthening of the concrete generic conventions of modern and period
horror together with royal court sageuk.

c onc l u s i o n
By making direct references to older horror dramas and borrowing thematic
and textual motifs from Shin Sang-ok’s films, Shadows in the Palace placates
the souls of the female victims in films from the past who were sacrificed for
the sake of the patriarchal family order. The close-up of Wollyeong / Hui’s
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

face with its intense stare at the very end conjures up memories of infamous
screen femmes fatales, including Jang Nok-su in Prince Yeonsan, the young
woman of the title in Surrogate Mother (Ssibaji, Im Kwon-taek, 1986), and
even the lower-class servant in The Housemaid (Hanyeo, Kim Ki-young,
1960). Whereas these women met a tragic end, Wollyeong is honoured by
the all-male court officials when her son is named as successor to the throne.
Standing firm and defiant, she conveys a message of solidarity with the many
ambitious and victimised women of the past. What is more, the narrative
tension of Shadows in the Palace acknowledges the process of history writing.
Inside the royal court, Cheollyeong is pressured by her superiors to report the
murder as a suicide. This scene offers a moment of reflection on the dominant
history, formed through and sustained by the silencing of truths. The film’s
bleak ending has a timeless resonance, as the very foundation, progress and
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 84 y u n m i hw an g

succession of the nation, here represented by the royal court, are built upon
coercion and suppression of the truth.

no te s
1. I translate ‘sageuk’ as ‘historical drama’ in English. Just as the attempts
to distinguish ‘historical drama’ from ‘costume drama’ in the West have
often produced unsatisfactory results, the study of historical genre in
the Korean context has also been troubled by taxonomy. For An Jinsoo,
yeoksa-geuk (history drama) and sidae-geuk (period drama) are specified at
either end of historical truth-value. The period drama film is ‘constituted
by folkloric and fictional stories set in an indeterminate pre-modern time-
frame’, while the historical drama film ‘derives its narratives from specific
and official histories of the nation’ (2005: 64). However, the widely held
view on ‘history versus costume / period’ that charts across different
national cinemas is far from conclusive because all cinematic texts are, by
default, founded on the very tension between past truths and liberal imag-
ination, albeit in varying degrees. The newly coined expression ‘fusion
sageuk’ is telling evidence that the two existing terms do not adequately
account for the recent ‘history boom’ in Korea. I use ‘sageuk’ in a broad
sense, therefore, embracing the issues pertaining to both ‘history’ and
‘costume’.
2. Eclipsed by both the mainstream features of the 1960s Golden Age period
and the auteurist New Wave films of the 1980s, Korean horror was at the
periphery of academic discourse until recently. The fact that low-budget
horror / fantasy films in the 1970s were mostly consumed in re-run thea-
tres and regional cinemas has furthered the marginalisation of the genre
(see Lee et al. 2004: 128).
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

3. All Korean to English translations from references are mine.

4. Box-office results and other statistical data are taken from the Korean
Film Council ([Link].).
5. I am thinking here of Byun Young-joo (Flying Boys, 2004), Jeong Jae-eun
(Take Care of My Cat, 2001), Lee Jeong-hyang (The Way Home, 2002),
Lim Soon-rye (Forever the Moment, 2007) and Park Chan-ok (Paju, 2009).
6. According to Andrew Higson (1997: 26), heritage cinema ‘reinvents and
reproduces, and in some cases simply invents, a national heritage for the
screen’. The texture of the past as a source of visual attractions is stamped
with a mark of authenticity, a point that distinguishes heritage cinema
from more generic costume drama. By highlighting the splendour of
upper-class interiors and pastoral landscapes, and by transforming the
past into an object of easy consumption, films like Chariots of Fire (Hugh
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 heritage of horrors 85

Hudson, UK, 1981) and A Room with a View (James Ivory, UK, 1985)
have managed to enter the global film market, earning great prestige and
commercial success.
7. Interestingly, Lee Kwang-hoon’s 2003 film The Legend of the Evil Lake
(Cheonnyeonho) is a remake of Shin’s The Thousand Year Old Fox, an
instance of a typical twenty-first-century China–Korea co-production,
where the bulk of the filming was done in exotic Chinese locales.
8. See Kim’s study of the figuration of Nok-su in Shin’s Prince Yeonsan
(1999: 129–38).
9. ‘Arang’ tells of a magistrate’s daughter, pure and virtuous, who is mur-
dered when she attempts to fend off a rapist. The magistrate, unaware
of the cause of his daughter’s disappearance, resigns in shame. Arang,
however, returns as a vengeful ghost and kills each of her father’s succes-
sors until a new magistrate arrives who is brave enough to confront the
ghost, learn the truth and punish her murderer, thus restoring justice.
10. I thank Baek Moon-im for pointing out that the exorcism theme has
fallen out of fashion in Korean horror films from the 1990s and onwards.
Thus, the absence of exorcism in Shadows is not unusual. Even so, this
does not deny the fact that the film is daring and fresh for its treatment of
ambitious and evil female characters in a royal court setting. Wollyeong
relishes her revenge and gets away with it, unlike predecessors in earlier
films.
11. A recent box-office hit The Concubine (Hugung: Jewangui Cheop, Kim
Dae-seung, 2011) makes many narrative and aesthetic reference to Eunuch
and other Shing Sang-ok films.

wo r k s c i t e d
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Altman, Rick (1999), Film / Genre, London: BFI.

An, Jinsoo (2005), ‘Popular Reasoning of South Korean Melodrama Films
(1953–1972)’, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Department of Film and
Television, University of California, Los Angeles.
Baek, Moon-im (2008), Sorrowful Screaming: A History of the Female Ghost
in Korean Films [Wolha-eui yeogokseong: Yeogwi-ro ingneun hanguk gongpo
yeonghwasa], Seoul: Chaeksesang.
Cagle, Robert L. (2009), ‘The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean:
Violence, Morality, and the South Korean Extreme Film’, in J. Choi and
M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in
Asian Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 123–44.
Cine 21 (2007), Shadows in the Palace Production Notes; [Link]
com/do/movie/detail/synopsis?movie_id=21260; accessed 10 July 2010.
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Korean Horror
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 86 y u n m i hw an g

Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and

Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.
Heo, Ji-woong (2011), Memories of the Ghost: Korean Horror Films from the
1960s to the 1980s [Mangryeong-eui Gieok: 1960–80 nyeondae hanguk gongpo
yeonghwa], Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Higson, Andrew (1997), Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in
Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hwang, He Jin (2006), ‘The Family Narrative Represented in Recent Korean
Horror Films: Focusing on the Problem of Memories in A Tale of Two
Sisters and Uninvited’ [Gongpo yeonghwa-ae natanan gajokseosa yeongoo
– Janghwa, Hongryeon gwa 4inyong siktak-ae natanan gieokeui moonjaeleul
joongsimeuro], Film Studies [Yeonghwa yeongoo], 29, pp. 375–95.
Kim, Mee-hyeon (2003), ‘The Cinemascope in Korean Film History’
[‘Hanguk yeonghwsa-eui cinemascope’], Quarterly Journal of Film Language
[Gyegan yeonghwaeoneo], 1, pp. 196–213.
Kim, Soyoung (1998), ‘A Note on Post-Colonial Korean Classics’ [‘Talsikminji
hanguk gojeonyeonghwagye-ae gwanhan noteu’], The Hankyoreh, 17
January; [Link]
html; accessed 29 Nov 2011.
— (2000a), Ghosts of Modernity: Fantastic Korean Cinema [Pantaseutik hanguk
yoenghwa: geundaeseong-eui yuryeong-deul], Seoul: Ssias-eul ppurineun
saram-deul.
Kim Haboush, JaHyun (2008), ‘The Vanished Women of Korea’, in A. Walthall
(ed.), Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, Los Angeles:
University of California Press, pp. 280–98.
Lee, Hyoin et al. (2004), A History of Korean Cinema: 1960–1979 [Hanguk
yeonghwasa gongboo 1960–1979], Seoul: Korean Film Archive.
Lim, Bliss Cua (2001), ‘Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical
Allegory’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 9: 2, pp. 287–329.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Paquet, Darcy (2003), ‘Dressed for Success’, Screen International, 1427, 31

October.
Seo, Hyun-suk (2009), ‘That Unobscure Object of Desire and Horror: On
Some Uncanny Things in Recent Korean Horror Films’, in J. Choi and
M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries
in Asian Cinema, Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
pp. 163–78.
Stam, Robert (2000), ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’,
in J. Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, pp. 54–78.
Williams, Linda (1991), ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film
Quarterly, 44: 4, pp. 2–13.

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 c h apter 6

Acacia and adoption anxiety in

Korean horror cinema
Hye Seung Chung

Recent South Korean film history saw a landmark year in 2003, when some
of the most artistically ambitious and thematically complex examples of
contemporary horror cinema were theatrically released; these films included
Pak Gi-hyeong (Park Ki-hyung)’s Acacia (Akasia), Kim Seong-ho’s Into
the Mirror (Gyeoul sok euro), Kim Ji-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa,
Hongryeon) and Lee Soo-yeon’s Uninvited (4-in yong siktak). Domestic critics
welcomed this progressive departure from the millennial horror craze of 2000,
when a spate of blood-soaked slasher films, including Bloody Beach (Haebyeon
euro gada, Kim In-su), Harpy (Hapi, Ra Ho-beom), Nightmare (Gawi,
Ahn Byung-ki) and Record (Jjikhimyeon jukneunda, Kim Gi-hoon) battered
summer-season moviegoers into less than sympathetic submission. Putting a
positive spin on the evolution of the Korean horror genre, film critic Byeon
Seong-chan argued in 2003 that this sudden maturation was based upon a
‘meditation on the genre and [a] reflection through the genre’ (my emphasis). In
particular, Byeon pinpointed the ‘fear of family’ as a common motif found in
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three high-profile horror films released that year: Acacia, A Tale of Two Sisters
and Uninvited. Each film focuses on individuals living in seemingly comfort-
able, well-appointed, upper-middle-class domiciles which ultimately become
settings for abjection, paranoia, terror and madness. Within these familiar yet
unsettling contexts, each film depicts the disintegration of the family unit, a
breakdown prompted by the intrusion of the unfamiliar and undesirable other
(including an adopted son, a stepmother and a child ghost) within the ideal
home.
Two of the aforementioned films – Acacia and Uninvited – touch upon the
theme of adoption, which for many years has been a largely silenced subject in
Korean society and cinema. While the narrative of Acacia prominently fore-
grounds the process and effects of adoption, Uninvited uses the theme as an
understated subplot that is belatedly introduced as part of a surprise revelation
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 88 h y e se ung ch un g

uncovering the protagonist’s dark past as a child shaman. At first glance, the
incorporation of adoption as a motif in horror narratives seems to support the
traditional norm of the family as being comprised of biological connections.
Upon closer scrutiny, however, both Acacia and Uninvited reveal and reflect
deeper psychological ills and fears of (sub)urban, middle-class, professional
protagonists who are plagued by the spectre of the ‘other’, an outsider threat-
ening their normalcy, security and social mobility. This chapter will explore
how Acacia fuses elements of the horror film with social commentary tied to
a still-taboo topic – a fusion that criticises the hegemonic ideology of ‘blood
familialism’ (hyeolyeon juui), which remains a pervasive, potentially corrosive,
part of Korean life.

bl o o d b us in e ss: k o r e a n f a mil ia l ism a n d t h e

‘ a d o p t i o n p r o b l e m’
Known to many Westerners as a leading ‘baby supplier’ for the world’s devel-
oped nations, South Korea began expatriating its children for overseas adop-
tion in 1954, one year after the end of the Korean War, a bloody, three-year
civil conflict which left countless children orphaned and homeless. According
to statistics provided by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, between
1954 and 2006 a total of 224,752 children were adopted domestically and
abroad (Hwang 2006). What is striking is that only 67,607 (appropriately 30
per cent) of these children found new homes and parents domestically, while
the rest were sent abroad for international / interracial adoption.
Throughout the 1960s, on average 421 children were domestically adopted
each year, as opposed to an annual international average of 728 children. In the
1970s, the ratio disproportion increased and the number of yearly adoptions
rose to 1,530 (domestic) to 4,825 (overseas), and in the 1980s, to 2,650 (domes-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

tic) to 6,532 (overseas) (Hwang 2007). In order to shed its reputation as the
world’s leading ‘baby exporter’, the South Korean government began imple-
menting an overseas adoption quota in 1990 and strove to increase the number
of domestic adoptions. Although the state policy succeeded in reducing the
annual average of overseas adoptions to 2,232 throughout the 1990s, the
domestic adoption rate also fell, with an average of 1,330 each year that same
decade (ibid.). In 2006, the South Korean government proclaimed 11 May as
Adoption Day (to encourage one adoption per household in the Family Month
of May) and announced a social benefits plan (promising stipends, parenting
holidays and so forth) for families that adopted children. From January 2007,
the government mandated that all prospective overseas adoptions be put on
hold for five months, during which time adoption agencies were required to
look for opportunities for domestic adoption as the default option. Despite
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 ad o pt i o n a n xi e ty in k o r e a n h o r r o r c i n e m a 89

active state involvement and multi-pronged promotion, the number of domes-

tic adoptions today in South Korea remains stagnant, slightly diminishing
from 1,770 in 2000, 1,461 in 2005 and 1,306 in 2008 (Hwang 2006). Due to the
five-month suspension policy introduced in 2007, overseas adoptions nearly
halved from 2,436 in 2000 to 1,250 in 2008 (Ryu 2010). This means that the
majority of the thousands of Korean children available for adoption each year
are left in institutions with little or no hope of finding new families.
The adoption problem in South Korea is particularly vexing, as the coun-
try’s fertility rate has consistently ranked as one of the lowest in the world (an
average of 1.2 babies per woman, a figure that would presumably increase the
demand for adoptable children among childless, middle-class couples). For
cultural outsiders, it might appear odd that this country, home to the world’s
fifteenth largest economy (with $20,000 GDP per capita), cannot handle its
own orphan problem and continues to ‘export’ its children abroad. According
to a survey conducted by the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK)
in 2006, out of 1,720 adult respondents, 49.5 per cent never considered adop-
tion; 44.2 per cent considered it; and 4.9 per cent seriously considered it (Anon
2007). The primary reason for hesitation and non-action on the part of prospec-
tive parents is not economic, as civic organisations such as MPAK have made
clear. Rather, both experts and adoptive parents single out social prejudices as
the greatest obstacle to the growth of domestic adoption in South Korea.
Korean neo-Confucian familialism (gajok juui) privileges blood relations
(hyeolyeon) as the foundation for parental and filial obligations across genera-
tions. During the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), intra-lineage (or intra-family)
adoption was normalised as a means to pass down the family’s patrilineal line
and wealth if the eldest son was without a male heir. Despite the long history
of modern, non-intra-lineal adoption in South Korea dating back to 1954,
and regardless of active government campaigns since the 1990s, the culture of
adoption is still closeted for the most part because of social stigma. Out of
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1,770 children adopted domestically in 2000, only 200 cases were ‘open adop-
tions’ (gonggae ipyang) wherein adoptive parents chose to acknowledge their
new children publicly as adoptees (Jang 2002).1 One notable trend in domestic
adoption in South Korea is the strong preference for female babies and chil-
dren. In 2003, 1,021 girls were adopted domestically as opposed to 543 boys.
The following year, 1,147 girls and 494 boys were adopted at home (Yoon
2008).2 In contrast to the traditional preference for boys (nama seonho) in the
case of biological birth, the preference for girls in the case of adoption proves
that adoptive children are still regarded in many respects as outsiders. Korean
adoptive parents are likely to feel more comfortable with daughters, as they
are deemed easier to raise, less prone to cause trouble when they discover their
identity as adoptees in their adolescence, and less burdensome once they are
married.
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 90 h y e se ung ch un g

Although the social infrastructure of adoption is gradually improving as

South Korea’s vibrant civil society progresses, it is an uphill battle to fight the
centuries-old national obsession with ‘blood line’ (pitjul) and ‘roots’ (ppuri)
and to foster an inclusive environment where diverse forms of family (adop-
tive, single parenting, lesbian / gay / trans-sexual / bisexual, and so forth) are
equally accepted and respected. Given the ambivalence and discomfort that
many ordinary Koreans feel about adoption despite their country’s stability,
prosperity and maturity, it is little wonder that the theme has emerged as a
motif in horror, a genre known for its capacity to reflect collective anxieties
and social malaise.

chi l d , t r ee , f a mi l y: a mb iv a l en t mon st r osit y

i n acacia
In his study of the 1970s American horror film, Robin Wood locates ‘the
concept of “the Other”’ at the heart of the genre. According Wood:

Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize

or accept but must deal with . . . in one of two ways: either by rejecting
and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it,
converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself. (1986: 73)

He goes on to argue that, in American horror cinema, the repressed other

is typically represented by women, members of the proletariat, other cul-
tures, ethnic groups, alternative ideologies or political systems, bisexuals and
homosexuals, and, perhaps surprisingly, children (ibid.: 74–5). For Wood, the
basic formula of horror films is that ‘normality is threatened by the Monster’,
where normality is represented by ‘the heterosexual monogamous couple, the
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support
and defend them’ (ibid.: 78–9). What makes the horror genre especially com-
pelling and, indeed, complex is its depiction of normality’s relationship with
the Monster. Far from being antithetical to one another, normality and the
Monster are often positioned as ‘doppelganger[s], alter ego[s], or double[s]’ (a
concept most effectively demonstrated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and its multiple screen adapta-
tions) (ibid.: 79).
In contemporary Japanese and Korean cinema, the motif of the child ghost
or demon has emerged as a response to the social crisis triggered by the pan-
Asian financial meltdown in the late 1990s. As Karen Lury suggests in her
book The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales, the child figure in popular
J-horror films such as Ring (Ringu, Nakata Hideo, Japan, 1998) and Ju-on: The
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 ad o pt i o n a n xi e ty in k o r e a n h o r r o r c i n e m a 91

Grudge (Ju-on, Shimizu Takashi, Japan, 2002) is ‘not unambiguously a victim

and he or she may equally (or even simultaneously) act as a threat’ (2010: 27).
When the bubble economy of post-industrial East Asian countries (Japan,
South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan) burst in the late 1990s, it compromised
the myth of model childhood and ‘its promise of seamless trajectory that led
to becoming a responsible adult-citizen and effective worker / consumer’
(ibid.: 28). Ironically, the failure of the nation was projected on to its weakest
population: children, whose immaturity, moral inadequacy and penchant
for rebellion and aggression were increasingly being perceived as a threat to
the already troubled society. In Uninvited, for example, the two little girls
who are drugged and abandoned on the underground by their own mother
(presumably due to the economic predicament) are emblematic of this double
articulation of victimhood and menacing childhood. After disembarking from
a train late at night, the male protagonist, interior designer Jeong-won, spots
the unattended sisters through the window; they appear to be sleeping and are
the sole passengers in an otherwise empty underground compartment. The
next day, he is shocked to hear on the radio that the girls were poisoned to
death by their mother. Although Jeong-won is an innocent, if also indifferent,
bystander, the ghosts of the dead children begin to haunt his upscale apart-
ment and occupy the modern dinner table, a wedding gift from his fiancée.
The sinister, intruding presence of the child ghosts gradually destroys every-
thing that the young man has worked for, and at the end of the narrative he is
left alone in his haunted apartment without a bride or family. These ghastly
children, however, are not entirely demonic or malevolent since they are not
only victims of a heinous parental crime but also a reminder of Jeong-won’s
repressed childhood memory: he committed arson to take revenge on his
abusive father but accidentally killed his little sister in the process.
In Acacia, a six-year-old orphan boy, Jin-seong, is adopted into the affluent
suburban home of a childless, upper-middle-class couple. He also functions as
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

both a victim and a threat; from the onset he is presented as the ultimate other,
as he is not only a defenceless child but also a male orphan beyond pre-school
age (an unpopular candidate for adoption in South Korea). We are given an
introductory glimpse into the melancholic boy’s inner psyche in the film’s first
scene. Tapestry artist Choe Mi-sook serves as a guest judge for a university-
sponsored children’s drawing contest / exhibition and is drawn to Jin-seong’s
dark, abstract portrait of an agonised, faceless figure set against a tree, reminis-
cent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). Because of its subject matter, the
woman suspects that the picture cannot possibly be the work of a six-year-old
and, as a result, makes the controversial decision not to award any prize to the
talented boy. When a concerned member of the event staff remarks, ‘what if
he had really done it all by himself?’, Mi-sook defends herself, stating ‘then he
might be a genius, and he’ll be praised elsewhere.’ From her first encounter
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 92 h y e se ung ch un g

with Jin-seong (who remains off screen throughout the scene, his existence
gestured toward through the mediating presence of an artwork, his drawing),
Mi-sook feels ambivalent about and suspicious of the boy, foreshadowing the
two characters’ difficult relationship throughout the narrative.
Mi-sook returns home, where her husband Do-il is doing the dishes. This
action, in addition to an earlier glimpse of Do-il checking an adoption website
in the clinic where he works as a gynaecologist, showcases the couple’s egali-
tarian relationship. Serving his wife tea, the husband cautiously brings up the
subject of adoption, which clearly makes Mi-sook uncomfortable. The tension
between the two becomes pronounced when she learns that Do-il has already
consulted his father, a presumably widowed art professor, who lives with them.
The enraged wife lashes out and cynically comments, ‘I guess it’s settled. All
you have to do is bring a kid home. Go right ahead . . . All I have left to do is
to raise a kid you and your father bring home. I’ll just be a nanny who raises
the family heir.’ She makes a sarcastic allusion to Confucian ritual traditions
that exclude women, saying ‘great for you. Now you’ll have someone to do
your memorial ceremonies.’ In this confrontation with her mild-mannered
husband, Mi-sook appears to be a strong-willed, sassy woman who defies the
patriarchal order, but the next scene – set at night in the back garden – reveals
her vulnerability and conflicted emotions. Mi-sook’s deep solitary medita-
tion is interrupted by her father-in-law, who joins her at the garden table. He
gently persuades the emotionally torn daughter-in-law with a not-so-subtle
analogy, one that equates children and works of art: ‘I was just going through
my old works. I got a different feeling looking at them again. I guess I have
affection for them,’ then explaining ‘if you look at them affectionately it’s
refreshing and gratifying, whether it’s your work or not. How much you care
about it is what matters whether it’s art or a person.’ Describing the scene in
his audio commentary on the UK / US DVD (released by Tartan Video),
the director Pak Gi-hyeong, who also co-wrote the script, elaborates that he
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

wanted to portray what adoption means to the upper-middle-class, elite family

consisting of artists and doctors. He observes that they are ‘not much different
from anyone else. It is not easy to accept it in their hearts. But after they think
about it rationally, they say, “Let’s give it a try.” So they decided to go for an
adoption’ (2005).
The next scene shows Mi-sook and Do-il in the orphanage director’s office,
where Ji-seong’s Munch-like portrait from the first scene is displayed. After
finally confirming the little boy’s natural gift for drawing (the director informs
her that an art teacher has not worked in the orphanage), Mi-sook demands
that she see him, as if compensating for her misjudgement in the film’s first
scene. In the orphanage yard, Mi-sook meets Jin-seong, who is engrossed in
drawing another picture, and instantly forges a bond with him. The close-up
of the boy’s expressionless yet soulful face (seen from Mi-sook’s point of view)
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 ad o pt i o n a n xi e ty in k o r e a n h o r r o r c i n e m a 93

then transitions to an ominous high-angle shot which shows Jin-seong looking

obsessively up at a leafless acacia tree, an out-of-place element in the couple’s
manicured garden fronting their picture-perfect house. The camera pans left
to reveal a medium two-shot of the contented parents, now looking at the child
from afar. A spoken flashback, sonically mingling with one of Erik Satie’s
elegant Gnossienne melodies, accompanies the image. Do-il asks his wife, ‘Isn’t
he a little too old?’, to which Mi-sook replies, ‘It’s strange. It feels as if I’ve
always been waiting for him. Isn’t that more important?’ The following shot is
a mirror reflection of Mi-sook’s father-in-law gazing sternly at Jin-seong, who
is obsessed with the acacia tree. Another low-angle shot of the tree is followed
by a close-up of Jin-seong, who appears to be possessed by the bizarre breath-
ing sound emitting from the tree, a sinister noise apparently inaudible to the
other characters.
In the same audio commentary, Pak defines Mi-sook’s decision to adopt
Jin-seong (despite her husband’s concern about his age) as a barometer of
the ‘arrogance or confidence that intellectual people have’. He goes on to
explain, ‘she would think, “People say I should adopt a newborn or a two- to
three-year-old but I like him even though he is a bit old for an adoption. I
can adopt him and make him my real son”’ (2005). Despite their best inten-
tions, Do-il and Mi-sook appear to be selfishly happy in the above-mentioned
scene, where they observe Jin-seong – their latest ‘addition’ to the already
well-stocked, commodity-filled home – with visible gratification. One might
speculate that Mi-sook has chosen Jin-seong for several reasons. Perhaps it
was done to allay her unspoken guilt for failing to see Jin-seong’s demonstrable
talent in the contest. Or maybe she simply has a slow, but instinctual, ability
to grasp his capacity to be the ‘right child’. As an individualist and an artist in
her own right, Mi-sook is guided in her selection not by conventional beliefs
entrenched in contemporary Korean society (that it is better to adopt a girl
than a boy, an infant over a six-year-old, and so on) but by her ‘unique’ (high-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

brow) taste.
Mi-sook’s nonconformist approach is challenged when she unexpectedly
becomes pregnant and gives birth to her biological son soon after Jin-seong’s
adoption. Her superstitious, traditional mother (who has been openly antago-
nistic to Jin-seong from the moment he stepped into their lives) gloats, ‘you’re
no different. Having your own child is lovely, isn’t it? Plus, a boy is better.’
Although Mi-sook’s pride prevents her from verbally admitting it, she is
overjoyed with her baby and grows emotionally detached from her adopted
son, who in turn plunges into a fantasy that the acacia tree in the lawn is a
reincarnation of his dead, biological mother. In several scenes throughout the
film, Pak’s camera captures the physical distance between the adoptive parents
and the child, who is often seen alone, sitting in the acacia tree, drawing pic-
tures, or riding a bicycle (a material reward he had received after calling Do-il
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 94 h y e se ung ch un g

‘Daddy’ for the first time). The adopted child’s alienation from the family is
poignantly visualised in a single image of Jin-seong solitarily drawing while
seated behind the rail of a staircase inside the home. The shot underscores the
spatial distance and emotional separation between figures in the background
(a marginal corner occupied by the outsider) and the foreground (where all
attention is focused on the newborn baby, Hae-seong, whom Do-il’s diegetic
camera is busy capturing). Although the father takes a couple of charity shots
of Jin-seong at the staircase, the adopted son is not invited to participate in the
family’s picture-taking ritual in the living room.
Despite the fact that Acacia occasionally inserts a few suspense-inducing
shots of a sinister Jin-seong acting strangely (including unravelling Mi-sook’s
half-knit tapestry, smashing a snail into the window, and speeding aggressively
on his bike in a manner reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (UK /
US, 1980)), the film does not neatly fit into the ‘devil-possessed child’ formula
of American horror cinema exemplified by Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski,
1968), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Omen (Richard Donner,
UK / USA, 1976). It is tempting to compare Acacia to the latter film in par-
ticular, as The Omen similarly depicts the destruction of a bourgeois family
after the arrival of a sinister, adopted son of unknown origin. In his review of
Acacia for Variety, Derek Elley complains:

Straining to plant itself in the horror garden somewhere between The

Shining and The Omen, helmer Park Ki-hyung [Pak Gi-hyeong]’s
Acacia never takes root in the imagination nor blooms as a sheer
frightener . . . Right from the get-go, the movie starts to lose the
audience, as . . . there is no discernible reason why they’d choose an
unearthly tyke with a Damien haircut and satanic eyes to match. Sure
enough, Jin-seong soon starts to act majorly weird, cycling around like
the boy in The Shining, playing with insects, and refusing to adopt the
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Kim family name. When he tries to burn down the garden shed, mom
just tells him they love him. (2003: 54)

Despite superficial similarities in plot and iconography, Acacia and The Omen
are quite different films with diametrically opposing ideological orienta-
tions. The former is a morally ambiguous psychological thriller replete with
horror film trappings, and critical of bourgeois hypocrisy and discrimina-
tory attitudes against adoptees. In sharp contrast, the latter is a mainstream
Hollywood film that clearly – and too cleanly – pits Good (represented by
the hero Ambassador Thorn and his idealised wife) against Evil (represented
not only by their adopted son Damien, a devil child from a shadowy Italian
convent, but also by a working-class British nanny who protects him). As
Wood rightly points out:
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 ad o pt i o n a n xi e ty in k o r e a n h o r r o r c i n e m a 95

In obvious ways The Omen is old-fashioned, traditional, reactionary:

the goodness of the family unit isn’t questioned; horror is disowned by
having the devil-child, a product of the Old World, unwittingly adopted
into the American family; the devil-child . . . [is] regarded as purely
evil . . . [The film] is about the end of the world, but the world the film
envisages ending is very particularly defined within it: the bourgeois
capitalist patriarchal Establishment. Here normality – the state, the
church, the family – is not merely threatened by the monster, but
totally annihilated . . . (1986: 88, original emphasis)

The characters in Acacia, on the other hand, may feel conflicted, and are
certainly flawed, but they are decidedly not ‘pure evil’. The film subtly
embeds several textual clues that hint at why Jin-seong behaves in ways that
are deemed disturbing and abnormal to the wealthy family’s biased eye. As
Elley’s Variety review references, Jin-seong is initially adamant about calling
himself by his birth name (Lee) rather than by the adoptive family surname
of Kim, a repeated act that tests Mi-sook’s patience. However, in a later
scene, the child expresses his acceptance of his new parents by presenting
the adoptive mother with a drawing of Mi-sook and Do-il, this time calling
himself ‘Kim Jin-seong’ (Kim is Do-il’s surname). However, the slow build-
up of child–parent bonding is constantly undermined by Mi-sook’s mother,
who despises Jin-seong and pushes her daughter to continue her efforts to
become pregnant. She even brings a fortune teller’s ‘fertility fan’ to Mi-sook
and asks her to carry it, insisting that ‘blood is thicker than water’ (a famous
Korean proverb that is often invoked to emphasise the importance of biologi-
cal relations). The fire in the garden workshop alluded to in Elley’s review is
an accident caused by the poor boy’s desperate attempt to burn the fan. This
act inversely proves how much his new parents’ undivided attention and care
mean to this boy, who was raised in an overpopulated institution. Jin-seong
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

almost kills himself in the fire but is rescued by Mi-sook in the nick of time.
After noticing the half-burnt fan, the pregnant mother consoles her adop-
tive son, saying, ‘Jin-seong, don’t worry. Nothing will change after the baby
is born. You know I love you so much’ – a half-hearted promise revealed as
empty when Hae-seong is born.
Another key incident of misunderstanding occurs when Jin-seong playfully
hits the newborn baby in the cradle while the family’s attention is distracted.
When Hae-seong reacts with a loud cry, the startled boy attempts to hush the
baby by covering his mouth. The adults misinterpret Jin-seong’s harmless
gesture as foul play and thereafter become vigilant in ensuring the safety of
Hae-seong. Although Mi-sook outwardly defends Jin-seong in front of her
husband, her icy glance at the boy the next morning betrays her own suspicion
and mistrust. More tellingly, the artist mother pays no attention to the new
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 96 h y e se ung ch un g

drawing her adoptive son has brought to the breakfast table. A close-up of the
object reveals an abstract portrait of four figures (consisting of two adults and
two small children) – Jin-seong’s shy declaration of devotion to his new family:
a declaration that goes unnoticed by Mi-sook, for whom it was intended.
Feeling deserted and unloved, the introverted child isolates himself from the
family by spending his time alone sitting on the branch of the acacia tree, a
stand-in for his dead birth mother. One stormy night, Jin-seong overhears
Mi-sook’s telephone conversation with her mother, who is pressuring her to
return the boy to the orphanage. As soon as she hangs up the phone, she is
confronted by Jin-seong who yells, ‘I’m going to my mother!’ When Mi-sook
identifies herself as his mother, the child insists that his real mother is dead
and became a tree. After denying his adoptive kinship to Mi-sook by calling
her ‘ajumma’ (an impersonal appellation used by young people to refer to any
middle-aged woman), Jin-seong dashes out of the house and disappears into
the rain.
Forty-six minutes into the film, the screen blacks out momentarily. When
the scene fades in, the three adults (Mi-sook, Do-il and his father) are sitting in
the living-room with gloomy expressions. Do-il’s father breaks the silence by
ordering his son to call the police to report a missing person. After Jin-seong’s
departure, the relationship between Mi-sook and Do-il deteriorates dramati-
cally and the once-happy couple becomes increasingly antagonistic and violent
towards one another. The barren acacia tree in the garden mysteriously blos-
soms in full and its supernatural power poisons Mi-sook’s mother and kills
Do-il’s father. Near the end of the film, after undergoing a series of nightmares
and hallucinations that reveal their accumulating paranoia and guilt, Mi-sook
and Do-il have a fatal confrontation. By this point, the happy home has turned
into a spooky house of spectres, an uncannily (un)familiar space that Mi-sook
has decorated with spider’s web-like, blood-red yarns, as well as a tapestry
installation that depicts Do-il’s murder of Jin-seong. Deranged Mi-sook
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

accuses her husband of not only killing the adopted son but also plotting to kill
their baby, then attacks Do-il with a pair of scissors. The husband struggles
with the wife and begins to strangle her with equal ferocity, claiming that she
is the one who has killed the boy.
The repressed truth is exposed by way of a black-and-white, internally
fragmented flashback, one that is intercut with a present-day colour sequence
where Mi-sook, having revived from a near-fatal strangling, stabs Do-il with
scissors in the garden before turning the weapon on herself and committing
suicide. The flashback takes us back to the stormy night when Jin-seong left
home. Mi-sook follows him to the yard and tells him that the acacia tree is
not his mother and that he is not allowed to climb it again. She gets an axe to
chop down the tree, and in his ill-fated attempt to protect it, Jin-seong stands
between Mi-sook and the axe. He is then accidentally hit, and to her horror,
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 ad o pt i o n a n xi e ty in k o r e a n h o r r o r c i n e m a 97

Mi-sook watches Jin-seong fall to the ground, blood spilling from his head.
The husband returns home, sees the fallen child, and starts to bury him under
the acacia tree. In a moment that surely pays homage to Brian De Palma’s
Carrie (US, 1976), the arm of the still-breathing boy springs up above the
ground. Do-il then mercilessly finishes off Jin-seong by repeatedly smashing
his half-buried body with a shovel. Over the end credits, the flashback reveals
Do-il’s father arriving home in time to witness the boy’s burial and thus impli-
cate himself in the crime. Describing the film’s twist ending, Hyun-suk Seo
argues:

The final opposition of the couple . . . reveals not only that she has
misrecognized the husband as the murderer in her paranoiac state
but also that it was she who had killed the boy (by pure accident or
as an effect of her unconscious will). The flashbacks . . . reveal that
[Mi-sook]’s convenient amnesia led to her false sense of innocence and
blind accusation of the husband. (2009: 178)

What the film seems to stress, though, is not whether it was Mi-sook or Do-il
who killed the boy (after all, Do-il’s intentional shovel attack is as much respon-
sible for the boy’s demise as Mi-sook accidentally hitting him with the axe),
but rather the family / society’s collective guilt in contributing to the death
of an orphan. Unlike The Omen and other possessed-child films, Acacia blurs
the boundaries between normality and Monster and, toward the end, unveils
normality’s barely hidden monstrosity. However, just as Jin-seong is not the
typical devil child of Hollywood horror films, his adoptive family members
also break free from culturally entrenched stereotypes and are revealed as
complex individuals who cannot simply be conceived of as either righteous
heroes or heartless villains. Do-il’s alcoholism, spousal abuse, and recur-
ring nightmares of delivering a bloody, still-born child are symptoms of his
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

extremely troubled conscience. Likewise Mi-sook’s amnesia and self-punitive

suicide are telling indicators of her complexity. It is this moral ambivalence
that makes Acacia such a compelling horror text, one that not only revamps
the familiar enfant terrible subgenre but also offers a sophisticated, nuanced
reflection on discrimination, human rights and collective responsibility in the
face of social marginalisation.

c onc l u s i o n
Although Acacia was a commercial failure, with a mere 35,000 admissions
generated in the nation’s capital and biggest film market Seoul (compared
with one million admissions garnered by A Tale of Two Sisters, one of the ten
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 98 h y e se ung ch un g

highest-grossing films of 2003), it was well received by critics and filled the
prestigious closing-film slot at the 2003 Pusan International Film Festival. In a
press interview at the festival, Pak explained that the ‘horror code’ was a mere
device to make the narrative accessible and that he did not intend to make a
specific genre film (Kim 2003). Although Pak is best known for his debut film
Whispering Corridors (Yeogo goedam, 1998), the commercially successful high-
school ghost story largely responsible for the revitalisation of the horror genre
in contemporary South Korean cinema, he maintained, ‘I am not interested in
making a film for pure horror effects’ (ibid.). Indeed, both Whispering Corridors
and Acacia are socially conscious films that indict an establishment system (the
educational system in the former, the bourgeois family in the latter) respon-
sible for victimising the young and the weak. Although not a fully-fledged
horror film, Pak’s sophomore feature Secret Tears (Bimil, 2000) likewise
interweaves a supernatural plotline involving a Carrie-like schoolgirl with
telepathic / telekinetic powers and a socially relevant theme – a taboo relation-
ship between a mysterious girl and an adult man. Comparing Acacia with the
Japanese horror film Ju-on, Korean film critic Hong Seong-nam pinpoints the
absence of conventional shock effects in the former, yet argues that Pak’s work
is ‘a scary, chilling film . . . because it sharply portrays the cruel, ugly faces of
ordinary people we encounter in everyday life’ (2003).
Perhaps the most horrific scene in Acacia is its slow-motion epilogue in
which a group of police officers and construction labourers excavate Jin-
seong’s body from under the acacia tree, whose coffin-like roots have ensnared
the dead boy. The filmmaker puts the audience in the perspective of the
speechless adults gazing at the terrifying sight of the child’s lifeless face,
scarred by the mark of the axe. The solemn scene is powerfully effective; it
compels the audience to confront the dreadful consequences of social apathy
towards abandoned children. This almost documentary-like epilogue arouses
fears as it conjures up collective memories of news headlines about child
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

murders committed by the parents of the victim. Korean audiences belatedly

viewing Acacia on DVD may recall the notorious February 2011 case involv-
ing a three-year-old boy whose body was found in a construction waste dump
in Seoul. The boy was beaten to death by his legal father, who had been rou-
tinely abusing him, believing the child (who was born during his separation
from his wife) to be someone else’s. The child’s parents did not remove his
decaying body from their home for eighteen days; they then disposed of it in
a rubbish bag at a nearby construction site (Anon. 2011). More horrific than
any horror film, this shocking incident once more reminds us that the tragic
story of Jin-seong mirrors a real social problem in South Korea, a technologi-
cally advanced country where the antiquated notion of blood familialism still
suffocates orphans and other children, figuratively, if not literally, burying
them alive.
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 ad o pt i o n a n xi e ty in k o r e a n h o r r o r c i n e m a 99

no t e s
1. In the United States, open adoption has a different meaning, referring to
the arrangement in which biological parents and the adoptive family / child
stay in contact. Because most adoptions are kept secret in South Korea,
accidental revelations in adoptees’ adulthood often cause serious mental
and emotional distress. For example, in Uninvited, the roughly thirty-five-
year-old male protagonist discovers his identity as an adoptee, and has a
painful confrontation with his pastor father, who is unable to bring himself
to admit the fact.
2. In the case of overseas adoptions, the gender imbalance is opposite. In
2005, 1,353 boys and 748 girls were adopted overseas, and in 2006, 1,253
boys and 646 girls. Unlike their Korean counterparts, foreign parents are
not allowed to select the gender of their first adopted children from South
Korea, resulting in agencies pushing for ‘exporting’ boys who are in low
demand at home (Yoon 2008).

wo r k s c i t e d
Anonymous (2007), ‘How to Facilitate Domestic Adoption’ [‘Guknae ipyang
hwalseonghwa bangan mueotinga’], Joongdo Daily [Jungdo Ilbo], 10 May;
[Link]
accessed 30 July 2011.
— (2011), ‘“He’s Not My Son”: Murdering and Dumping the Body of a
Three-Year-Old’ [‘“Nae adeul anya”: saesalbaegi salhae sseuraegijang ae
byeoryeo’], Chosun Daily [Joseon Ilbo], 8 February; [Link]
com/site/data/html_dir/2011/02/08/[Link]; accessed 30
July 2011.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Byeon, Seong-chan (2003), ‘Acacia and Korean Family Horror Films’ [‘Akasia
wa hanguk gajok horeo yeonghwadeul’], Cine 21, 23 October; [Link]
[Link]/do/article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=21534; accessed
30 July 2011.
Elley, Derek (2003), ‘Acacia’, Variety, 1–7 December; [Link]
com/review/VE1117922262; accessed 30 July 2011.
Hong, Seong-nam (2003), ‘Scary, Chilly Family Horror, Acacia’ [‘Museopgo
seomtteukhan gajok horeo, Akasia’], Cine 21, 15 October; [Link]
com/do/review/article/typeDispatcher? mag_id=21387&menu=M080;
accessed 30 July 2011.
Hwang, Seong-hae (2007), ‘Have You Thought about Adoption?’ [‘Ipyang,
saengakhae bosyeoteupnigga?’], Weekly Chosun [Jugan Joseon], no. 1986, 31
December; [Link] accessed 30 July 2011.
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[Link] 08/02/2013 12:03
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 100 h y e s e ung ch un g

Hwang, Yoon-eok (2006), ‘Institutionalization of Adoption Day’ [‘Ipyang ui

nal jaejeong’], Kid Chosun Daily [Sonyeon Joseon Ilbo], 12 May; [Link]
[Link]; accessed 30 July 2011.
Jang, Hyo-ju (2002), ‘Our Baby Is Adopted’ [‘Uri agi ipyang haeteoyo’],
Chosun Daily [Joseon Ilbo], 11 November; [Link]
accessed 30 July 2011.
Kim, Min-yeong (2003), ‘Closing Film Acacia Press Screening’ [‘Pyemakjak
Akasia gijasisahoe yeolryeo’], PIFF News, 2–10 October; [Link]
[Link]/festival/piff2003/news_10-[Link]; accessed 30 July 2011.
Lury, Karen (2010), The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales, London:
I. B. Tauris.
Pak, Gi-hyeong (2005), ‘Cast and Crew Commentary’, Acacia DVD, Tartan
Video.
Ryu, Jeong (2010), ‘Adoption, Inheritance Overhaul Revisions’ [‘Ipyang,
sangsok jedo jeonmyeon gaejeong chujin’], Chosun Daily [Joseon Ilbo], 27
September; [Link] accessed 30 July 2011.
Seo, Hyun-suk (2009), ‘That Unobscure Object of Desire and Horror: On
Some Uncanny Things in Recent Korean Horror Films’, in J. Choi and M.
Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian
Cinema, Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 163–78.
Wood, Robin (1986), Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Yoon, Jeong-gil (2008), ‘The Rebirth of a Beautiful Family: Adoption’
[‘Areumdaun gajok ui jaetangsaeng “ipyang”’], Kookje Daily [Gukje Ilbo],
26 October; [Link] accessed 30 July 2011.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

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[Link]
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 c h apter 7

Apartment horror:
Sorum and Possessed
Nikki J. Y. Lee

Many horror films utilise (often remote) haunted houses as singular spatial
settings. In comparison, a further group of horror films are set in urban
apartments where a number of different households share the same build-
ing. While Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954, US) may be viewed as
the precedent for ‘apartment horror’, Roman Polanski’s ‘apartment trilogy’,
comprising of Repulsion (1965, UK), Rosemary’s Baby (1968, US) and The
Tenant (1976, France), provides quintessential examples of this type of film.
Apartments also feature as key spatial settings in a number of contemporary
Korean films, and apartment spaces have featured in many Korean films
since the 1970s, a time when the buildings were constructed en masse. For
example, Kim Ki-young presents two different kinds of apartment in his 1972
film Insect Woman (Choongnyeo): a slum apartment located on a high hill and
a new upscale apartment block. In more contemporary films, Barking Dogs
Never Bite (Plandaseu-ui gae, Bong Joon-ho, 2000), Happy End (Haepi endeu,
Jeong Ji-woo, 1999) and Crush On You (Sunjeongmanwha, Ryu Jang-ha, 2008)
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

all effectively integrate apartment spaces into the development of their nar-
ratives. Contemporary Korean horror movies with apartments as key spatial
settings include Sorum (Soreum, Yoon Jong-chan, 2001), Kim Ji-woon’s short
film Memories (Memoriseu, 2002), Uninvited (4inyong siktak, Lee Soo-yeon,
2003), Apartment (APT, Ahn Byung-ki, 2006), The Pot (Dog, Kim Tae-gon,
2008) and Possessed (Bulsinjiok, Lee Yong-joo, 2009). This chapter focuses on
Sorum and Possessed as examples of this particular phenomenon; both are pre-
dominantly set in a single apartment building whose space is used to engender
horror.
Apartments have recently become central to academic discussions of cin-
ematic space, and the work of Lee Wallace and Pamela Robertson Wojcik is
particularly important in this regard. Wallace argues that in numerous films
featuring an (implicit or explicit) lesbian relationship, the apartment setting
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embodies homosexuality through spatial characteristics and cinematic conven-

tions. Here, the permeability of the apartment building is a key aspect: neither
completely private nor public, ‘the apartment house bridges or confounds a
number of oppositions that the schoolroom and bar chronotopes [of lesbian
films] tend to keep separate: privacy and publicity, domesticity and urbanity,
innocence and corruption, work and leisure’ (2009: 11). For Wallace, such
permeability echoes the way in which lesbianism blurs the boundary between
homosexuality and heterosexuality, demonstrating how cinematic space may
override – or may not be entirely subject to – plot development and characteri-
sation. On the other hand, Wojcik underlines the permeability of apartment
space in her articulation of ‘the apartment plot’ as ‘a genre in which issues of
contact, entanglement, and privacy are played out through the figure of the
apartment and in which the apartment mobilizes themes of porousness, spon-
taneity, play, simultaneity, and improvisation’ (2010: 10). According to this
perspective, the apartment plot encompasses films from diverse genres such
as the melodrama, the romantic comedy, the family drama, the thriller and
the horror movie. As a space of and for single people, the apartment facilitates
romantic relationships or sexual adventures in, for example, The Apartment
(Billy Wilder, US, 1960) and L’Appartement (Gilles Mimouni, France / Spain
/ Italy, 1996).
In their respective readings, both Wallace and Wojcik draw upon Sharon
Marcus’s elaboration of the cultural discourses and experiences of apartment
space in Paris and London in the nineteenth century. In particular, Marcus
(1999) links the social failure to deliver ideal houses for Victorian middle-
class families in London – namely, a freestanding house exclusively occupied
by one household – to the boom in popular literature about haunted houses.
According to Marcus, when the Victorian domestic ideal is disrupted by these
housing conditions, it creates a fear of the permeability which renders a house
– a private domestic sanctuary – vulnerable to intrusion by neighbours, noise
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and social contamination (through mingling with people of a different race

and class). This historical lineage of fear is continued in what I would like to
term ‘apartment horror’, or the apartment plot as a horror movie. This chapter
explores how the porousness and permeability of apartment spaces in Sorum
and Possessed are used to develop particular narrative situations, as well as an
overriding sense of horror.
The specifically Korean context of apartment spaces is also an important
dimension of this chapter. After all, the apartment is one of the most common
residential places in South Korea: according to the 2010 Population Census,
over 40 per cent of Korean households reside in apartments (Statistics Korea
2010). The relatively new mega-blocks of twelve- to thirty-storey buildings
dominate the scenery of Korean cities and towns. Apartments in South Korea
symbolise wealth and modern values (identified as efficiency, convenience,
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cleanness, safety, newness and urban-ness). The development of apartments

was initiated, from the early 1960s, by authoritarian state governments who
placed exclusive emphasis on ‘the quantity and speed of the economic growth’
(Choi 1991: 227–64).1 Korean apartments (blocks) have functioned as mate-
rial and ideological machines for economic growth while mobilising the public
by exhibiting visible material reward and distributing wealth exclusively to
the middle and upper-middle classes (see Choi 1991; Lett 1998; Oh 2005;
Park 2005). In this respect, French geologist Valérie Gelézeau claims that
‘[Korean] apartment blocks are the most peculiar outcome, medium and
symbol of modernization of Korean society; the Korean apartment blocks are
an index of and the very icon of the Korean modernity’ (2008: 239–40). As
such, a key issue for this chapter is to query how, and to what extent, the sui
genesis status (and state) of Korean apartments intersects with the way that
they are represented in contemporary Korean horror films.

sorum : a p a r t me n t a s/ is h o r r or
Sorum is the debut feature of Yoon Jong-chan, made when the director
returned to South Korea after studying filmmaking in the US. Yoon’s sober
observations on Korean society may also be linked with his personal experi-
ence. He lost his wife at the Sampung Department Collapse Incident in 1995,
just before he left for the US. It was highly acclaimed by Korean critics as an
auteurist work adopting an original film style, and screened at many interna-
tional film festivals (see Nam 2001). Since Sorum, Yoon has to date directed
two other feature films, Blue Swallow (Cheongyeon, 2005) and I Am Happy
(Naneun haengbokhapnida, 2008), neither of which is a horror movie; thus he
fits into the common pattern in Korea of directors debuting with a horror film
and subsequently abandoning the genre.
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The film’s title, Sorum, means ‘goosebumps’ in Korean. Combined with a

particular verb (Sorum-i kkichida), it forms an idiom meaning bloodcurdling,
hair-raising, chilling and horrifying. However, throughout the film, what is
horrifying is not clearly identified and remains invisible. Vis-à-vis such obscu-
rity, my contention is that – in terms of cinematic space as well as narrative
– in Sorum the apartment building itself materially and cinematically embod-
ies the origin of horror. The main male character, Yong-hyun, a taxi driver,
moves to an old apartment in a building on the verge of being demolished for
reconstruction. He learns that the previous resident died in a strange fire in
the apartment, and that his next-door neighbour, a middle-aged novelist, is
writing a mystery novel about a tragic event that happened in the same apart-
ment. Yong-hyun becomes involved with a young woman, Sun-young (Seon-
yeong), who lives on the same floor. In the mean time, the police investigate
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 104 n ik k i j. y . l e e

the disappearance of Yong-hyun’s ex-girlfriend, whose belongings Sun-young

discovers in Yong-hyun’s fridge.
The apartment block, named Migeum Apartments, is an old slum build-
ing located on a high hill and is implied to be somewhere in Seoul. The film
begins with Yong-hyun’s first encounter with the building. He has just arrived
in order to move in, and the camera focuses on his back as he looks up at the
building, the opening shot thus signifying that the film is about the man, the
apartment and the relationship between the two. However, because we cannot
see the man’s face, and hence are not in a position to be able to determine what
he feels about the building, it also suggests that this relationship will remain
obscure. Significantly, because it is partially blocked by the silhouette of Yong-
hyun’s back, the viewer is also denied a complete picture of the building itself.
Because so few scenes show him spending time alone in his apartment,
it can be argued that Yong-hyun is afraid of staying in his own home.2 For
example, in the scene where he first enters the building, more time is allocated
to him walking up the stairs and looking around the corridors than to looking
around his apartment. Indeed, the corridors play a far more significant role
than his apartment and become key spaces in the film. Individual apartments
are located on either side of corridors that open to the outside. When Yong-
hyun looks down the end of a corridor, other characters standing on the other
side appear only in silhouette, softened by daylight. A low-level light-bulb
hangs from the centre of the corridor ceiling, and at night the dim light coming
through the windows on the walls of the stairs provides the only source of
light.3 As a result, it is difficult for both the viewers and the main characters
to form a clear picture of other characters (let alone their facial expressions)
and what may be lurking in the corridors. This blurred vision and ambiguity
invoke misunderstanding and horror. In Sorum, spatial setting and lighting
design work together to present the corridor as a literal and metaphorical
porous space, creating and accumulating fear, of both impenetrable characters
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and an invisible horror.

In an important scene, Yong-hyun returns to the apartment building late
at night, and looks intently down the corridor where Sun-young’s apart-
ment is located. Just after he turns around and walks towards his apartment,
blood-covered Sun-young appears behind his back. Her emergence is a shock
because, just moments earlier, the darkness of the corridor had concealed her
existence. In a later scene – yet again depicting Yong-hyun returning to the
apartment – he eavesdrops on an argument between Sun-young and one of her
neighbours, a piano teacher whose apartment is located next to the stairs. He
begins to suspect that Sun-young intends to involve him as an accomplice in
murder. When Yong-hyun later reveals to Sun-young that he eavesdropped
on her conversation with her neighbour and accuses her of entrapment, she
responds ‘if you wanted to hear, you should have heard it right.’ However, he
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 apartment horror 105

remains confused and upset because she does not provide him with the true
version of her story. As porous and liminal spaces between public and private,
the corridors therefore become places where random but fatal encounters
happen. Information, in the form of gossip, noises and eavesdropping, flows
amongst neighbours and leads to misunderstanding, anxiety and horror.
In Rosemary’s Baby, neighbours intrude into Rosemary’s apartment. It is
supposedly a private and domestic space of her own, but it becomes a space
where her neighbours and husband confine her. In contrast, in Sorum, Yong-
hyun is not restricted to his own apartment; he is drawn to the corridors
and his neighbours, intrigued by the haunting story of his apartment and
Sun-young’s life. His fear about his apartment grows as the horrifying and
tragic story of what happened there is revealed. The novelist, who lives next
door, plays a key role here. At the very beginning of the film, he enters Yong-
hyun’s apartment quite freely, when Yong-hyun leaves the door open while
unpacking. The novelist continuously reveals the haunted house narrative to
Yong-hyun: at the barber’s, in his own apartment and in the corridors. It is
the novelist’s story (rather than the random strange noises that usually terrify
characters in horror movies) that intrudes into Yong-hyun’s mind; it gradually
leads him to believe in the existence of a vengeful soul and to question his own
fate. The story encroaches on Yong-hyun’s anonymity; it fills the void of his
past and his memories – as an orphan, Yong-hyun is unaware of his origins. At
the end of the story Yong-hyun is horrified to realise that he may have killed
his half-sister. However, it still remains ambiguous whether his realisation
draws upon his own fear and sense of guilt, as his neighbour has distorted his
thoughts. In short, the spatial permeability of the apartment is interwoven
with the temporal permeability of the past story – the history – of the space,
affecting the minds of characters and blurring the boundary between reality
and fantasy.
As suggested, the cause of horror in the film appears to be the apartment
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building itself. After the first scene, full-frontal long shots of the apartment
building are used as master shots marking out transitions between scenes. In
the daylight the apartment building is mostly bright and has a warm atmos-
phere, presented usually from a low angle or horizontal eye level. In contrast,
at night – often in the middle of heavy rain – the building is dark and ominous,
filmed at low angle from ground level. Such camera choices help establish the
character of the building, as if it is responding to the evolving situations and
accidents occurring in the apartment. As the story develops, it is revealed that
Yong-hyun’s father killed his mother in the building, and it is implied that her
vengeful soul lingers there, still waiting after thirty years for her son to return.
However, the film does not represent the soul or the ghost visually or in terms
of sound, with one exception: the fantastic nightmare sequence of another
resident – a young female piano teacher – in which a ghost appears for shock
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 106 n ik k i j. y . l e e

effect. The novelist seems to sense some invisible power, yet it is one that does
not have any particular shape or sound; it is inferred by his sensitive reaction
to his surroundings. Indeed, the only palpable sign of the ghost is the flickering
light of the building itself, a motif repeated in key scenes, leading to the con-
clusion that the whole building materially embodies the ghost. The last scene
appears to confirm this. When Yong-hyun tries to leave the building, all of its
lights begin flickering. Horrified, he stops in front of the building, and then
instead of revealing the source of the horror – the ghost – the film depicts an
empty corner of the building in a flickering light. Sorum thus ends exactly as it
started, by showing Yong-hyun’s back as he turns around and looks up at the
(now flickering) building. Viewers are once again left uncertain of his response
to the building. What precisely is he looking at? What horrifies him? Unlike in
the first scene, however, viewers are now in a position to be able to recognise
that the building itself is the object of horror and he is staring at it.
The presentation of the apartment building in Sorum chimes with the social
connotations of apartments in the Korean context. Gelézeau emphasises that
not every existing Korean apartment fits the special model identified with the
fruits of economic development (namely, modernity, economic efficiency and
material affluence) epitomised by the urban middle class of Seoul. However,
this model dominates the Korean public’s ideas about apartments and embod-
ies the ideology of urban development embedded in Seoul City Council’s
housing development plan (Gelézeau 2008: 126). In contrast to the myths of
the wealthy middle class, the apartment in Sorum is an old, worn-out and poor
residential dwelling, occupied by socially marginal classes. The apartment in
the film is thus no longer a symbol of a materially affluent and comfortable
modern lifestyle; it is instead depicted as a space where the greediness and
angst of people and their desire for survival and recognition come to a terrify-
ing end. The real location of the apartment used in Sorum is the Geumhwa
City Council Apartment complex in central Seoul. Geumhwa Apartments is
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one of the few remaining first-generation apartment blocks built by Seoul City
Council in the 1960s. The whole block was constructed as part of an ambi-
tious contemporary urban redevelopment plan. However, most of the build-
ings were eventually deserted and were demolished after a disastrous accident
in the 1970s in which another city council apartment building, the Wau
Apartment, collapsed overnight, killing a number of residents and leaving
more injured.4 At the time of writing, only two buildings are left, and these
are due to be demolished soon; some residents still live there while negotiating
terms of compensation with the local council. In Sorum, in the first conversa-
tion between Yong-hyun and the novelist, the latter states that the apartment
is scheduled for imminent redevelopment. Later scenes include tall new apart-
ment blocks framed in a blurred background and built close to Yong-hyun’s
Migeum Apartment. The existence of Geumhwa Apartments poses just such
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 apartment horror 107

contrasts between the ideological model of glossy modern superabundance and

the terrifying presence of fatal greediness that lurks beneath the glossy surface.
While temporal permeability (of the intruding past) is intertwined with spatial
permeability (of the apartment space), the cinematic presence of Geumhwa
Apartments as a historical monument or ruin evokes horrifying memories
buried in the modernisation period’s blind combative style of industrialisa-
tion. In other words, while Geumhwa Apartment is featured as the terrifying
Migeum Apartment, the apartment building in Sorum cinematically envisages
the horrifying lived experiences (and deaths) hidden beneath the myth of
Korean economic development.

possessed : r e l ig io u s p r a c t ic e s a n d a p a r t men t
s pa c e s
The boom period for the contemporary Korean horror film was 2003 to 2007,
a time that established particular expectations in the Korean film industry
concerning the production of horror films, including the idea that a horror
film can be made on a low budget by a first-time director for maximum profit.
Possessed – also known as Disbelief Hell – (Bulsinjiok, Lee Yong-joo) fits the bill,
as it is Lee’s debut feature film and was produced on a small scale for a summer
release. However, Possessed is intriguing, as it was produced in 2009, after the
genre had entered into a decline, and it stands apart from its contemporaries in
delivering solemn critical comments on Korean society while not over-relying
on the generic conventions of horror movies that had proved so successful
at the box office just a few years earlier (see Kim 2009). This critique relates
to wider tendencies in Korean horror filmmaking. In 2003, the Korean film
journalist Nam Dong-chul published an article in Cine 21 that identified two
key overlapping trends in contemporary Korean horror movies. The first
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type of film adopts the generic conventions of prior horror films, conventions
often taken from female ghost figures like Sadako in the Japanese Ring series,
1960s Korean horror films, Hollywood slashers, and plot reversals of the kind
found in The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, US, 1999) and The Others
(Alejandro Amenábar, US / Spain / France / Italy, 2001). The second type
presents the reality of Korean society as the origin of horror. While these two
trends certainly intertwine in numerous Korean horror movies, the tendencies
of Possessed, like Sorum, lean far closer to the latter type.
The film’s Korean title, Bulsinjiok, connotes social implications in relation
to the religious practice of Christianity in Korea. It literally means that dis-
believers will fall to Hell, and is one of the commonly used phrases by people
who promote Christianity in Korean public spaces. However, as director
Lee Yong-joo remarks, if the film delivers social criticism, it does not apply
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 108 n ik k i j. y . l e e

exclusively to Christian beliefs but rather to the greediness of people who like
to believe in whatever will help them realise their desires (Kim 2009). The
main female character, Heui-jin, lives alone in Seoul. One day she receives
a telephone call from her mother informing her that her younger sister is
missing. As soon as she gets back to the apartment where her mother and
younger sister live together, she calls the police to investigate (against the will
of her mother, a Christian with a blind religious belief). As the investigation
develops, the neighbours (a young single woman, a security guard, a novelist
and a shaman) die one by one under mysterious circumstances and Heui-jin
experiences unsettling incidents. The detective learns of the strange stories
that surrounded the missing young girl and discovers that the neighbours
believe she possessed supernatural powers.
The apartment building in the film is not particularly old or new. It is
located in a suburban town outside Seoul. As in Sorum, it is not part of a huge
(new) block of apartments built for urban middle-class households. Unlike in
Sorum though, the residents of the building are of the mid-lower class rather
than of the marginal lower class. The apartment appears to be a replacement
for ordinary residential houses in small towns. The suburban location has a
marginal status in the social hierarchy of residential space, and this is made
clear during the opening scene, in which Heui-jin’s life in Seoul appears to
be what the director describes as ‘life in hell’ (Lee 2009). A university student
from outside central Seoul, Heui-jin has evidently taken more than two part-
time jobs to make ends meet. One of her jobs is teaching high-school students
as a private tutor. Although only briefly glimpsed, the apartment where she
goes to teach her students appears to be in one of the large Seoul apartment
blocks built for middle-class households. This is in stark contrast to her
own place: a small one-room apartment located at the top of a steep hill in a
marginal area of Seoul.
The horror of Possessed, as with Sorum, draws upon the porousness of apart-
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ment space where people of different social backgrounds live in close proxim-
ity, and where different individuals with different interests are easily able to
infiltrate the private space of other people. Director Lee previously worked as
an architect and retains a good working knowledge of apartment space (Kim
2009), an expertise used here to develop the plot and a sense of horror. For
example, the scene showing Heui-jin’s arrival at the apartment begins with a
bus entering the centre of a small town. As she gets off the bus, she looks up at
an apartment building in front of her. The next shot shows her walking along
the top floor towards an apartment located at the end of the corridor. Framed
from a low camera angle, her approach to the apartment appears perilous. A
metal cross carrying the name of a local church hangs on the door, signalling
that it is the space of a Christian – her mother. Three heavy door locks secure
the space from outsiders, as well as potential danger. At the same time, though,
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 apartment horror 109

the existence of the locks suggests that the space is vulnerable to external
intrusion. For example, the neighbours and security guard all have access to
the apartment, and on the day that the mother allegedly discovered that the
younger sister was missing, she tried to open the door but in doing so actually
locked it, as the door was already unlocked and left open. This demonstrates
that, even when the mother believes that she is keeping the space secured, the
apartment is always and already subject to external intrusion.
A key feature of Possessed is that both the narrative and the horror develop
in tandem with Heui-jin’s (subjective) experiences of different spaces of the
deadly apartment building, including a veranda, corridors, the windows on the
side of corridors, the foyer, lift, rooftop and basement. At each stage of plot
development, these varying spaces direct Heui-jin (and the viewers) to other
characters and new settings. Moreover, they provide different types of horrific
experiences. Let us consider specific examples of such uses of space. First,
the initial horrifying intrusion occurs when Heui-jin is led to the veranda by
a strange black silhouette that turns out to be her mother’s coat. As soon as
she recovers from the false scare, she sees a woman’s body pass in front of the
veranda window and hang there momentarily. As she struggles to reach her,
Heui-jin sees her face moments before she falls to her death. While this rep-
resents the first invasion of one of the neighbours into Heui-jin’s perception,
it also leads her and the detective to the dead woman’s apartment, where he
finds a clue – the keys to Heui-jin’s mother’s apartment – which leads on to the
next stage of the investigation. The second event occurs when Heui-jin is in
her younger sister’s room, and the security guard of the building looks through
the window in an ominous manner. He then dies at his security post by drink-
ing poisonous insecticide. Later, when Heui-jin is once again in her younger
sister’s room, the woman living next door suddenly appears at the window
with a menacing expression on her face, and tells Heui-jin that she just saw
her younger sister in the basement. In these examples, the door, veranda and
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windows all connect the apartment to the external world and neighbours; they
become open holes exposing the apartment space to intruders.
As ‘collective spaces of restricted access’ (Wallace 2009: 73), the rooftop
and the basement become key locations. When Heui-jin goes down to the dark
basement, she finds the female shaman who had attacked her earlier in the film.
Following the shaman to the rooftop, Heui-jin discovers the final secret of the
apartment: this is where her mother has hidden the dead body of her younger
sister. Located on top of the building, the small rooftop space becomes a good
surveillance space, used by the security guard to spy on Heui-jin’s mother and
sister, and also explains the omnipresence of her younger sister’s ghost.
The rooftop and the basement also appear as significant spaces in the endings
of other apartment horror films. Because of safety issues, residents’ access to
rooftops is usually strictly prohibited. However, the rooftop is often employed
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 110 n ik k i j. y . l e e

cinematically as a liminal space linking the outer open space and the apartment
building. Moreover, it functions as an exit – albeit a fatal one – for charac-
ters who do not have any other way out of the horrifying realities of life. For
example, in Ahn Byung-ki’s Apartment, the rooftop is an open place where the
main characters can enjoy the view and snatch a moment of reprieve; it is also
where the main female character falls to her death. In Lee Soo-yeon’s Uninvited
– which features many falls from apartment buildings – the main female char-
acter falls from the rooftop out of despair at the end of the film. In Possessed, the
rooftop functions as a critical place where the mother’s belief and Heui-jin’s
disbelief, as well as the existence of the ghost of her younger sister (or of the
ghost that possessed her), are finally tested once more through the act of falling.
Because of its choice of title, the social message of Possessed appears to target
the particular religious practice of Christianity in Korea. Yet it is perhaps
more valid to think of the film as targeting the blindness and greed of people
who believe in whatever works for their own selfish interests; this includes
not only Christianity, but also any other belief system, such as Shamanism,
as represented here. More specifically, it is tempting to interpret the spatial
co-existence of Christianity and Shamanism (the shaman’s temple is located
on the ground floor of the same building) as the intrusion of the pre-modern
– Shamanism – into the modern apartment space. However, such an inter-
pretation may be misleading, as it is embedded in the mythic belief in the
dichotomy between the pre-modern and the modern (see Mitchell 2000). In
contrast, Shamanism and Christianity should be considered to be contempo-
rary, which is to say that they are socially practised as systems of belief in
contemporary Korean society, albeit situated differently in terms of social
hierarchy.5 Certainly, the contemporary nature of both belief systems is made
clear in relation to the film’s critical point: Possessed places Shamanism in
parallel with the Christian belief of Heui-jin’s mother. The neighbours want
to believe that the girl, who seems to suffer from injuries after a car accident,
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is a possessed shaman, and so they exploit her and abandon her when she is
severely injured. Meanwhile, her mother believes that her prayers saved her
daughter from her fatal injuries. As such, due to her firm religious beliefs, she
leaves her daughter to die, as she believes that the miracle will happen again.
In both cases, the apartment is the location where blind belief and selfishness
lead to death as they are mediated by the porousness of its space.

c o nc l usi o n
In apartment horror films, the porousness and permeability of both the apart-
ment and the apartment building engender horror. These spaces are inter-
twined with narrative developments and used to create a sense of horror. The
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 apartment horror 111

two Korean films discussed above, Sorum and Possessed, demonstrate how
the lived experience in real-life apartments can return as a cinematic experi-
ence of horror. In particular, the run-down apartment building in Sorum not
only functions as space of horror but also becomes an object of horror itself.
It materially and cinematically embodies the horror buried underneath the
development of the ‘turbo-capitalism’ of modern South Korean society under
the military authorial regimes (Cho 2005).6 In comparison, Possessed envisages
apartment space as an interpersonal social arena where a supposedly enclosed
private domain is subject to invasion by selfish and greedy individuals – and
superstitious power – through the connecting and also disconnecting inter-
spaces (the walls, windows, doors, veranda and corridors), while developing
a distinctive apartment spatial plot. However, despite such different orienta-
tions, they, in common, unveil the horrors underlying the historical and social
construction of apartment spaces in which Korean modern life is embedded,
while also cinematically exploring those spaces. Therefore, Korean apartment
horror films cinematically ‘expound the process of production’ (Lefebvre,
1991 [1974]: 38) of apartments as social spaces.

no t e s
1. Unless otherwise mentioned, all translations are the author’s.
2. Many scenes depicting his daily life in the apartment show him taking a
shower in the bathroom. These scenes are closely related with key narra-
tive developments. For example, he takes a shower after burying the main
females character’s dead husband. He also carefully looks at a large burn on
his back after a shower when beginning to suspect that the baby who was
left in a fire in the same room thirty years earlier is him.
3. The director has commented that the main concept for the lighting design
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

of the film was realistic and the production team did not add any artificial
lighting sources within the frame (Yoon 2001).
4. The Wau Apartment Collapse Incident killed forty-four people and injured
thirty-three. The apartment was one of those built in 1969 by the Seoul
City Council for low-income households. The construction company cut
corners severely in order to make up for the money they had used to bribe
high-ranking bureaucrats.
5. Many Korean sociologists explain such co-presence of different forms of
social development and cultural values in contemporary Korean society
in terms of contemporaneous non-contemporaneity (Kim 1995). This
is borrowed from German philosopher Ernest Bloch, who articulates
his theory of non-contemporaneity in relation to the rise of Fascism in
Germany in the 1930s.
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 112 n ik k i j. y . l e e

6. In order to see how contemporary Korean popular culture reflects such

social experiences on turbo-capitalist economic development, see Cho
(2005).

wo rk s c i t e d
Choi, Pyeong-du (1991), Space and Environments in Korea [Hanguk-eui gong-
gan-gwa hwangyeong], Seoul: Hangil-sa.
Cho, Hae-joang (2005), ‘Reading the “Korean Wave” as a sign of Global
Shift’, Korea Journal, 45: 4, pp. 147–82.
Gelézeau, Valérie (2008), Apartment Republic: Korean Apartments Seen by a
French Geologist [Apateu gonghwaguk: Prangseu jirihagja-ga bon hanguk-eui
apateu], trans. Gil Hye-yeon. Seoul: Humanitas.
Kim, Do-hoon (2009), ‘Don’t Assume It’s Criticism about Religion: Interview
with Lee Yong-joo [‘Jonggyo-e daehan damron-euro boji mara: Lee Yong-
joo gamdok inteobyu’], Cine 21, 8 August; [Link]
article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=57407; accessed 25 June 2011.
Kim, Ho-gi (1995), Contemporary Capitalism and Korean Society: State, Civil
Society, Democracy [Hyeondae jabonjuui-wa hangugsahoe: gukga, siminsahoe,
minjujuui], Seoul: Sahoebipyung-sa.
Lee, Yong-joo (2010), DVD commentary on the South Korea Region 3
Possessed DVD, Art Service.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991 [1974]), The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-
Smith, Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell.
Lett, Denise P. (1998), In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s ‘New’
Urban Middle Class, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marcus, Sharon (1999), Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-
Century Paris and London, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Mitchell, Timothy (ed.) (2000), Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.
Nam, Dong-chul (2003), ‘Uninvited and Korean Horror Films’ [‘4inyong sik-
tak-ae geurigo hanguk gongpo yeonghwa’], Cine 21, 8 August; [Link]
[Link]/do/article/article/typeDispatcher? mag_id=20310&page=1&
menu=&keyword=&sdate=&edate=&reporter=; accessed 13 July 2011.
Oh, Chang-eun (2005), ‘The Cultural Resistance and Acceptance of the
Space of Apartment: Focusing on Park Wan-suh’s Similar Rooms and Lee
Dong-ha’s A Roar of Laughter [‘Apateu gonggan-e daehan munhwajeok jeo-
hang-gwa surak: Park Wan-suh-ui dalmeun bangdeul-gwa Lee Dong-ha-ui
hongso-reul jungsimeuro’], Academic Journal of Language and Literature
[Eeomunnonjib], 33, pp. 163–90.
Park, Hae-cheon (2005), ‘Seoul Apartments: Modernity in Everyday Life
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 apartment horror 113

[‘Apateu, ilsang-ui modeoniti’], in H. J. Kang et al. (eds), Design in Korea:

Industry, Culture, History [Hanguk-eui dijain: saneop, munhwa, yeoksa],
Seoul: Sijirak, pp. 28–133.
Statistics Korea (Tonggyecheong) (2010), 2010 Census [Ingu Jutak Chongjongsa], 8
August 2011; [Link]
[Link]?p_bitmId=60482&q_menu=4&q_sub=2&q_pageNo=1&q_div=
ALL; accessed 20 August 2011.
Wallace, Lee (2009), Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments,
London: Routledge.
Wojcik, Pamela Robertson (2010), The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in
American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Yoon, Jong-chan (2001), ‘Yoon Jong-chan Talks about Sorum [‘Yoong Jong-
chan gamdok-i malhaneun Sorum’], Cine 21, 10 August; [Link]
[Link]/do/article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=3595&page=1&m
enu=&keyword=&sdate=&edate=&reporter=; accessed 13 July 2011.
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 c h apter 8

The face(s) of Korean horror film:

toward a cinematic physiognomy
of affective extremes
David Scott Diffrient

The question to be asked of a face is not ‘what does a face represent?’

but rather, ‘what can a face do?’
Richard Rushton, ‘What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze
and Faces’

Scream. Laugh.
Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality: The Textuality of
Contemporary Horror Films’

One of the most unforgettable yet critically overlooked moments in Park

Chan-wook’s twisted revenge thriller Oldboy (Oldeuboi, 2003) occurs at the
thirty-five-minute mark. After the film’s protagonist, Oh Dae-su, receives
a scrap of paper with erroneous information about his missing daughter’s
Stockholm address, he quickly walks away from the bearer of this bad news,
Mi-do. Chasing after Dae-su as he hurries down a busy street in Seoul, the
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young woman asks if he would like to visit his wife’s grave, a map of which
has been drawn on the reverse side of the paper. Having been wrongly accused
of his wife’s murder, and having been forcibly confined to a shabby room for
fifteen years by an unseen captor who recently granted him ‘freedom’, the
tormented antihero – now attempting to exact revenge on those responsible
for his many misfortunes – could be expected to harbour little else beyond
rage, resentment and the mounting sorrow of someone who has lost every-
thing. And, indeed, when he turns around to confront the inquiring Mi-do,
a close-up of his face visibly registers those emotions. However, in a matter
of seconds his pained, momentarily frozen expression of abjection transforms
into a smile, albeit one that seems forced, with the muscles around his eyes and
mouth straining to maintain the illusion of temporary happiness. Trembling as
he struggles to flash his yellowed teeth, Dae-su (played by Choi Min-sik) turns
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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 115

his weathered face into a mask, a grotesquely grinning visage that appears to
disguise his true feelings. However, this shift from one extreme to the other –
this metonymic stand-in for the entire film’s schizophrenic slide from sadness
to euphoria, misery to contentment – is a rhetorical gesture on both the direc-
tor and performer’s part, revealing as much as it conceals. What it discloses is
the contradictory confluence of affective and emotional states bound up in the
so-called ‘extreme film’, a subgenre of horror that oscillates between distinct
tonal registers and which, I argue, is fixated on that most common yet oft-
ignored of iconographic features: the face.
When watching Oldboy, I too find myself becoming fixated on – or perhaps
haunted by – Dae-su’s face, a fleshy screen-within-the-screen onto which
the spectator’s own conflicting emotions can be projected. The significance
of the aforementioned scene is enhanced by its narrative bivalency, pointing
toward both preceding and future moments when similar preoccupations with
the human face attain allegorical suggestiveness. To begin with, it visually
echoes an earlier moment in which the incarcerated protagonist stands before
a painting of a man’s bloody face. As described by Joseph Jonghyun Jeon in his
analysis of the film’s thematic emphasis on trauma and forgetting, the abstract
artwork ‘features an impossibly toothy, smiling face’, and Dae-su mimics the
painted subject’s ghastly (and ghostly) grin as if standing before a mirror (Jeon
2009: 732). Graced with the words ‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
weep, and you weep alone’ (written in Hangeul, but derived from Ella Wheeler
Wilcox’s English-language poem ‘Solitude’), the painting, like the main char-
acter’s eventual juxtaposing of grief and pained elation, puts forth contradic-
tory ideas. Besides recalling his abject state of loneliness as a physically abused
and psychologically tormented prisoner (trapped inside a tiny, motel-like
space between 1988 and 2003, an economically unstable period of political
reform condensed to a quick montage of televised, newsworthy events), Dae-
su’s unusual act of first frowning and then smiling also anticipates the film’s
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ambiguous conclusion. As such, it establishes the foundation upon which our

own anxieties about the film’s labyrinthine storyline and troubling themes
(including incest) can be negotiated, even if they remain unresolved at the
end. Moreover, Dae-su’s face could be said to convey the existential dilem-
mas confronting millions of Koreans in the aftermath of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis. Occurring in 1997, this pan-Asian economic
catastrophe not only resulted in massive layoffs, widespread unemployment,
reduced social services and a ‘breakdown of corporate paternalism’ (Jeon 2009:
720), but also led to an increase in suicide rates, school dropout rates, divorces
and reports of domestic violence (Ha and Lee 2001; Kim and Finch 2002). As
Jeon observes, Dae-su’s face ‘is very specifically situated in this historical time
and place’ (2009: 715).

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 116 d avi d s co t t d if f r i e nt

be t we e n p l e a sur e a n d p a in : ‘ a sia ex t r eme’

Inspired by Oldboy’s literal and figurative framing of the face as a rhetorical
object of contemplation, I seek to show how this and other Korean films solicit
spectatorial participation through a kind of phenomenological engagement
with the medium’s material properties. In the context of horror film spectator-
ship, such cinematic ‘interfacing’ might result in a mutually reflective form
of physical expressivity; for, as embodied viewers before the screen (be it that
of a cinema or that of a television monitor), we sometimes mimic the reac-
tions – the looks of fright and terror – performed by actors and photochemi-
cally registered on strips of celluloid (or delivered electronically via video
technologies). This is not a novel idea. Carl Plantinga, in his recent study of
facial feedback, emotional contagion and affective congruence, draws upon
the work of the classical film theorist Béla Balázs, who argued that ‘if we look
at and understand each other’s faces and gestures, we not only understand,
we also learn to feel each others’ emotions’ (Plantinga 1999: 243). Nor is this
idea unique to horror film, as highlighted in Noel Carroll’s reading of the
studio-era Hollywood melodrama Stella Dallas (King Vidor, US, 1937), which
culminates with empathy-engendering shots of the title character (Barbara
Stanwyck) watching her estranged daughter’s wedding from afar (a series
of close-ups that elicit a ‘bittersweet’ emotion that is part-dysphoric, part-
euphoric) (Carroll 1999: 36). However, Plantinga emphasises that ‘the horror
film . . . reserves a special place for the face, as the prevalence of close-up face
shots of victims in anguish demonstrates’ (Plantinga 2009: 126). As Inger
Ekman and Petri Lankoski likewise underline in their study of the horror
video games Silent Hill 2 (Japan / USA, 2001) and Fatal Frame (USA, 2001),
‘Humans have a tendency to automatically mimic emotional expressions. This
phenomenon, termed affective mimicry, is an unconscious emotional process
in which a person will automatically mirror emotions of others’ (Ekman and
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Lankoski 2009: 188). In a way, like those of Dae-su and Woo-jin near the
end of Oldboy, our own perceiving faces metaphorically fuse with the faces of
characters in film: people who are forced to confront nightmarish visions on
the path to enlightenment, freedom or redemption. In the following pages,
I examine the ways in which Korean horror films (gongpo yeonghwa) present
spectators with a physiognomy of affective extremes, showcasing the face as a
hyper-visible yet often obscured sign of the genre’s paradoxical appeals as a
source of pleasure and fear, amusement and dread.
Building on Philip Brophy’s theory of ‘horrality’, or ‘the construction,
deployment and manipulation of horror – in all its various guises – as a textual
mode’ (1986: 5), this chapter explores how these affective extremes or emo-
tional polarities, situated at the far ends of an experiential continuum signified
by Dae-su’s negatively charged and positively charged facial features, are the
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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 117

constituent features of the genre as it is ‘felt’ by the audience. Coined in 1983,

Brophy’s notion of horrality – a neologism that conflates horror and hilarity
(on top of textuality and morality) – was not the first attempt to conceptualise
the genre in such a way. Writing a quarter of century earlier, Derek Hill, in
a piece for Sight & Sound entitled ‘The Face of Horror’, acknowledged that
1950s audiences frequently laughed ‘at the most repugnant details of the new
horror films’ (Hill [1983] 2000: 53). ‘As a release from suspense and nervous
tension’, this tendency produced ‘the same kind of laughter that accompanies
a successful comedy sequence – laughter not to relieve tension, but to express
amusement or satisfaction’ (Hill 2000: 53). Although Hill employs the word
‘face’ in a general way (as part of a title that essentially evokes the ‘state’ or
‘appearance’ of horror, and not its actual faces), and while considerably dif-
ferent from my own attempt to locate specific features of the genre within
the physiognomy of onscreen performers, his writing gestures toward an idea
that is central to the current study. Horror, I argue, is most horrific when its
constituent polarities are fully operative, when the contrast between emotional
extremes is most pronounced, and when amusement, hilarity and pleasure
co-exist alongside dread, terror and pain.1
In the final seconds of Oldboy, as Dae-su embraces Mi-do in a mountain
forest blanketed with snow, the young woman whispers the words ‘I love you’.
The film’s last image before the closing credits – another ambivalent close-up
of Dae-su, now tongueless – captures his combined pleasure and pain upon
hearing her say this phrase. Like the earlier scene set outside a jewellery shop
in Seoul, this final moment offers a kind of affective ‘montage’ or dialectical
synthesis of discrete emotional parts, his beaming expression morphing into a
look of clinched-teeth consternation as the uninterrupted shot fades to black.
Here as before, in a mere ten seconds of screen time, director Park and actor
Choi locate in the face some of the attributes associated with South Korea’s
unique brand of ‘extreme cinema’. Although Choi’s performance as Dae-su
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

is relatively subdued, his facial expressivity in the snow-filled final scene of

Oldboy functions rhetorically to remind audiences of the uncomfortably close
distance – the uncanny proximity -between pleasure and pain, the comic
and the tragic. The more uncomfortable the audience is, the more horrific
the horror. This is something clearly borne out in many of the examples of
extreme cinema being produced in South Korea.
Although the much-discussed marketing term ‘Asia Extreme’ (coined by
the London-based distributor Tartan Films) is problematic insofar as it hinges
on Orientalist, taste-based assumptions of cinematic distinction (tied to the
supposed exoticism of East Asian cultural productions pitched at horror-film
connoisseurs in Europe and North America) (Shin 2009: 85), the more general
expression ‘extreme film’ has proven to be useful as a critical tool through
which to isolate seemingly irresolvable, ultimately collapsible, binaries at the
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 118 d avi d s co t t d if f r i e nt

textual level. An iconographic convention of the Korean horror genre (con-

temporary examples of which were introduced to the West under the umbrella
category of ‘Asia Extreme’) is the habitual appearance of long-haired female
spirits, known as gwisin. This convention provides opportunities to explore
the dialectical tension between what is shown (or ‘known’) and what is hidden
(or ‘unknown’); what is openly revealed on the face and what is obscured or
veiled behind a cascade of black. Although the Japanese equivalent of gwisin
(known as yūrei) has attracted critical attention for years, owing in part to the
widespread popularity of such films as Kobayashi Masaki’s Kwaidan (1964)
and Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998), the parallel history of Korean horror films
and their fixation on female ghosts (dating back to such Golden Age classics as
Lee Yong-min’s A Devilish Homicide [Salinma, 1965] and Gwon Cheol-hwi’s
A Public Cemetery under the Moon [Wolha-eui gongdongmyoji, 1967]) has yet to
receive a comparable degree of scrutiny.
Another culturally specific convention, as pointed out by Robert Cagle,
is that moral structures are often reversed in Korean extreme films, and the
binary opposition between good and evil dissolves as the ‘protagonist recog-
nizes that he / she has become an Other to himself / herself’ (2009: 132). This
argument is supported by the many shots of Dae-su gazing into mirrors and
other reflective surfaces, as well as Park’s split-screen conjoining of the protag-
onist and his equally traumatised tormenter, Woo-jin, whose face merges with
Dae-su’s as the two men edge closer to a deadly confrontation. When mapped
on to the spatiotemporal coordinates of past and present (representing Woo-
jin’s and Dae-su’s individual traumas, respectively), such a superimposition
of once-opposing, now comparable figures of combined scorn and sympathy
obliterates ‘the artificial distinction between good and evil’ while illustrat-
ing the persistence with which South Korea’s history of class-based violence
impresses itself on the contemporary moment (Cagle 2009: 135).
Why South Korea? What makes this country unique as a space of stylisti-
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cally dynamic cultural production, a place where horror narratives proliferate

and faces, both human and ghostly, become the focus? To be sure, there are
many other regions of the world one could turn to so as to test a theory of affec-
tive extremes in cinema. After all, every national cinema is rife with faces. And
indeed, many film scholars have already examined some of the most notable
‘face films’ in motion-picture history, from Robert Florey’s early noir The
Face behind the Mask (US, 1941) (Meehan 2011) to Georges Franju’s poetic
yet lurid Eyes without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage, France, 1960) (Lowenstein
2005; Powell 2005), both of which hinge on physical disfigurement, prosthetics
and plastic surgery (themes that rise to the surface of several Korean cultural
productions, from Yoo Sang-gon’s tellingly titled Face [2004] to Bong Man-
dae’s Cinderella [2006]). However, the sheer number of horror films produced
in South Korea since the late 1990s (a period when increased liberalisation
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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 119

created new opportunities for filmmakers a decade after democratic general

elections were held in the country), as well as the privileged place of the face
in those motion pictures, demands critical scrutiny. Although preliminary in
nature and limited in scope, the following examination of the face (eolgool, in
Korean) can serve as the opening salvo in a more expansive study of both the
genre and the physiognomy of affective extremes so central to it.

t wo . . . e x t r e me s ( a nd t h e sp a c es in
b et we e n) : d e l e uz i a n f a c i a lit y fr om the red
shoes to cello
A horror story, the face is a horror story.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia

One way to initiate a series of inquiries about the facialising impetus of horror
film and to respond to Richard Rushton’s question ‘What can a face do?’ is to
turn to the theoretical work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who,
individually (in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [1986]) and in partnership
with Félix Guattari (in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
[1987]), developed the concept of visagéité. Translated into English as ‘facial-
ity’, visagéité is closely related to Béla Balázs’s notion of physiognomic expres-
sion, which the Hungarian film critic linked to the close-up. Fulfilling an
anthropomorphic function, the close-up, according to Balázs, ‘strips the veil
of our imperceptiveness and insensitivity from the hidden little things and
shows us the face of objects’, but ‘it still shows us man, for what makes objects
expressive are the human expressions projected on to them’ (1970: 60). Like
Balázs, Deleuze ‘closely associates faciality with the use of close-ups’, although
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the latter’s conceptualisation hinges on the face ‘as a model displaying two dif-
ferent but interrelated series of sensori-motor movements’ (Rodowick 1997:
66). Those two movements – the reflective unity and the intensive series –
structure the trajectories of the face, ‘the direction of the thoughts, feelings,
and affects that energize’ it (Rushton 2002: 228). Before applying these move-
ments to the affective extremes on view in Korean horror films, it will be useful
first to delineate the Deleuzian pairing of reflective and intensive.
Although deployed at various junctures in Deleuze’s first cinema book (The
Movement-Image), these terms and their relationship to faciality are perhaps
most easily explained by drawing attention to a short passage in his second
cinema book (The Time-Image). In a section devoted to the sensory-motor
situations and schemes of silent-era film comedy, the French philosopher
contrasts the ‘impassive, reflective face’ of Buster Keaton and the ‘intense and
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 120 d avi d s co t t d if f r i e nt

variable face’ of Charlie Chaplin (1989: 64). Anyone familiar with these two
slapstick performers will understand the vast difference between Keaton’s
trademark style as a deadpan, poker-faced modernist and Chaplin’s less coolly
detached comic persona. Unlike Chaplin’s intensive face, which bursts at its
seams and expands outward ‘into the external world’, Keaton’s visage col-
lapses in on itself, directing expressivity inward, ‘toward the interior of the
body’ (Rushton 2002: 229). Not coincidentally, the words used by the film
critic Andrew Sarris to differentiate Keaton and Chaplin’s comic tendencies
– centripetal and centrifugal, respectively – amplify the rhetoric of extremes
attending critical explorations of their facialised performances, suggesting
that one face (Keaton’s) seeks the centre in a reflective manner, while the
other face (Chaplin’s) flees it in an often exaggerated, intense way (Sarris
1996: 62).
While the reflective face is ‘undynamic and unexciting’ when compared
to the intensive face, as a kind of smooth, minimally striated surface it nev-
ertheless ‘retains the mystery and intrigue of the other and the insolubility of
the infinite’ (Rushton 2002: 229), and thus draws us in rather than pushes us
out into the world and its attendant shocks. The intensive face, according to
Deleuze, may lack the mystery, intrigue and permanency of the other, but it
pulsates with a physiognomic energy that results from the interplay, or micro-
movements, of its many parts. Those various independent parts – the arched
eyebrow, the pursed lips, the wrinkled brow and so on – contribute to the
intensity of an expression that is ‘transitory in nature’ and part of a series. It
is the serial aspect of the intensive face, its composition of segmental features
whose successive enchainment (one after the other) ‘opens up the possibilities
of expansion into and connection with the world’, that distinguishes it from
the reflective face, which ‘contains the possibility of the world’s folding in on
itself’ (Rushton 2002: 230). To return to Keaton and Chaplin, if the former’s
face inspires one to ask ‘What is he thinking?’, then the latter’s face is more
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

likely to generate the following questions: ‘What is bothering him? What is the
matter? What does he sense or feel?’ (Deleuze 1986: 88).
These two movements, one centripetal and the other centrifugal, lend
structure to many of the horror films produced in South Korea over the past
two decades. One film in particular, The Red Shoes (Boonhongsin, 2005), is
notable for the way in which it metatextually renders as a representation those
polarities while foregrounding the partially hidden face as a site of herme-
neutic significance. Written and directed by Kim Yong-gyoon, and released on
DVD in the UK and North America as part of Tartan’s ‘Asia Extreme’ series
of home video titles, the film concerns a female optician named Seon-jae, who
discovers that her husband is having an affair with a woman who wears blue
shoes (stolen from the female protagonist’s impressively large collection of
pumps and sandals). Rather than try to work things out with her philandering
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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 121

husband or seek advice from a marriage counsellor, Seon-jae and her young
daughter, Tae-soo, move out of their comfortable middle-class home in the
heart of Seoul and take up residence in a small, ramshackle apartment across
from Gokseong Station. Disgusted and heartbroken, she redirects her energies
toward her career, hiring a male interior designer named In-cheol to remodel
her eye clinic. After finding a stunning pair of discarded pink shoes on the
underground, she becomes obsessed with the footwear, refusing to let even her
daughter try them on. The strangely enchanted shoes exert a sinister power
over the female protagonist, who, throughout much of the story, remains
unaware of their earlier ‘life’ on the feet of a beautiful ballerina during the final
years of the Japanese occupation period (1910–45).
Flashbacks reveal that Oki, the colonial-era dancer, was envied by a female
rival named Keiko, who was vying for the attention of Oki’s male partner and
lusting after the titular footwear. After Oki stumbles upon her male partner
making love to Keiko (in a scene that establishes a past–present parallel with
Seon-jae’s story, which likewise hinges on an act of marital infidelity), the
Japanese woman murders the ballerina, dumping her body into a freshly dug
grave, chopping her legs off, and finally claiming the mud-caked shoes as her
own. The final portion of the flashback reveals that Oki ultimately exacted her
revenge from beyond the grave, haunting the couple’s wedding and killing
them both in a comically absurd scene that recalls Hans Christian Andersen’s
1845 fairy tale ‘The Red Shoes’, which likewise concerns a girl who is forced
to dance against her will. Back in the present, Seon-jae is revealed to be the
reincarnation of Oki, who will stop at nothing to prevent other women from
wearing her shoes. Sprinkled throughout the second half of the film are
other scenes establishing the familial stakes involved in Seon-jae’s literal and
figurative ‘possession’ of / by that fetishised object, one of the many props
highlighted in the titles of contemporary Korean horror films (including Ahn
Byung-ki’s Phone [Pon, 2002], Won Sin-yeon’s The Wig [Gabal, 2005] and Lee
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Woo-cheol’s Cello [Chello: hongmiju ilga salinsageon, 2005]).

Several of these shock-filled moments in The Red Shoes bring forth Oki’s
spirit, a ghostly presence whose face is obscured by long black hair. As Hyun-
suk Seo states in his examination of the genre, ‘Most Korean horror films rely
heavily on one dominant supernatural prototype: the virgin ghost, or cheonyeo-
gwisin’ (2009: 166). Indeed, the gwisin is a defining feature of Korean horror,
visible in such films as Park Ki-hyung’s Acacia (Akasia, 2003), Ahn Sang-
hoon’s Arang (2006) and Ahn Byung-ki’s Apartment (APT, 2006), among many
others. Often, the female ghost is the spectral emanation of someone who is
unable to cross over to the ‘other side’ as a result of some past injustice, which
has contributed to a deep feeling of resentment or sorrow, and which leads to
present-day hauntings and violent acts of vengeance. In films such as Phone,
The Wig and The Red Shoes, the titular object ‘embodies the deceased damsel’s
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 122 d avi d s co t t d if f r i e nt

memories of distress and affects the living, whom she seeks her revenge upon’
(Seo 2009: 166). According to Seo, as a film dealing with ‘memory, desire, loss,
and repetition’, The Red Shoes is especially ripe for Lacanian (and Žižekian)
unpacking, owing in part to the fetishistic anxiety surrounding the titular
object, an ‘impossible object’ evoked in ‘ghostly signs’ that reveals a fundamen-
tal lack at the heart of the film’s system of signification. Drawing attention to
the gap separating the film’s original Korean-language title Boonhongsin (The
Pink Shoes) and its English-language title (which establishes an intertextual link
between it and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 ballet film The
Red Shoes, as well as Andersen’s Danish fairy tale written a century earlier), Seo
employs psychoanalytic theory to parse through the various ‘veiling’ operations
of the text, which ‘simultaneously recalls and resists the memory associated with
the “original” signifiers’ (2009: 164). Although he stresses that ‘it is the thing-
ness of the thing itself, both material and symbolic, not some illusory images of
the ghost / owner, that enthralls the spectators inside and outside the screen,’
I believe that it is the partially veiled face of the gwisin that most dynamically
foregrounds the affective allure of Korean horror films, particularly those that
oscillate between tonal registers and provide fleeting approximations of the
Lacanian Real through the symbolic interplay of contrasting forms.
The visual contrast between pale flesh and the black shock of hair that covers
it is of particular interest. In a way, the female ghost’s hair acts as a mask, meta-
phorically preventing the spectator from fully accessing the traumatic past
that haunts the gwisin, just as she haunts the present-day protagonists. It spills
down from the top of the figure and reaches toward the floor, only occasionally
parting to reveal a menacing eye, which is often fixed on us, thanks to the cam-
era’s adoption of first-person perspective (the point of view of someone being
threatened by the vengeful spirit) and the filmmaker’s willingness to ‘break
the fourth wall’. In one respect (and perhaps unexpectedly), this iconographic
figure recalls the villains in American and British slasher films, many of whom
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hide their physical disfigurements behind actual masks. As Joanne Cantor and
Mary Beth Oliver point out, ‘most killers evidence some physical abnormality
or distortion that sets them apart from the characters they victimize’ (2004:
227). For example, in Tower of Evil (Jim O’Connolly, UK, 1972), the mutant
psychopath responsible for a series of bizarre murders on Snape Island (off the
coast of England) has a deformed face. Dr Christian Storm (Michael Gough),
the mad scientist who ‘lobotomizes hippies and turns them into robot slaves’
in Horror Hospital (Antony Balch, UK, 1973), is likewise disfigured (Sipos
2010: 202). As for their own examples, Cantor and Oliver cite the killer in
The Burning (Tony Maylam, US, 1981), whose face ‘is scorched and scarred
beyond recognition’, as well as Michael Myers from the Halloween series,
Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th series, and Leatherface from the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre series. Spectators might be compelled and repelled by such
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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 123

figures, desiring to see what lies behind the mask even as they wish to flee the
fear that such monsters bring to the screen. Such seemingly contradictory
impulses are fundamental to the affective allure of the genre, which is just as
likely to produce fits of giggles as it is to induce fright. Perhaps the long-haired
female spirit can be understood as the spectral projection of those duelling
tendencies. But a more apt response to her recurrent role as an emblem of the
once-buried, now eruptive past would acknowledge filmmakers’ tendency to
encode this figure as a fetishised thing – not a person – that is there but not there,
facially present yet shrouded in irreducible mystery.
As if to italicise the significance of expressive physiognomy found in South
Korea’s contemporary cultural productions, the opening scene in director Ahn
Byung-ki’s Bunshinsaba (2004) ends with a freeze-frame close-up of a young
girl’s face as she screams, having just seen the ghostly visage of a long-haired
female spirit. Holding on the image in such a way, the filmmaker invites the
audience to read their own potentially fluid reactions to the onscreen threat in
the fixed facial features of the human character. Being a close-up, the image
magnifies the ‘shapes, textures and muscular movements’ of the face, which,
according to Anna Powell, ‘suspends individuation and attains a transpersonal
quality’, becoming de-familiarised in the process (2005: 146). Similarly, in being
frozen, the primal scream in that first scene of Bunshinsaba is transhistorical, sus-
pending time and reminding one of the blurred line between past and present.
Besides the freeze-frame, other cinematographic devices – from the shock
cut to the zoom shot – can be harnessed so as to intensify the spectatorial
experience, injecting jolts and perhaps even engendering smirks of recogni-
tion among viewers who are conversant with the genre’s stylistic conventions
or clichés. For example, Arang includes a number of quick zoom-in shots,
thrusting us into close proximity to the facial features – the eerie orifices – of
both undead and living characters. As John Kenneth Muir states in his study
of American horror films of the 1970s, ‘A quick zoom-in on somebody’s face
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can generate a scare or a laugh, if done just right’ (2007: 48). But it can also
isolate features of a reflective or intensive face, zeroing in on the eye or mouth
in ways that either push us away (repelling the spectator through its confron-
tational gaze) or draw us in (swallowing the spectator in its immersive fiction).
This is true of Roman Polanski’s psychological thriller Repulsion (UK, 1965),
which, despite its title, pulls the spectator into the eye of Carole in the final
seconds, treating this young, distracted and visibly disturbed subject of the
camera’s gravitational gaze as a representation within a representation (that is,
as the subject of another camera’s comparatively impassive gaze, rendered as a
black-and-white photographic still). It is also true of Kim Yong-gyoon’s The
Red Shoes, which, through zoom shots, shock cuts and other cinematographic
devices, simultaneously attracts and repels the viewer in ways that replicate the
fluctuating place and paradoxical allure of the deadly gwisin figure.
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 124 d avi d s co t t d if f r i e nt

Significantly, near the midpoint of the film, director Kim inserts images
of another long-haired figure – visual representations, painted on the wall of
In-cheol’s studio – which illustrate the Deleuzian split between reflective and
intensive faciality. The first image is ostensibly that of the interior designer’s
former girlfriend (as he explains to Seon-jae in the minutes leading up to their
lovemaking). It shows, from the neck up, her pale features set against black
holes for eyes. The face is stoic, icy and utterly lacking in the kind of expres-
sive details found in the second image, which follows the first by way of a
lap-dissolve. This second painting is a non-diegetic insert shot, as it is not to
be found in the young man’s studio. The contrast between the two images is
explicit, with the second wall-painting featuring a Medusa-like witch whose
fangs (visible through her open, blood-smeared mouth), terrifying eyes, flared
nostrils and snake-coiled mane collectively produce the kind of frisson associ-
ated with horror while putting into a serial chain those autonomous parts that
partially comprise the iconography of the genre. If the face in the first image
eludes our grasp, inviting us into the hidden mysteries behind the frozen
visage of the woman even as it keeps us at bay, then the busier, more intense
face of the second image all but overloads the visual plane, as well as our
propensity to become ‘reflective’ ourselves.
As with the example from Oldboy cited at the beginning of this chapter, the
affective extremes on view in this brief passage from The Red Shoes reflect in
miniature the narrative’s seemingly ‘schizophrenic’ tonal shifts, an oscillatory
type of patterning based on polarities. Significantly, several reviewers of the
film dismissed the work on the basis of its failure to follow through on the
narrative promises made throughout its first half. As one reviewer states, ‘The
success of the first half heightens the disappointment as The Red Shoes takes
a quick dive into overused Asian horror conventions’ (Pearce 2006). Other
commentators have drawn attention to the sophisticated visual polish and
narrative complexity of the film’s early scenes, which eventually give way to a
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disproportionate number of shock-filled moments and generic clichés, includ-

ing direct and indirect allusions to American horror films such as Carrie (Brian
De Palma, 1976) and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). However, as a mise-
en-abyme gesturing toward the formal and structural properties of the film as a
whole, this brief interlude showing a reflective face first and an intensive face
second functions metatextually as a representation within a representation and
furthermore comments on the main character’s split identity.
Indeed, at first Seon-jae embodies, in her physical refinement and impec-
cable taste in shoes, the connotative ideals associated with her initially chaste,
platonic relationship with In-cheol, the interior designer who eventually turns
against this tragic victim-turned-rampaging monster and calls her a lustful,
‘oversexed bitch’. Significantly, In-cheol’s harsh indictment arrives several
scenes after her own remark to him, when she states, ‘Now I see your face
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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 125

more clearly. My eyes have gotten better.’ Presented in this way, the two dia-
metrically opposed sides of her personality are an extension of this film’s own
bipolar ‘horrality’, which intensifies once she is possessed by Oki and forced to
commit murders of which she has no memory. That is, the aggressive woman’s
psychotic streak peaks when juxtaposed against her softer side, her desire to
protect her daughter maternally only seconds after threatening her. Such
extremes in behaviour are further complemented by the quicksilver shifts in
comportment exhibited by another character: a much older, hunchbacked
housemaid who resides near Gokseong Station and who, decades earlier, wit-
nessed Keiko’s murder of Oki from afar. When Seon-jae confronts her about
the meaning and power of the pink shoes, the old woman breaks into uproari-
ous laughter, a smattering of rice on her lips and chin. Seconds later, she
informs Seon-jae that she ‘shouldn’t have worn something that pretty without
asking’ and suddenly begins to cry, telling the younger woman to return the
shoes lest she die. Another, even bigger fit of laughter erupts from her mouth
a minute later, emphasising once again the sharp emotional turns made in this
narrative of literal and figurative extremes.
The Red Shoes is certainly not unique in terms of foregrounding emotional
volatility in this way. Horror films in general tend to crystallise such moments,
providing opportunities for audiences to see themselves and their own seem-
ingly contradictory reactions in the diegetic interplay of affective extremes.2
These outwardly dissimilar, yet equally intensive reactions on the character’s
part are indicative of the fluidity with which emotional states shift, moment
to moment, within and in response to horror films. Kim Tae-gyeong’s Ghost
(Ryeong, aka Dead Friend, 2004) features several such occurrences, as, for
example, when the female protagonist, Ji-won, is sitting with her boyfriend in
a cinema, about to watch a film. At first she appears bored, a look of dissatisfac-
tion on her face. Then Ji-won turns her head, casting her gaze to the side of the
auditorium and exhibiting a look of concern. When she returns her gaze to the
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screen, her face displays astonishment, and she begins breathing quickly and
loudly upon seeing a long-haired woman situated in front of her. This broad
range of emotional responses had been anticipated by an earlier scene set inside
a photo-developing darkroom, in which Ji-won’s face goes from being stoic,
distracted and unfocused to being content, satisfied and interested in what she
is doing to being curious and a bit surprised at what the photograph is revealing
to being terrified at the final result. The screen blacks out, but a cigarette lighter
provides illumination for her visibly disturbed face, shown in extreme close-up.
Similarly, in the aforementioned horror film Cello, the main character, a
musician named Mi-joo, is shown stroking the face of her sleeping daugh-
ter, Yoon-jin. Her eyes closed, the girl is calm. Her face is reflective and her
thoughts appear to be tucked away inside an interior dreamscape. Suddenly,
Yoon-jin’s eyes open, her ‘sweetness’ giving way to a terrifying apparition,
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 126 d avi d s co t t d if f r i e nt

seamlessly superimposed atop the girl’s face and bathed in yellow-green light.
The juxtaposition of extremes here recalls the oscillation between bitter and
sweet in the film’s opening sequence, which intercuts shocking close-ups of
a dying woman’s bloody face and images of Mi-joo playing the melodic tune
to ‘Ave Maria’ on the titular instrument – a sequence that not only hints at
the main character’s backstory but also announces the film’s spatiotemporal
elasticity, suggested by the incompatibility of image and sound. The shock of
seeing her daughter’s altered face – the vehicle through which a dead woman,
a former friend of Mi-joo named Tae-yeon, is able to confront the protagonist
‘head on’ – registers in the reverse-angle shot of Mi-joo’s visage. The woman’s
look of dismay, which is perhaps not unlike the viewer’s own shocked expres-
sion at that moment, anticipates the final image of the film, which culminates
with Tae-yeon’s fingers crawling spider-like up her neck and cheek. If the first
reaction shot conveys the shock of suddenly witnessing a facialised spirit from
beyond the grave, forcing its way into the present, the last image relays a sense
of slow, impending dread, which, directed toward the future, stretches beyond
the terminal point of the narrative (and its unresolved ending) and could be
said to extend into the audience’s ‘real’ world.
Many horror films have ended with the main character or villain facing
the camera in such a way, frontally confronting the very apparatus or ‘vision
machine’ responsible for his or her physical and / or psychological undoing.
Although ‘the face full-on is rare in mainstream cinema’, as Anna Powell
remarks in her own Deleuzian study of horror film (Powell 2005: 146), several
examples to the contrary suggest that this genre is particularly inclined to
break the fourth wall in a narrative’s closing minutes, at the point where the
border between fantasy and reality, the diegetic universe and the spectator’s
extradiegetic world, begins to dissolve.3 Few motion pictures have managed to
do this as evocatively as Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (Salineui chooeok,
2003), a film whose story is based on an actual series of unsolved murders
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

that took place in the provincial town of Hwaseong between 1986 and 1991 –
crimes that were well known among many Korean audience members before
and after the film’s theatrical release.

co nc l usi o n
I wish to conclude this chapter by drawing attention to the final shot in
Memories of Murder, which suggests the possibility of a third face, one that is
neither absolutely reflective nor wholly intensive but rather is a combination
of the two. The final scene in Memories of Murder circles back to the opening
crime scene, located near an irrigation tunnel in the countryside, where
Detective Pak (played by Song Gang-ho) had found the first victim’s body.
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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 127

Now a small-business owner, the former policeman returns to the scene of the
unsolved crime and encounters a schoolgirl, who tells him that another man,
presumably the unapprehended murderer, recently came to check the tunnel.
When asked to describe the man’s face, the girl hesitates, but soon divulges
to the ex-detective-turned-businessman that it was just a familiar, ‘ordinary’
face. Pak then turns his face to the side, ninety degrees, and casts his gaze
momentarily toward the surrounding field. He then abruptly turns it again
until he is gazing directly into the camera (and at the audience), illustrating
in the process precisely the kind of imprecise, general face alluded to in the
young eyewitness’s account. This close-up of a ‘normal-looking’ face, one that
belongs to neither a victim nor a victimiser (that is, a monster / murderer /
gwisin, according to the conventions of horror films and thrillers), is chilling
in its everydayness, further illustrating Robert Cagle’s argument that the line
between good and evil, self and other, dissolves in Korean extreme cinema,
leaving spectators in a quandary about their own complicity or interest in real-
life horrors (2009: 132). As such, it invites the audience to fill in the blanks
and project their own picture of what an anonymous serial killer (who escaped
justice after raping and murdering at least ten women) might look like.
What makes this shot so uncomfortable and, indeed, uncanny is that the little
girl has just described the monster’s face as being ordinary and that the audience
is now confronted with a close-up of the law enforcement officer who was in
charge of the case, not the elusive, unknown and unseen criminal who escaped
justice. Despite the ostensibly reflective qualities of actor Song Gang-ho’s
expressionless, unamplified face (evincing none of the iconographic trappings of
the horror genre), this close-up is implicitly intensive as it breaks the fourth wall
and self-consciously intrudes upon the spectatorial space of present-day audi-
ences, who are thrust back into the world, back into the prolonged (unresolved)
past. His is an in-between face, caught not only between Deleuzian extremes
but also between the positively charged and negatively charged features of Dae-
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su’s reaction to hearing ‘I love you’ (from his own daughter) in the final seconds
of Oldboy. Reflectively intensive, intensively reflective, the final close-up in
Memories of Murder shows us the true face of everyday horror. A slightly arched
eyebrow, a tremor of translucent emotion expressed as a yet-to-be-shed tear.
These are the individual parts of Pak’s face that subtly convey, in concert with
one another, the persistence with which South Korea’s past continues to haunt
onscreen horrors, both real and imagined.

no t e s
1. This idea is illustrated in director Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).
An adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same title, the film features
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 128 d avi d s co t t d if f r i e nt

a showy, gesticulatory performance by Jack Nicholson, who stars as a

struggling writer named Jack Torrance. Not long after Jack takes his wife
Wendy and son Danny to the empty Overlook Hotel, where he plans to
live and work peacefully throughout the winter season, a series of super-
natural occurrences interrupts his writing and wreaks havoc with his mar-
riage. Throughout the second half of the film, Jack acts in an increasingly
irrational manner, lashing out at Wendy and behaving as if he is possessed
by a malevolent spirit from the establishment’s dark past. The Shining
culminates with a night-time chase through the snow-packed hedge maze
outside the hotel. Carrying an axe, Jack attempts to hunt down his son,
who manages to cover his tracks and misdirect his pursuer. Not long after
Danny and his mother escape into the night, dawn breaks. Light floods
in, illuminating a most horrific scene. It is ‘horrific’ not because the sight
of Jack frozen to death in the hedge maze is ‘scary’ or ‘terrifying’. Rather,
there is something simultaneously comical and disconcerting about that
penultimate shot in the film, which shows a medium close-up of a once-
menacing, now ridiculous-looking character mugging one last time for the
camera, his eyes pointed heavenward and his chin protruding to reveal a
toothy under-bite between frostbitten lips.
2. For example, a woman’s scream gives way to laughter in the Spanish
horror film La Marca del Hombre-lobo (The Mark of the Wolfman, Enrique
López Eguiluz, 1968). Given the more menacing English-language title
Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror for its stateside release in the early 1970s, this
film features an early scene in which an ill-fated gypsy woman (Rossana
Yanni) opens a wine cabinet, draped in cobwebs, only to discover a golden
skull beside the dusty bottles. She shrieks in terror the second that she sees
the object, but begins chuckling and smiling broadly upon realising that it
is simply a candleholder in the shape of a skull.
3. Indeed, instances of this type of rhetorical flourish are plentiful, from
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Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (US, 1960) to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,

the final image of which is a Repulsion-inspired dolly-in and slow fade to
a framed black-and-white photo of Jack Torrance, or rather his earlier
incarnation from the 1920s, who – smiling, with face directed to the camera
– haunts the film (and the viewer) from beyond the grave.

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 t h e f ac e (s ) o f k o r e a n h o r r o r f i l m 129

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Rushton, Richard (2002), ‘What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces’,
Cultural Critique, 51, pp. 219–37.
Sarris, Andrew (1996), The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–
1968, New York: Da Capo.
Seo, Hyun-suk (2009), ‘That Unobscure Object of Desire and Horror: On
Some Uncanny Things in Recent Korean Horror Films’, in J. Choi and
M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries
in Asian Cinema, Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
pp. 163–78.
Shin, Chi-Yun (2009), ‘The Art of Branding: Tartan “Asia Extreme” Films’,
in J. Choi and M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing
Boundaries in Asian Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
pp. 85–100.
Sipos, Thomas M. (2010), Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language
of Fear, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
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 c h apter 9

Death Bell and high-school horror

Chi-Yun Shin

Released in the summer of 2008, the high-school horror film Death Bell (Gosa,
Yoon Hong-seung) did tremendous business at the South Korean box office.
Made by a former music video director, the film follows an elite group of stu-
dents, specially selected to stay behind during the school holiday. However, as
the first special class gets under way, the almost empty school is terrorised; it
is cut off from the outside world and the students are kidnapped and tortured
to death one by one in order of their examination rankings. At the same time,
a mysterious voice on the school’s public address system demands that the
students solve ‘exam questions’ to save the lives of their kidnapped classmates.
The students and teachers watch the gruesome ways in which each of the
kidnapped students is killed via the school audiovisual system. As two of the
teachers desperately try to protect the students and find the culprit, it becomes
apparent that the situation is connected to the death two years earlier of a
former classmate.
Selling over 1.6 million tickets nationwide with a modest production budget
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of 1.3 billion won (approximately $1 million, well below the budget of most
Korean films), Death Bell became the surprise, runaway success of the season
despite the almost universally negative reviews in the Korean press. For
instance, film scholar and critic Kyu Hyun Kim wrote that ‘quite a few viewers
have already pointed out just how unconvincing the flick’s central premise is’
(2008), while for writer Kim Chong-il, the only merit of the film was its short
running time of 85 minutes, within which events unfolded so rapidly that the
audience had no time to get bored (2008). Rather bewildered by its commer-
cial success, local critics blamed its popularity on the fact that it was the only
horror title released that summer – the traditional season for horror films in
Korea. Indeed, film producers had stayed away from horror films after a series
of box-office failures in the summer of 2007, including titles such as The Evil
Twin (Jeonseol-eui gohyang, Kim Ji-hwan), Muoi: Legend of a Portrait (Meui,
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 132 ch i-yun s h in

Kim Tae-gyeong), Someone Behind You (Doo saramida, Oh Gi-hwan, also

known as Voices) and The Cut (Haeboohakgyosil, Son Tae-woong, also known
as Cadaver).1
Some attributed Death Bell’s success to strategic casting, which included
Lee Beom-soo, who had just appeared in On Air (SBS TV) – one of the most
successful television drama series of the year, Kim Beom, one of the country’s
most popular young heartthrobs, and singer Nam Gyu-ri from the successful
girl group SeeYa. There was also a relentless marketing and promotional cam-
paign that had the very buzz-worthy members of the cast (which also included
popular television actress Yoon Jeong-hee as the strict English teacher Ms
Choi) appearing constantly on television entertainment programmes. In fact,
the lesson that Death Bell taught the South Korean film industry was that
the right combination of careful timing, a good-looking cast and a smart PR
machine could make a film commercially viable, regardless of its ‘quality’.
More importantly, Death Bell had a clear target audience – teenagers. And
the film did reach its (normally elusive) target, under-18 viewers reportedly
comprising half of its audience at the weekends (Kang 2008). The film’s teen
appeal is indeed what made it a box-office success, and what the film specifi-
cally offers to teen audiences is not just a school setting and adolescent cast
/ characters they can identify with, but teen-friendly music video aesthetics
– as mentioned earlier, it is the debut feature of a music video director – and
a ‘novel’ means of committing murder and torture (the film’s publicity mate-
rial describes itself as ‘Saw meets Battle Royale’). What also struck a chord
with adolescent South Korean audiences was the way that the film revealed
an underlying anxiety about the high-pressure education system in Korea,
and the extent to which the system was capable of leading to corrosion and
ultimately explosion. Thus, while this chapter draws upon Carol Clover and
Barbara Creed’s writing on horror film, it also explores Death Bell in a more
nuanced social and cultural context in order to articulate the particular nature
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

of the film’s teen appeal for its domestic market.

ni g ht m a r es a n d a b je c t i o n
Death Bell opens with Ina, the young female protagonist, having a nightmare
in which she wears a white nightdress and wanders amongst rows of desks and
chairs in the middle of ‘nowhere’. Some of the desks are on fire, the crackling
sound of which creates the eerie atmosphere of a deserted battleground. The
‘classroom’, however, is not empty. Sitting in the middle row with an exam
paper is the ghost of Ina’s former best friend Chi-won, who has been dead
for two years. There are also zombie / witch girls in school uniform roaming
around, all long-haired teenage girls, even though the school Ina goes to is
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 death bell and high-school horror 133

co-educational with male and female pupils. Some of the monsters are under-
ground, and one suddenly jumps through a glass pane on the ground just as Ina
wipes the dirt away on it to see through. Ina is, in effect, looking into a mirror,
and what emerges is a grotesque figure – the monstrous ‘other’ – which grabs
Ina’s ankle. If the monsters are the other, dark side of Ina, however, if indeed
she was looking into the mirror, it is then only fitting that the monstrous
figures take female form. As Clover puts it in her study of American horror
film, ‘attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares’
(1992: 12). Ina is quickly surrounded by undead creatures, intercut with close-
up shots of a bloodstained exam paper; at the same time, Chi-won’s ghost sits
at a desk and watches Ina with a faint smile. Chi-won is able to switch from a
ghostly figure lacking pupils in her eyes, to a human form and then back again
to a ghostly figure. Thus, Ina might be able to outrun the zombies, but when
facing Chi-won’s smiling face she slows down, almost giving up. There is
nothing left that she can do. In the following close-up shot, Ina slowly turns
around to face the camera with an almost pleading look of foreboding. The
opening sequence is, then, filled with this sense of foreboding, including, as
it does, the prophetic appearance of Chi-won, whose murder turns out to be
the cause of the ensuing horror, and the bloodstained, burning exam paper,
which functions as a visualisation of the exam-centred school system, both of
which become the tools of terror unleashed on the elite students of Chang-In
Foreign Language High School. This is also evident in the film’s Korean title:
Gosa literally means examination, but a horror element is added, the second
syllable ‘sa’ spelled as a Chinese word meaning ‘death’, which sounds the same
(a Korean pun).
There is a graphic image of Ina’s menstruation immediately following the
nightmare sequence, a highly symbolic moment that recalls Carrie (Brian De
Palma, US, 1976) and the more recent Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, Canada,
2000), in which adolescent girls turn ‘monstrous’ upon their entrance into
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womanhood, their entry indicated by the onset of menstruation. Ina’s bleed-

ing is explicitly linked to the transformation that her body has gone through
after her encounter with the ghostly Chi-won. Interestingly, Ina describes her
sudden bleeding (which was clearly not expected, although not her first expe-
rience) as an ‘attack’ or ‘invasion’ of ‘the reds’.2 Soon after the ‘invasion’, Ina
does assume a rather aggressive attitude, getting into a dispute with a pompous
classmate over a mobile phone and confronting ‘the rich PTA kids’ who stick
together. Further evidence of Ina’s transformation follows, in the scene after
the nightmare but prior to the special class. The students are checking their
rankings, displayed on TV monitors in the crowded school corridor, after the
mid-term exam. As one of Ina’s male classmates, Beom, looks at a monitor, the
name of the top-ranking student – Min Hye-young – switches to Kim Chi-
won. Spooked by this, he looks around and sees the ghostly vision of Chi-won
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 134 ch i-yun s h in

just behind him, and then on Ina’s face. He lunges wildly at Ina and begins to
strangle her; as he is pulled away and taken into the ambulance, he screams,
‘you are all going to get killed. You’re all dead!’ At the end of the narrative we
learn that Beom witnessed the murder of Chi-won but did not do anything to
stop it; nor did he report it to the authorities in compliance with the parents,
who bribed Mr Hwang. Clearly, he suffers for it, haunted by Chi-won’s ghost,
but his guilt also provides him with the power of prophecy.
Ina’s transformation (and Chi-won’s transgression) is also confirmed in the
final images of Ina in the film. The scene starts with an out-of-focus shot of
the empty school corridor, but as Ina walks towards the camera, everything
comes into focus as if to proclaim that things are clearer now. As Ina looks up
(in the same spot where she was attacked at the beginning of the film), it cuts
to a medium close-up shot of the TV monitor that displays the rankings of
the final-term exam: Ina has taken first place. In a shot very similar to the end
of her nightmare, Ina then slowly turns around to face the camera, and as the
camera closes in on her, her image switches to that of Chi-won, who smiles
contentedly. It switches back to an unsmiling Ina, and the ‘invasion’ of the
supernatural alluded to at the beginning of the film is confirmed in the film’s
conclusion.
The ghost of Chi-won represented in Ina’s nightmare should, then, not be
seen as a benign spirit that appears in the dream to warn her friend, but as an
avenging monstrous-feminine – the phrase Barbara Creed uses to ‘emphasise
the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity’ (1993: 3),
the spirit who wants to come back to life through Ina’s body. In this regard,
Chi-won’s ghost can be viewed as the wonhon, the wronged female who
returns to seek justice – even if, in this case, it is actually Chi-won’s parents
who enact the revenge. What is peculiar about her parents, however, is that
her father is a purposefully ‘normal’ security guard but her mother appears
ghostly and possessed, with a disfigured face, dishevelled long hair and the
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white dress resembling traditional funeral costume (thus appropriate for the
wonhon). As such, although her study of the monstrous-feminine is in rela-
tion to (mainly) American horror films, Barbara Creed’s observation that
‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to
her mothering and reproductive functions’ has some truth in Death Bell too
(Creed 1993: 7).
Connections drawn in the film between menstrual blood and the mon-
strous-feminine can be related to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, where
she argues that the body extricates itself from its wastes, including shit, sweat,
blood and pus, so that it can continue to exist. She argues that menstrual blood
‘stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual)’,
that it is one of the two ‘polluting objects’ (the other type is excremental,
which threatens identity from the outside) and relates specifically to women
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 death bell and high-school horror 135

(1982: 71). Menstruation and motherhood are central to the construction of

the monstrous-feminine in Death Bell, because they are directly linked to the
female reproductive system: that which must first produce something abomina-
ble before it can be expelled. Creed applies Kristeva’s theories to her study of
horror film, where she points out ‘the association between woman’s blood and
the supernatural’ (Creed 1993: 74), where menstruation is something powerful
and mysterious, often symbolic of women’s affinity with nature and the Devil.
Ina wakes up from her nightmare drenched in sweat (another form of bodily
waste), and finds her unexpected period an inconvenient annoyance, especially
on the last day of their mid-term exams. Although she does not realise this at
the time, her period allows her to be understood as abject and associated with
the supernatural. In Kristeva’s view, ‘abjection is immoral, sinister, scheming
and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles . . . a debtor who sells
you up, a friend who stabs you’ (1982: 4). Indeed, the ghost of Chi-won is Ina’s
former best friend who symbolically stabs Ina to cross the ‘border’ from the
supernatural to reality. And Ina’s menstrual blood – an image of abjection –
becomes the visual manifestation of this transgression.

r ev e ng e a nd o t h e r p l e a sur e s
Bearing in mind this transgression, it seems fitting that it is Ina who first links
the horrific killings to the death of Chi-won. She realises that the answer to the
third exam question (a mobile phone cryptogram puzzle) is: ‘Remember the
auditorium on a warm, spring day,’ the place and time of Chi-won’s death.
Ina’s ‘remembering’ of Chi-won leads to the first flashback sequence, which
reveals that Chi-won studied obsessively and independently, without help
from private tutors or institutions, in order to maintain her top ranking. The
flashback also shows the intimate relationship Ina and Chi-won shared, in
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

which they confided in each other, including the fact that Chi-won desperately
needed to keep her ranking and obtain the scholarship as her father’s business
was in trouble. When her ranking suddenly went down to sixth place, the
distraught Chi-won was found dead in the auditorium. The following scene
returns to the school cafeteria, where all the surviving students and teach-
ers are resting, and Ina’s recollection allows the other students to speculate
that Chi-won’s ghost might be posing the questions. Despite Mr Hwang’s
rational response, that there is no such thing as ghosts, Ina is convinced that
the unfolding events are something to do with Chi-won, and further questions
and answers then point to Chi-won’s death. As the obligatory final revela-
tory flashback sequences reveal – they appropriately take place at the funeral
of the victims the next day – Chi-won was murdered because she had found
out about the illicit behaviour of Mr Hwang, the school’s most popular and
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 136 ch i-yun s h in

highly regarded teacher, who was providing exam questions to paying parents
(the members of the parent–teacher association). Determined to retrieve her
top ranking and chance of a scholarship, Chi-won approached Mr Hwang
and threatened to reveal his wrongdoings unless she was reinstated as the top
student, but Mr Hwang responded by strangling her to death and presenting
her body as suicide by overdose.
What is most apparent about Mr Hwang’s strangulation of Chi-won is the
way that the murder scene is framed in a way that implies rape. Chi-won is
pressed down on the ground, her skirt pushed up as she struggles with Mr
Hwang, who stands on a lower level, leaning forward, his crotch positioned
between her legs. The last section of the sequence is shot from behind Mr
Hwang (just as the footage – possibly recorded on Chi-won’s mobile phone –
is shown by Chi-won’s father to the auditorium full of mourning family and
friends), and the only part of Chi-won shown is her bare legs going limp. In
her work on rape-revenge cinema, Clover argues that ‘the implication of rape
makes the deed all the more avengeable’ (1992: 137), and the parents’ revenge
in Death Bell is indeed executed with force. It is fitting that Chi-won’s father
uses a knife (and then an axe) to kill his daughter’s murderer. Grabbing – in
fact, almost embracing Mr Hwang – Chi-won’s father stabs him, a penetrating
action which takes place in the school auditorium where his daughter’s body
was found. The father is astride Mr Hwang who lies flat on the floor. He wields
an axe over Mr Hwang’s half-conscious body and is framed in low angle from
Mr Hwang’s point of view. His attack is considerably slowed down to depict
the intensity of his revenge, a moment analogous to what Clover describes
as the ‘otherwise gentle father’s rise to anger and his grisly revenge’ in many
rape-revenge films such as Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (USA, 1972),
a film in turn inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (Sweden, 1959)
(1992: 137). As his body is hacked with the axe he brandished himself but a
moment ago, Mr Hwang manages momentarily to stay the father’s hand, and
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says sorry, but his repentance is met with a final blow and he vomits blood. At
the same time as this attack is taking place, Ms Choi rescues the bound and
gagged Ina, and together they return to the auditorium to witness the final act
of revenge, where Chi-won is able to watch the death of her murderer through
Ina’s eyes.
Set in a highly competitive high-school system in which students are
pressurised to conform and compete, there is no doubt that Death Bell owes
a clear debt to the groundbreaking Whispering Corridors series, four instal-
ments of which were released before Death Bell. Foregrounding the school
as a haunting ground where success is measured only by exam results, Death
Bell recalls in particular the first Whispering Corridors (Yeogo gwedam, Park
Gi-hyeong, 1998), in which teachers actively encourage students to compete at
the expense of friendship, and Wishing Stairs (Yeowoo gyedan, Yoon Jae-yeon,
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 death bell and high-school horror 137

2003), which tells the story of two ballet dancers whose friendship turns to
fierce competition. In her study of the Korean horror cycle of the late 1990s
and early 2000s, Jinhee Choi observes that the ghost-revenge plot employed
in the Korean horror cinema of the 1960s and 1970s is motivated by the need
to protect kinship (often involving a dead mother protecting her child), but in
contemporary horror films such as the Whispering Corridors series it is ‘a threat
to friendship [that] causes the ghosts to exercise their supernatural powers’
(2009: 45). Although sharing the theme of strong female friendship with the
series, Death Bell takes a different turn, in which the ghost victim is not an
active avenger or protector. The act of vengeance is left entirely to her parents,
who kidnap one student after another and enact horrific revenge upon their
young bodies.
Until it finally reveals its revenge plot, Death Bell follows the familiar
formulation of the slasher film by having a string of teenage victims tortured
and killed in gruesome (and in some cases outright inventive) ways by the
mysterious killers. The scenes of mutilation and murder are shown in great
detail. When the second teenage victim Dong-hyeok is tortured, eight Chinese
letters (the answer to the second question) are ‘written’ on his body with a
sharp knife; he is then asphyxiated with dripping candle wax. The body of the
third victim, Jae-wook, is covered with bloody wounds carved in the shape of
numbers and letters, while razor blades are inserted into the body of the fourth
victim Soo-jin, who is then put in a washing machine. The teenage victims
chosen are not random targets; nor are they killed for sexual transgression or
promiscuity, but for taking a higher spot than Chi-won in the exam ranking.
In fact, what Chi-won wants – or at least what the film suggests that she wants
– is the top ranking, the only place she deserves to have in this life or after.
Indeed, the final image of Ina, which then switches to Chi-won smiling, is
when Ina has the number one ranking. In order for Chi-won / Ina to get to the
top, all those who indulged in foul play need to be killed in the order of their
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rankings: after all, the higher the ranking, the guiltier they are.
Ina survives. Although she is not the only survivor, to all intents and pur-
poses she is the ‘final girl’ of Death Bell. As with the final girl of the slasher
film, Ina is ‘presented from the outset as the main character’; and she is ‘the
one who first grasps, however dimly, the past and present danger, the one who
looks death in the face, and the one who survives the murderer’s last stab’
(Clover 1992: 39). She is intelligent and resourceful enough to grasp the link
between the past and present murders, provide clues to the questions posed
and figure out that the students are kidnapped in the order of exam ranking.
Also, although adored by one of her male classmates Hyeon, Ina pointedly
declines his attention, sharing the sexual reluctance of the final girl typified
by Laurie Strode in Halloween (John Carpenter, US, 1978). Even when she
accompanies Myeong-hyo to the club where Hyeon works as a DJ, she does it
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 138 ch i-yun s h in

to accompany her best friend rather than to attract male attention. The club
scene presents Ina as a ‘good’ student who can relax and have fun, even boldly
using an illicit fake ID provided by Hyeon. Above all, Ina is loyal to her friend
Myeong-hyo, constantly looking out for her, even when Myeong-hyo joins
the renegade group to save herself. And although Ina does not fight back or
overcome the killer, she is strong enough to survive but only in the shadow of
Chi-won’s ghost, a situation comparable to the final girl’s uncertain future, to
be forever haunted by recalling the gruesome events in which all her friends
were slaughtered. Death Bell deviates from conventional slasher films in its
final moments, though, as Chi-won’s face replaces Ina’s, the film appearing to
suggest that the final girl may in fact be the wonhon Chi-won.

co nc l usi o n
The end-credit sequence of Death Bell features a curious little insert that
can be described as a behind-the-scenes or a making-of-documentary of the
parents’ revenge act. Appearing at the side of the rolling credits, the scene
shows Chi-won’s mother and father having a snack in between their monstrous
acts. They are still in character and in their ‘costumes’, but they are momen-
tarily a husband and wife slurping instant noodles, and discussing the saltiness
of the food and what they are going to do next. Considering that this would
have occurred in the middle of their brutal attacks on the students (more
precisely, just before the mother takes Myeong-hyo from the canteen), their
calm and banal conversation seems ridiculous, even hilarious. Located soon
after the film’s emphatic climax, it also evokes a sense of irony; it functions as
a footnote to the events depicted, seemingly willing to declare that the film is
a fictional fantasy. Notwithstanding the disarming ‘do-not-take-it-seriously’
attitude manifested in the end-credit insert, Death Bell does not make the high
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

pressure of the exam-centred Korean education system any less real. Building
its narrative structure around solving given questions within a certain number
of minutes, the film takes the all-too-familiar and dreaded experience of exam-
taking to a bloody and terrifying conclusion. In real life, a sickening competi-
tiveness pervades the education system and publicly displayed exam results
are an all-too-real event. In this sense, the film is an heir to the Whispering
Corridors series which is highly critical of the Korean educational system.3 The
all-girls’ high school of the series is updated in Death Bell to become a foreign
language high school, one of the so-called ‘special purpose high schools’ that
specialise in art, foreign language or science, whose ferociously competitive
entrance exams have become a social issue. Indeed, entrance to these specialist
high schools is considered a sure-fire way to increase the likelihood of gaining
entry to one of the prestigious universities, whose academic degrees are a
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 death bell and high-school horror 139

marker of social status, prestige and economic mobility in Korean society. It

is, then, reasonable to see that the film’s ‘execution’ of the highest-ranking
student first – following its own logic that the higher the ranking, the guiltier
you are – provides a sense of justice (albeit a ‘perverse’ one) to the Korean teen
audiences who are under constant pressure to perform well. It may be a fic-
tional world, but for once they are discovering that high academic achievement
does not pay dividends.
Death Bell would also have brought back vivid memories to its audiences
of some high-profile, real-life scandals in education. In November 2007,
sixty-three students had their admissions to three elite high schools cancelled
because of an entrance exam leakage scandal involving a parent, a teacher and
a so-called cram school – a private institute providing extracurricular lessons
to boost student exam results (Kim 2007). In 2005, a teacher at a Seoul high
school was arrested for completing exam answer sheets for a student (the son
of a former public prosecutor) and for arranging for his colleagues to tutor
the student privately, which is illegal in Korea (Anon 2005). In fact, wide-
spread corruption charges in education (including many appointment and
promotion scandals) have shocked the nation in the last few years. Granted,
there are abusive teachers who deserve to be punished; granted too that the
heartless school system has driven many to despair, but the meritocratic ideal
that people of high ability or intelligence get the greatest rewards has always
been trusted. Indeed, the ‘education fever’ based on this ideal has long been
regarded as a major factor driving the country’s economic advancement since
the Korean War in the 1950s. Recent years have revealed this ideal to be
no longer trustworthy; it is possible that all your hard work may amount to
nothing.
What Death Bell seems to have offered its teen audiences, then, is a symbolic
and cathartic punishment, not just of the teacher who sold the exam questions,
but of the pompous students who took advantage of the corrupt environment
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and their parents who encouraged cut-throat competition, in disregard of

fairness and parity. Indeed, as the film’s second student victim, Dong-hyuk,
is made to confess, his wrongdoings stem from his greedy mother. In ‘An
Introduction to the American Horror Film’, Robin Wood suggests what we
repress as a society comes to the surface in the medium of the horror film: ‘the
true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our
civilisation represses or oppresses’ (1985: 201, his emphasis). Death Bell may
be very formula-driven, combining slasher conventions with the traditional
Korean figure of the avenging wonhon, but if we accept that horror is a genre
that seeks to reveal what a society fears most at the time the film is made, then
Death Bell certainly touches a raw nerve.

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 140 ch i-yun s h in

no te s
1. For instance, according to Box Office Mojo, Someone Behind You grossed
$1,619,050, while The Cut grossed just $20,245, ranking 274th at the box-
office chart. However, not all horror titles were abysmal box-office failures
in the summer of 2007; period horror Shadows in the Palace (Goongnyeo,
Kim Mi-jeong) and psychological horror Black House (Geomeun jip, Shin
Tae-ra) did relatively well, ranking 29th and 30th at the box office respec-
tively. See Box Office Mojo, South Korea Yearly Box Office 2007 and
2008.
2. Here, I use the literal translation of what Ina says after discovering the
blood-stained bed sheet rather than the English subtitle used in the DVD
copy of the film (‘Damn, period!’).
3. In a kind of reverse influence, the fifth instalment of the Whispering
Corridors series – A Blood Pledge (Dongban jasal, Lee Jong-yong), which
was released in 2009, incorporates the public display of examination results,
which turns out to be the cause of a suicide pact gone wrong.

wo rk s c i t e d
Anonymous (2005), ‘Circumstances and Doubts over Private School Teacher
Cheating Case’ [‘Sarip gyosa haksaeng dap-anji dari-jakseong jeonmalgwa
uihok’], The Hankyoreh, 18 January; [Link]
schooling/[Link]; accessed 18 July 2011.
Box Office Mojo (2008), ‘South Korea Yearly Box Office (2007 and 2008)’;
[Link]
accessed 13 February 2012.
Choi, Jinhee (2009), ‘A Cinema of Girlhood: Sonyeo Sensibility and the
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Decorative Impulse in the Korean Horror Cinema’, in J. Choi and

M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in
Asian Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 39–56.
Clover, Carol J. (1992), Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism,
Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.
Kang, Byeong-jin (2008), ‘Death Bell: Is This Right Grade?’, Cine 21, 25
August; [‘Gosa: pieui joonggangosa, matneun jeomsuipnikka?’] http://
[Link]/news/view/mag_id/52660; accessed 5 November
2011.
Kim, Chong-il (2008), ‘Diagnosis of Korean Horror Film of This Summer’,
Cine 21; 16 October; [‘Ddaeggalgwa noonmoolae eolghin pyeonjibjeungeul
Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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 death bell and high-school horror 141

geodeonaela’] [Link]
accessed 5 November 2011.
Kim, Kyu Hyun (2008), ‘Death Bell’ Korean Movie Reviews for 2008; http://
[Link]/[Link]; accessed 16 December 2011.
Kim, Rahn (2007), ‘63 Students School Admissions Cancelled’, Korea Times,
19 November; [Link]
asp?newsIdx=13684; accessed 15 February 2012.
Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Wood, Robin (1985), ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in
B. Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Volume II, Berkeley: University of
California Press, pp. 195–220.
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 p a rt iii

Contemporary ‘International’
Horror
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 c h apter 10

Between the local and the global:

‘Asian Horror’ in Ahn Byung-ki’s
Phone and Bunshinsaba
Daniel Martin

In spite of the great number of directors who have made a horror film in
South Korea in the last decade, the contemporary cycle is rarely associated
with committed genre auteurs. This is in stark contrast to the case of modern
J-horror, a movement seemingly defined by a handful of key directors, includ-
ing Nakata Hideo, Shimizu Takashi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi. In most cases,
Korean directors debut with horror films and then ‘graduate’ to mainstream
non-horror productions. Ahn Byung-ki (Ahn Byeong-gi) is distinct (though
not unique) in avoiding this trajectory, displaying a passionate commitment
to the horror genre. From his debut feature Nightmare (Gawi, 2000) to his
fourth and most recent Korean film, Apartment (APT, 2006), Ahn has worked
exclusively in horror, with the express intention of achieving global visibility
and pushing the genre into the domestic mainstream. It is precisely these
twin aims that make Ahn’s career, and his films, noteworthy: the director has
admitted that one advantage of working exclusively in the horror genre is that
‘the universal language of fear’ has the ‘greatest potential to cross national bar-
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riers’ (Jeon 2009), and has also emphasised his belief that ‘horror movies in
Korea belong in the mainstream’ (Ji 2011).1 To reach an international as well
as a domestic audience, Ahn’s films carefully balance local cultural signifiers,
personal thematic preoccupations, and the stylistic and narrative trademarks
of the most successful pan-Asian horror of the current generation. Thus, Ahn
boldly refutes a definition of his films as ‘Korean horror’, insisting instead that
his work would better be categorised as ‘Asian horror’ (Ji 2011). Indeed, Ahn
has recently fully embraced the opportunities of a pan-Asian horror industry
by directing a remake of his own film Bunshinsaba (aka Witch Board, 2004) in
China, entitled Bi Xian (aka A Crazy Single Mom) and released in July 2012.
This chapter therefore interrogates Ahn’s career in terms of the extent to
which the four films he made in Korea both reflect and subvert the conventions
of contemporary Korean horror, presenting texts that are both recognisably
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 146 d an i e l m ar t i n

local, yet designed to be easily exportable as part of a homogenous cycle of

Asian horror. Bunshinsaba, arguably Ahn’s most masterful film, reflects this
hybridity particularly well. The transnational circulation of Ahn’s work is then
examined, with particular attention paid to the marketing and critical recep-
tion of his widely distributed 2002 film Phone (Pon). Finally, this chapter con-
cludes with a discussion of Ahn’s current status in the international market,
and his contribution to the local filmmaking culture and industry.

ahn b y u ng -ki a s ho r r o r auteur

Ahn Byung-ki’s original four films as director represent a cohesive œuvre,
unified by consistent thematic preoccupations and stylistic authorial signi-
fiers. Yet with the exception of Ian Conrich, who argues in an article on the
gothic in Ahn’s work that the director’s films ‘revisit themes, and replay
ideas, addressing issues of modernity, identity, and gender’ (2010: 106), Ahn
is rarely identified as an auteur. Typically, Ahn’s films are acknowledged as
significant individually within various horror cycles and subgenres, and are
defined by their generic compatibility with better-known films. This is argu-
ably intentional, in part, as Ahn readily admits to being influenced by numer-
ous American and Japanese films and frequently pays obvious homage to the
horror films he is most passionate about. Nightmare, Ahn’s first film, can be
easily read as a variation on I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie,
US, 1997): a group of privileged youths are haunted by a vengeful spirit
years after selfishly covering up an accidental (but far from blameless) death.
Though Nightmare has a strong supernatural element, drawing on shaman-
ism to represent its tortured / torturing ghost, the most malevolent villain is
ultimately one of the protagonists, an arrogant lawyer who hysterically stalks
his last surviving friends, intending to slaughter them rather than face justice.
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Ahn’s next film, Phone, is more assured, and it sees the director clearly
expressing his philosophy of horror. Ahn’s work typically falls within the
‘restrained tradition’ of horror, as identified by Ivan Butler (1979) and Gregory
A. Waller (1987), whereby terror is achieved by stimulating the imagination of
the viewer, rather than presenting visually explicit scenes of violence. Ahn
himself is keenly aware of these traditions, and cites The Exorcist (William
Friedkin, US, 1973) as his most inspirational horror film while emphasis-
ing that, in his view, ‘the key thing for a good horror movie is strong drama
instead of explicit violence’ (Kim 2004). Phone is seen almost universally as a
variation on the Japanese film Ring (Ringu, Nakata Hideo, 1998), due to its use
of modern technology as a means to transmit a ghostly curse, and the anxiety
generated for a determined mother (figure) by an innocent child in danger. In
terms of traditions of the horror film, Phone is a bold hybrid, like Nightmare,
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 be t w e e n t h e lo c a l a n d t h e g l o b a l 147

offering both realistic and supernatural villains, and in one startling case, both
appear in the same scene: as protagonist Ji-won is about to be pushed to her
death by a stalker (seeking revenge on behalf of a cabal of paedophiles), the
vengeful ghost intervenes, via her mobile phone, to kill the killer and save
her life. Read in the context of Ahn’s entire œuvre, this moment signals a
conscious shift in directorial preoccupation, away from the stalker cycle and
towards a more purely supernatural kind of horror. Indeed, this preference
for ghostly horror reflects Ahn’s determination to connect better with his
(broadly Asian) domestic audience; the director has admitted that he became
‘more interested in shamanism, mediums and ghosts’ in his work because
‘Hollywood-style slasher and splatter movies don’t really connect with Eastern
audience sensibilities’ (Kim 2004).
Ahn’s third film, Bunshinsaba, is arguably his most complex and confident,
weaving together the violent social pressures of contemporary high school with
a tale of possession and ghostly revenge. A clear entry into the Korean girls’
high-school horror cycle that began with Whispering Corridors (Yeogo gwedam,
Park Gi-hyeong, 1998), Bunshinsaba is none the less highly original, and again
exhibits the influence of the Hollywood slasher (in this case – through the
depiction of a generation suffering for the crimes of their parents, as well as the
ability of a medium to enter the protagonist’s dreams – Wes Craven’s iconic
1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street), carefully balancing implied and explicit
horror.
Finally, Apartment functions as a summary of Ahn’s themes and influences
to date, focusing on an isolated and inquisitive young woman who uncov-
ers a tragic, vengeful ghost seeking righteous revenge for various crimes and
abuses. Conrich (2010) observes the influence of both Hitchcock and Nakata
in Apartment, and the film also blatantly contributes to the apartment horror
trope identified by Nikki Lee in her chapter for this collection. Yet while
Apartment may superficially seem to be a collection of clichés and knowing
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

references to other horror, it emerges as perhaps Ahn’s most original and

personal film. Though based on a popular manhwa (Korean comic book), Ahn
retained only around 10 per cent of the material in his adapted script, adding in
avenues to explore social problems and personal preoccupations (Kim 2006).
Apartment, however, failed to equal the domestic commercial success of Ahn’s
prior films. Ahn’s career as director, and his unusual devotion to only making
horror films, coincided with both the blossoming of K-horror at the end of the
1990s and its commercial decline in 2006. So, while Phone achieved 2.6 million
nationwide admissions and was one of the top ten films of 2002, Bunshinsaba,
though still ‘successful’ among genre films, achieved just over one million
admissions in 2004. Apartment’s release resulted in a disappointing 644,893
ticket sales. This declining domestic interest in horror was particularly poorly
timed for Ahn, as, also in 2006, he was the driving force behind a pioneering
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 148 d an i e l m ar t i n

experiment to promote Korean horror even further. He served as producer on

a series of four horror films made by first-time directors; shot on HD rather
than film, and planned for near-simultaneous release in cinemas and through
television broadcast, these films gained little attention or, even by their own
modest ambitions, commercial success.2
Ahn has not directed a film in Korea since, yet his mark on the genre is
significant, and he remains virtually the only auteur of Korean horror from
the contemporary cycle. The following section draws on existing theories and
definitions of Korean horror to examine Ahn’s films in more detail, in the light
of his own belief in producing films within a broader ‘Asian horror’ genre that
aims to appeal to domestic and international audiences alike by both conform-
ing to, and subverting, the supposedly typical traits of Korean horror.

d e f i ni n g k o r e a n h o r r o r
From its opening moments, Bunshinsaba identifies itself as a hybrid text: three
schoolgirls, hoping to summon a spirit to rid them of the bullies who torment
them, perform a ritual instantly recognisable as a séance, and chant repeatedly
in both Korean and Japanese. Bunshinsaba takes place in a small rural village
in Korea, and weaves together several narrative threads, slowly uncovering the
connections between a possessed student, her haunted teacher and a heinous
crime committed a generation earlier. The film consistently exhibits familiar
elements of American and Asian horror, but also deviates from generic expec-
tations in several significant ways. Tonally, however, the film has more in
common with the classic cycle of Korean horror than its contemporaries.
Art Black argues that one of the distinguishing features of the current
cycle of Korean horror is the portrayal of ghosts as ‘lost creatures, sad,
invisible, overlooked, in search of friendship, companionship, love’ rather
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

than revenge (2003: 193). Exemplified in films such as A Tale of Two Sisters
(Janghwa, Hongryeon, Kim Ji-woon, 2003) and Memento Mori (Yeogo gwedam
2, Kim Tae-yong and Min Kyu-dong, 1999), the ‘sympathetic spirit’ shares
the tragic dimension of the wonhon (as identified by Hyangjin Lee in her
chapter for this collection), yet is far less aggressive. Ahn’s ghosts, however,
are pure vengeance (and are even, in the case of Phone, described as wonhon
in dialogue), thus aligning them with an earlier tradition in Korean horror.
Rather than merely sharing their pain, the ghosts of Ahn’s films seek justice
and take lives.
One of the key qualities of the vengeful ghost in classic and contemporary
Korean horror is that its victims are chosen logically, based on a sense of
righteousness. This is the case in Nightmare, where the conspirators in the
death of the young woman reborn as a ghost are eliminated one by one, while
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 be t w e e n t h e lo c a l a n d t h e g l o b a l 149

the only blameless member of the group is not targeted for revenge. In Ahn’s
subsequent films, however, the vengeful ghost is less discriminatory, causing
the suffering of innocents as well as evildoers; the protagonist in Phone has
committed no transgression, nor has the innocent child possessed by the spirit,
and likewise, in Apartment, the final victim of the ghost’s violent sorrow is the
character who uncovers the crime and offers her sympathies.
In keeping with the notion that contemporary Korean horror is tragic
rather than terrifying, Jinhee Choi argues that in the majority of these films,
the emotional overtone is not fear or disgust, but sadness, something particu-
larly evident in the girls’ high-school horror cycle (2010: 136). Although Ahn
has claimed, as quoted above, that he is more interested in ‘strong drama’
than ‘explicit violence’, his films arguably fail to conform to the convention
of emphasising sadness over fear, falling into the quintessential Hollywood
horror rhythm of well-paced scares and shocks. Bunshinsaba is perhaps the
best example of this, in spite of its superficial similarities to more melodra-
matic Korean horror. The plot presents fertile ground for dwelling on emotion
and exploring the inherent sadness of its characters; when bullied student
Yujin is possessed by the ghost she summoned to take revenge, she becomes
tormented and even more ostracised. However, Ahn’s film is fast-paced, and
its rapid narrative is clearly more interested in revealing the complex chain
of possession and reincarnation that constitutes the supernatural revenge of
a murdered mother and daughter. In one of the film’s most frustrating but
telling omissions, the final fate of Yujin is not revealed, in spite of the great
emotional weight of her plight.
Ahn’s obsession with plot intricacies at the expense of character develop-
ment is tied to one of the truly universal, fundamental qualities of contem-
porary Korean horror: flashbacks. It has emerged as a consistent trope of
the Korean horror film that the violent actions of the killer, either real or
supernatural, are indelibly tied to past events, and Ahn’s films are emphatic
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

examples of this (Ahn admits that his goal ‘is to make stories that reveal as
they progress’ (2006)). Thus, Ahn’s films – and in this they conform entirely
to modern Korean horror conventions – are structured around key flashback
scenes that reveal twists and provide closure. This technique in Korean horror
allows for ‘excavation of characters’ psyches and past histories’ (Hendrix 2004:
46), and several of the films considered in other chapters in this collection use
flashback sequences in this way. In Phone, extensive flashback sequences tell
the story of an unfaithful husband and the student who loved him, and cover
the initiation of the affair, as well as its discovery by his wife and her murder
of the student. These flashbacks use different point-of-view characters and are
not necessarily presented in chronological order. The wordless young ghost of
Phone – identified as a ‘virgin ghost’ by Hyun-suk Seo, and essentially identi-
cal to the long-haired spirits of the most iconic Japanese horror – uses these
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 150 d an i e l m ar t i n

‘repressed memories’ as a method of communication, as a way to ‘appeal to the

audience’ (2009: 166).
The ghosts of Bunshinsaba, likewise, have the opportunity to engage audi-
ence sympathy through flashbacks, contextualising (but not quite justifying)
the extent of their gruesome revenge. The hidden history in this case revolves
around Chunhee, a mother with supernatural gifts, who uses her powers to
‘see’ on behalf of her blind daughter Insook; both are burned to death by the
paranoid, abusive villagers who fear them. Thirty years later, it is the ghost
of Insook who answers Yujin’s call for vengeance, possessing her and taking
revenge in a way far more horrific than Yujin imagined: the girls who bullied
her are each forced, under a kind of spiritual hypnosis, to put a plastic bag
over their heads, drench it in lighter fluid, and set it alight. It is telling of
the way Ahn builds from restraint to explicit violence that the first several of
these deaths take place off screen. Meanwhile, the beautiful new teacher at
the school immediately sparks suspicion and scorn through her inexplicable
knowledge of the town’s secret past. She is revealed to be the reincarnation
of Chunhee, determined to restore justice by murdering the most culpable of
the elder villagers and, more startlingly, by conceiving a child as a new vessel
for Insook’s rebirth. However, though the pain suffered by the two spirits is
considerable and, arguably, demonstrable of the uniquely Korean concept of
han (anguish at unfair tragedy), their revenge is excessive, causing the trauma
and death of many undeserving characters.
At its deepest thematic level, though, indiscriminate and repressive vio-
lence is precisely what the film is about. While other Korean horrors use
flashbacks as a narrative device only, Bunshinsaba is preoccupied with notions
of ‘seeing’ the past, and of witnessing what others cannot. Insook’s white,
iris-less eyes and her mother’s unnatural powers of sight are the triggers for
their downfall, and although actress Lee Sae-eun gives a superb performance
as Yujin, it seems likely she was cast because of her unusually large eyes, fre-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

quently the focus of Ahn’s framing. Furthermore, events in Bunshinsaba are

tied to history even more deeply; a subtle but incredibly significant sign of
this is a radio broadcast, heard during a flashback sequence, announcing that
President Park Chung-hee has declared a crackdown on witchcraft and occult
practices. The film thus signals the brutal and unjustified murder of the two
women – by a group of villagers dominated by fear and a pack mentality – as
a sign of the times, an equivalent to the nationwide human rights abuses and
violent authoritarianism of the military government. In this sense, Bunshinsaba
deviates from generic conventions in order to emphasise a theme that ties the
film to the uniquely Korean context, yet does so in such a subtle way as to
avoid overspecificity and allow for a more universal reading of the film (by its
potential international audience) as simply an especially violent supernatural
revenge narrative.
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 be t w e e n t h e lo c a l a n d t h e g l o b a l 151

Bunshinsaba is thus a familiar text in several ways: it conforms to conven-

tions of both the restrained tradition and more explicit horror by slowly build-
ing tension to a bloody climax; in the context of Korean horror cycles, too, the
film is superficially similar to the films of the high-school horror subgenre.
So much so, in fact, that in an article on Korean horror for Film Comment,
critic Grady Hendrix flippantly mistakes Bunshinsaba for the fourth film in
the popular Whispering Corridors series (2004: 46). Yet, once again, Ahn’s
film avoids conforming entirely to the tropes of this specifically Korean cycle,
instead presenting a variation on the (sub)genre that has more in common with
Japanese and other Asian horror. According to Choi, ‘one of the specificities
of Korean horror cinema can be found in its foregrounding of a sonyeo (girls’)
sensibility’ (2010: 126). This is an entirely different kind of focus on female
characters from that in the notable American horror cycle that established the
‘final girl’ as a paradigm (Clover 1992). Rather, these films are about friend-
ship, trust and sacrifice in the difficult circumstances of being a teenager at
high school (compounded no end by the addition of ghosts). Further, Black
and Hendrix both identify the wanggda as one of the defining tropes of the
Korean high-school horror cycle (Black 2003: 196; Hendrix 2004: 46). Roughly
translated as outcast, the wanggda is the member of the group who (for what-
ever perceived offence) does not belong, and is typically subject to intense
psychological and / or physical bullying. Choi confirms this trope, though not
by name, when she notes that high school is ‘a place of peer pressure and social
ostracism’ (2010: 116). Both Nightmare and Bunshinsaba provide good exam-
ples of the wanggda, yet only in Nightmare is the emphasis on the emotional
pitfalls of friendship. Unusually for a high-school horror, Bunshinsaba’s focus
is on family rather than peer bonding. Yujin’s two friends, introduced in the
opening scene, are barely glimpsed again. Rather, the film emphasises Yujin’s
utter isolation, and through the revelations about the nature of the ghosts,
ultimately focuses on familial bonds and the mother / daughter dynamic. In
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

fact, the mother / daughter theme of Bunshinsaba ties it instantly to a transna-

tionally successful cycle of Japanese horror films on this topic, exemplified best
by Nakata Hideo’s Dark Water (Honoguraimizu no sokokara, 2002) and more
recently by NakashimaTetsuya’s Confessions (Kokuhaku, 2010).
Alongside the wanggda, one other trope Hendrix views as typical of con-
temporary Korean horror is the mudang, a medium of Korean shamanism who
is feared and, finally, killed (2004: 46). Again, shamanism and a specifically
Korean spirituality are employed by Ahn in both Nightmare and Bunshinsaba,
yet only in Bunshinsaba does Ahn show supernatural power and spirituality
confined to a pre-modern state, emphasising the timelessness of the cycle of
vengeance. In Nightmare, the flashbacks unfold via an incriminating vide-
otape, and in Phone, the mobile phone becomes an instrument of terror for a
ghost; in Apartment, the entire complex is the vessel for the wronged spirit,
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 152 d an i e l m ar t i n

who first manifests itself each night through flickering electric lights and
the disruption of digital clocks. This emphasis on technology, both as an
instrument of rebirth for the recently deceased and as a record of the fates of
victims who can no longer speak, blatantly ties Ahn’s films to broader popular
trends in the horror film, from the cursed videotape of Ring to the ‘found
footage’ of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, US,
1999). Bunshinsaba’s rejection of this particular trend reinforces its thematic
preoccupation with the past.
Ahn’s films, then, demonstrate clear thematic ties and significant varia-
tions between them, but all are hybrid texts, neither entirely conforming to
nor entirely rejecting the conventions of American, Korean and Asian horror.
Though Ahn is often accused of unoriginality or even plagiarism, it is evident
that his films are consciously designed to fit into a pan-Asian cycle of horror
that is both universal and culturally specific. As noted above, in the domestic
market Ahn achieved significant success, but suffered along with the momen-
tary decline of the genre’s commercial viability. The following section exam-
ines the international circulation of Ahn’s films, especially Phone, in the
context of simultaneously emerging, and often contradictory, canons.

the i nt e r na t i o na l c i r c ul a t ion of a h n ’ s ‘ a sia n

ho rr o r ’
Although Ahn has always sought to reach an international audience, capital-
ising on both New Korean Cinema’s blossoming success, as well as the Asia
Extreme boom instigated by the popularity of J-horror in the West, only his
second film, Phone, has achieved notable distribution in English-speaking ter-
ritories. Most significantly, Phone received nationwide theatrical distribution
at multiplex cinemas in the UK in August 2004, distributed by Tartan Films.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

The film’s apparent similarities to Ring and other Japanese horror were timely,
and the film was eminently importable thanks to its focus on such traditional
horror tropes as a possessed child in distress, a violent stalker preying on a
young single woman, and a dark haunted house hiding ghostly secrets.
However, without the invention of the pioneering and vastly influential
Asia Extreme brand, Phone would not have had such high visibility in the UK
and, later, the US. Tartan’s Asia Extreme brand was created to capitalise on
the international success of violent Japanese cinema, and the central market-
ing concept revolved around promoting Asian cinema as sexually explicit
and transgressively violent: essentially, a thoroughly Orientalist presenta-
tion of East Asia as morally and culturally alien (Shin 2009; Martin 2009).
Problematically, the Asia Extreme concept elided the individual differences
between national cinemas, and branded films from Japan, South Korea, Hong
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 be t w e e n t h e lo c a l a n d t h e g l o b a l 153

Kong and Thailand as homogenously ‘Asian’ in order to encourage brand

loyalty and suggest a consistent product line. It is obvious that Ahn’s own view
of a homogenous Asian horror genre fits neatly into this paradigm, and the way
his films display influences from both Hollywood and Japan was the emphasis
of Tartan’s marketing campaign for Phone.
Described as ‘the Korean Hitchcock’ in official press notes, Ahn was pre-
sented as a ‘master of horror’ who understood the value of psychological chills
over explicit violence. Indeed, Phone is one of Ahn’s more restrained films,
and though the Asia Extreme brand tended to emphasise the visually explicit
aspects of its catalogue, Ring had contradictorily earned significant critical
acclaim and an enduring fan following for its psychological, rather than visual,
intensity. Thus, Phone was canonised in its UK marketing on this same basis,
and press notes drew further comparisons with other restrained pan-Asian
horror films – none of which was Korean – such as Ju-On: The Grudge (Ju-on,
Shimizu Takashi, Japan, 2002), Pulse (Kairo, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Japan, 2001)
and The Eye (Gin gwai, Oxide Pang and Danny Pang, Hong Kong / Singapore
/ Thailand, 2002). The international dimension of the film’s production was
also emphasised: that Phone was financed with the support of Disney subsidi-
ary Buena Vista Korea was presented as an endorsement of the film, a form of
instant validation from a familiar Western company, in spite of the primarily
Orientalist discourse around the larger Asia Extreme brand.
Phone was released in the UK at the peak of the Asia Extreme cycle, as
part of the second year of an ambitious touring road show that put these films
in multiplex cinemas across the UK. The film’s original domestic theatrical
trailer, newly subtitled, was used to promote Phone to these mainstream film
audiences. Thus, the film had an unusually high level of visibility for an East
Asian genre film at that time, and it was dutifully reviewed by critics from
national newspapers and mainstream magazines.
Predictably, in keeping with Ahn’s own understanding of his work, as well as
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

the way Phone was branded, British critics almost universally defined the film
as an Asian, rather than a Korean, horror. In terms of value judgements, Phone
was typically seen as derivative, and found wanting in comparison to Tartan’s
other Asia Extreme titles, though a likely explanation, offered by many critics,
is simple oversaturation. Most notable is the shared vocabulary these critics
use, evaluating and defining Phone in precisely the same terms; Kim Newman,
in his review for Empire magazine, was typical in criticising Phone on the basis
that ‘Asian horror can’t go on much longer adhering to such standard rules’
and arguing that the Asia Extreme cycle as a whole was losing appeal, noting
that ‘a growing familiarity with Asian ghost movies hinders the effectiveness of
each effort’ (Newman 2004). The BBC’s Jamie Russell agreed with Newman’s
assessment, but also reacted against the film’s generic hybridity: ‘there’s so
much going on in this film, it’s no wonder the plot barely makes sense. It
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 154 d an i e l m ar t i n

opens with a psycho-killer, then morphs into techno-panic, then kiddie horror,
and finally a ghost story’ (Russell 2004). Writing for Sunday newspaper The
Observer, Philip French succinctly summarised Phone as ‘an accomplished
but rather anonymous picture’ (French 2004). In one sense, this is actually
precisely how both Ahn and Tartan Films intended for the film to be received:
as identifiably part of the contemporary Asian horror cycle. The accusation of
‘anonymity’ is simply a negative spin on the intended homogeneity.
However, despite its firm associations with other Asian horror, Phone failed
to equal the breakout success of earlier Japanese films like Ring, Audition
(Odishon, Miike Takashi, 1999) and Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru, Fukasaku
Kenji, 2000). Likewise, Ahn has never been canonised with the new Korean
auteurs that found success in the UK and USA, such as Park Chan-wook,
Kim Ji-woon and Bong Joon-ho. However, measures of success are depend-
ent on the context, and in this case, the intended audience. The Asia Extreme
Roadshow at multiplex cinemas was intended to raise visibility and encour-
age DVD sales.3 Conrich rightly suggests that ‘cult audiences, supported by
specialist publications and import DVD, are Ahn’s more significant audience’
(2010: 107). Phone saw release in the US in 2005 on DVD, and Bunshinsaba
followed in 2006 under the title Witch Board. These releases, aimed at a more
traditional cult market, have found a niche audience and remain two of the
better-known Korean horror films in the West.
Ahn’s films have found international distribution closer to home, too: the
screenplays of both Phone and Bunshinsaba were sold to Japanese compa-
nies, according to Ahn, because they reflect a sensibility similar to Ring and
other J-horror (Ahn 2006). This supports Ahn’s belief that ‘Asian horror’ is
a meaningful genre, though it is far from the only example of Japanese and
Korean horror sharing source material, and Ring was itself remade in Korea
as The Ring Virus (Ring, Kim Dong-bin, 1999). Finally, though its main-
stream impact in the UK was limited, the inclusion of Ahn’s Phone in the Asia
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Extreme canon demonstrates an important point: that the brand’s concept of

creating a problematically homogenous Asian genre was not the sole invention
of distributors, nor did the practice take place only in the West.

co nc l usi o n
Ahn Byung-ki’s career seemingly stalled after the failure of Apartment. Ahn
had established his own production company, Toilet Pictures, with the
express purpose of producing horrors and thrillers only, but later claimed
he felt isolated, as if he were the only director in Korea making horror films
(Kim 2009a).4 Ahn is far from the only director in Korea with a commitment
to horror, but his comments demonstrate his eagerness to brand himself
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as a devoted genre pioneer, and his consistent interest in horror remains

notable. Ahn claimed to have lost inspiration after Apartment (Kim 2009a),
and subsequently tried to secure funding for several horror films; rumoured
projects with Ahn attached as director included a ghost story called Whispering
(Soksakim) and a ‘reality-horror’ inspired by The Blair Witch Project, to be
called Pond (Mot).
Ahn’s career has since entered a distinct new phase of globalisation. Initially,
in December 2009, it was announced that US company Imprint Pictures had
secured the rights to remake Phone, and agreed that Ahn would direct (Han
2009). Much like Nakata, who directed the Hollywood sequel to the remake
of his own film Ring, Ahn was willing to re-adapt his material to suit a new
audience. This new version of the film, to be titled The Phone, was to be shot
in Seoul with an American and Korean cast. Much like the US remake The
Grudge, directed by Shimizu in Tokyo with an American cast, The Phone
would have been a truly hybrid text. However, this project, too, has stalled,
and seems unlikely to emerge in the near future. Though he failed to transfer
production of his horror film to Hollywood, Ahn has successfully transplanted
Bunshinsaba to China with 2012’s Bi Xian. Ostensibly a remake of Ahn’s
earlier film, Bi Xian appears to have undergone substantial alterations in its
adaptation to the Chinese market, yet Ahn’s fundamental techniques remain
evident. There is perhaps no greater validation of Ahn’s firm belief in Asian
horror as a meaningful category than his ability to achieve mainstream visibil-
ity in another major Asian territory; Bi Xian is reportedly the biggest-budget
thriller in Chinese cinema history (Ma 2012).
In the context of Korean cinema’s domestic boom and transnational vis-
ibility, Ahn’s philosophy of horror remains significant. Ahn’s films contribute
to distinctly Korean cycles of horror, and contain culturally specific themes.
Yet these aspects are carefully balanced with broader influences and a sense
of popular trends taking place outside the immediate national context. Ahn’s
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

films, at once personal and commercial, old and new, are identifiably Korean
yet homogenously Asian. Ahn’s films demonstrate that there is room for a
Korean horror that is generically designed to fit multiple paradigms. The
most notable qualities of Ahn’s films are their multivalent nature and the way
they are marketed and consumed by different audiences in different national
contexts. Like much of Korean horror, and, indeed, contemporary Korean
cinema, these are films situated at once between the local and the global.

no t e s
1. All Korean-language sources have been translated with the assistance of
Hyunjoo Lee.
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 156 d an i e l m ar t i n

2. The four films in the series are February 29 (I-wol isipgu-il, Jeong Jong-
hoon, 2006), Hidden Floor (aka Forbidden Floor) (Ne beonjje cheung, Kwon
Il-soon, 2006), Roommates (D-day, Kim Eun-kyeong, 2006) and Dark
Forest (Jugeumeui sup, Kim Jeong-min, 2006). Released first, February 29
achieved 56,958 admissions on eleven screens; the other films in the series
exhibit a pattern of rapidly declining success, with the final release, Dark
Forest, generating 3,241 tickets sold from showing on just two screens. A
DVD box set containing all four films was released in Korea in 2006.
3. From a personal interview with Paul Smith, 14 July 2009, London.
4. The name of Ahn’s company is, understandably, often the subject of
confusion or amusement for non-Koreans. Ahn chose the name ‘Toilet
Pictures’ based on a linguistic pun on his first name, and also because
he views the toilet as a potentially chilling site, where people are most
vulnerable. Indeed, Bunshinsaba includes a scene in which Insook is tor-
mented by bullies while in the toilet, and is maliciously drenched with
filthy water.

wo rk s c i t e d
Ahn, Byung-ki (2006), ‘Director’s Horror Film Theory’ US DVD Featurette
on Bunshinsaba (released as Witch Board), Tokyo Shock.
Black, Art (2003), ‘Coming of Age: The South Korean Horror Film’, in S. J.
Schneider (ed.), Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe,
Godalming: FAB, pp. 185–203.
Butler, Ivan (1979), Horror in the Cinema, 3rd edn, London: Tantivy.
Choi, Jinhee (2010), The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers,
Global Provocateurs, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Clover, Carol J. (1992), Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Conrich, Ian (2010), ‘Gothic Bodies and the Return of the Repressed: The
Korean Horror Films of Ahn Byeong-ki’, Gothic Studies, 12: 1, pp. 106–15.
French, Philip (2004), ‘It’s Violent, Vulgar, Raucous. And I Love It’, Observer,
29 August; [Link]
features.review17/print; accessed 20 October 2011.
Han, Sunhee (2009), ‘Imprint Entertainment to Remake Phone’, Variety, 3
December; [Link]
accessed 20 October 2011.
Hendrix, Grady (2004), ‘Back with a Vengeance: The Psychic Delirium at the
Dark Heart of K-horror’, Film Comment, November–December, pp. 46–7.
Jeon, Hyung-hwa (2009), ‘Director Ahn Byung-ki on Entering Hollywood:
“I Can Surpass J-horror”’ [‘Hollywood ipseong Ahn Byung-ki gamdok
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 be t w e e n t h e lo c a l a n d t h e g l o b a l 157

“J-horror neomgo sipda”’], Star News, 22 April; [Link]

view/[Link]?no=2009042209374170588; accessed 22 October 2011.
Ji, Yong-jin (2011), ‘Director Ahn Byung-ki: “Time to Go Back to the
Beginning”’ [‘Ahn Byung-ki gamdok, “dashi woljeomeuro dolagaya
halddae”’], Movieweek Korea, 23 May; [Link]
article/[Link]?aid=26649; accessed 22 October 2011.
Kim, Do-hoon (2006), ‘“We Still Lack a Culture of Horror”: Apartment
Director Ahn Byung-ki’ [‘“Ooriaegaen chookjeokdwen gongpomoonhwaga
eobda”: Apateu Ahn Byung-ki gamdok’], Cine 21, 11 July; [Link]
[Link]/do/article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=39791; accessed
22 October 2011.
— (2009a), ‘A Devotion to Quality Horror with Ten Years’ Know-how’ [‘Ahn
Byung-ki: gongpo yeonghwa 10nyeoneui nohawooleul balggo chakhan
yeonghwaae ssodattda’], Cine 21, 21 January; [Link]
article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=54755; accessed 22 October 2011.
Kim, Kyu-han (2004), ‘Interview with Bunshinsaba Director Ahn Byung-ki:
“Horror is Part of My Everyday Life”’ [‘Interview Bunshinsaba Ahn Byung-ki
gamdok – “gongponeun naesaleui ilbooija saenghwal”’], Max Movie, 3
August; [Link]
Type=&page=1&contain=&keyword=&mi_id=MI0000726512; accessed
23 October 2011.
Ma, Sicong (2012), ‘Thriller “Bunshinsaba” Debuts Today’, in Chinese
Films, 16 July 2012, available online at [Link]
/2012/07/16/[Link]; accessed 17 July 2012.
Martin, Daniel (2009), ‘Japan’s Blair Witch: Restraint, Maturity, and Generic
Canons in the British Critical Reception of Ring’, Cinema Journal, 48: 3,
pp. 35–51.
Newman, Kim (2004), ‘Phone’, Empire; [Link]
reviews/[Link]?FID=10220; accessed 20 October 2011.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Russell, Jamie (2004), ‘Phone (2004)’, BBC Films, 10 July; [Link]

[Link]/films/2004/06/29/phone_2004_review.shtml; accessed 20 October
2011.
Seo, Hyun-suk (2009), ‘That Unobscure Object of Desire and Horror: On Some
Uncanny Things in Recent Korean Horror Films’, in J. Choi and M. Wada-
Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema,
Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 163–78.
Shin, Chi-Yun (2009), ‘The Art of Branding: Tartan “Asia Extreme” Films’,
in J. Choi and M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing
Boundaries in Asian Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
pp. 85–100.
Waller, Gregory A. (ed) (1987), American Horrors: Essays on the Modern
American Horror Film, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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 c h apter 11

Diary of a lost girl:

Victoriana, intertextuality and
A Tale of Two Sisters
Robert L. Cagle

Kim Ji-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon, 2003) is a film

rent by duality and contradiction: its breathtakingly innovative narrative is
constructed almost entirely out of established conventions and techniques
drawn from such sources as the folktale, popular literature and the classi-
cal Hollywood film.1 This voluntary subjugation to a stylistic strait-jacket
of conventions, rules and limitations represents a key link between Kim’s
twenty-first-century film and a Victorian sensibility – a guiding aesthetic that
manifests itself in nearly every aspect of the work, from its strikingly macabre
marketing campaign to its meticulously crafted mise-en-scène. These visual and
stylistic elements conjure up the shadowy images of a time period profoundly
marked by stifling repression, obsessive morbidity and fanatical dissimulation.
They provide a suitably uncanny setting for the film’s unsettling storyline
– a hybrid of sorts of the melodrama and the gothic, two literary forms that
enjoyed immense popularity in the Victorian era, and that, like the film, make
use of highly systematised and even restrictive representational strategies.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

br o k e n b l o sso ms
Kim’s film takes its name from a well-known Korean folktale, The Story of Rose
and Lotus, which dates from the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) and occupies a
ubiquitous presence in Korean popular culture. The tale’s influence is so per-
vasive that it has become a cultural metaphor in the same way that fairy tales
such as ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ have
in the West. It has remained continuously in print throughout the modern era
and has been adapted to the screen no fewer than five times.2 The tale opens
as a childless couple wishes for a baby. Following a miraculous vision, the wife
discovers she is pregnant, and soon afterward gives birth to a daughter. A few
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 di a r y o f a l o s t g i r l 159

years later, a second girl is born. The mother dies while both children are quite
young, and the father marries a younger woman who has a son of her own. The
wicked stepmother becomes immensely jealous of the daughters and plots to
do away with them; she accuses Rose of terminating an unwanted pregnancy,
shaming the girl to suicide. Overcome with grief and loneliness, Lotus kills
herself too. The restless spirits of the girls haunt the quarters of the village
magistrate, until finally, armed with evidence provided by the ghosts, a young
magistrate reveals the deceptions of the stepmother in a court of law and she
is sentenced to death.
Lee Yoo-seop’s 1972 adaptation, Jang-Hwa and Hong-Ryeon: A Story of
Two Sisters, preserves both the traditional atmosphere (the settings, costumes
and ‘once upon a time’ feel) and the linear, action-focused narrative of the tale.
Its characters are painted in broad, almost primitive strokes. Rose and Lotus
are indisputably good girls, content with their simple country lives. They are
the consummate image of a particular brand of Korean femininity: subservi-
ent, pleasant and submissive – willing to suffer silently the unjust punishments
demanded of them by their parents because to do otherwise would be wrong.
Indeed, as is the case in the original tale, the sisters are able to articulate their
grievances only through the figure of the magistrate, whose authority as a
government official exceeds that of their parents. The girls’ father, a highly
regarded member of the community, is little more than a gruff voice and
horsehair hat, iconic and yet empty symbols of inflexible patriarchal power
and privilege. Their wicked stepmother, a shrewish, duplicitous woman, is
similarly two-dimensional; an irredeemably corrupt being fond of exaggerated
makeup and stagey histrionics, she exploits her mentally handicapped son, and
plots with a bogus shaman to murder her stepdaughters and her husband to
gain access to his finances and land.
The film’s tableau-style framing, uniform lighting and garish colour palette
flatten the image, lending it the appearance of an animated work of traditional
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Korean art. This is especially apparent in an early sequence in which the

young magistrate comes across the two sisters playing in a field. The girls are
presented as small figures against a sweeping landscape of green and blue, as
they giggle and play in a tree swing. These themes – women in nature, girls
swinging – occur with some regularity in traditional Korean representations,
perhaps most notably in Shin Yun-bok’s iconic and often-reproduced painting
of activities during the Dano holiday. Other scenes, especially those depict-
ing characters engaged in the rituals of everyday life, could well have been
lifted directly from the National Museum of Korea’s collection of traditional
artworks (see Cho 2008). Lee’s film, thus, adheres to established literary and
artistic codes, and like the story that it faithfully brings to the screen, functions
unmistakably and above all else as a timeless moral tale, played out in univer-
sal and unambiguous terms; its traditional, linear trajectory moves forward
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 160 robe r t l. ca g le

from an age of innocence to one of conflict and trauma, and concludes with a
conventionally happy ending.

s e c r e t s a nd l i e s
Kim’s film, in contrast, eschews the linear form, facile resolution and didactic
function of the earlier work, choosing instead to transform the tale into an
artful meditation on loss and mourning – a project that finds its most suc-
cinct expression in the image used in the film’s advertising campaign. Framed
against a backdrop of deep maroon wallpaper, two wooden-looking parental
figures loom ominously behind an ornate couch on which two girls, both of
whom are dressed in blood-soaked nightgowns, are seated. The woman smiles
coldly, and tightly grasps the shoulders of the girl on the right, who stares with
a frightened look into the camera. The girl on the left slumps against the back
of the seat, her eyes, half-closed, staring unfocused into the distance, her left
hand draped limply over the arm of the couch, her right hand gripped tightly
by her sister. The father figure rests his hand on the back of the couch, and
appears to be both physically and emotionally distanced from all. The subjects
have clearly assembled with the intention of posing for a family photograph,
but the instant at which this photo has been taken is not the optimal one; rather
than buttressing the desired image of domestic bliss, the photograph lays
bare the horrific details and alarming extent of the discord that separates and
alienates the members of this group from one another.
Similarly, the photo used in the Two Sisters marketing campaign recalls the
post-mortem memorial photograph, a genre of photography widely associated
with the Victorian era, and often viewed today as a symptom of the ‘ghoulish
and morbid’ (Bown 2009: 8) nature of the Victorian sensibility. While such
photos frequently depicted children who appeared to be blissfully asleep, and
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

of whom parents had few, if any, visual representations, other family members
did occasionally pose with the deceased, his or her eyes open, as if alive, in
exactly the same manner in which they might pose for a ‘normal’ family pho-
tograph. These images embody in visual terms both a final moment of union,
instantaneously frozen before an irrevocable separation, and the desire of the
family members to halt time and (re)create a moment of familial happiness no
longer possible.3
The film’s eerie opening credits sequence likewise calls to mind the shut-
tered world of the Victorian family: titles appear superimposed over dark,
floral-print wallpaper, the pattern of which suggests two faces, side by side,
with one slightly obscured by shadows. The overall effect is an uncanny one,
leaving uncertainty in the mind of the viewer as to what the significance of
this mysterious image is. As the names of the performers (in white) appear
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on the screen, there is a visual disturbance that mimics waves, as if the titles
were being filmed through clear water. The film’s title then appears in a deep
crimson as some of the flowers on the wallpaper appear to float up and away.
The framing then tracks fluidly to the right, moving deeper into the shadows
at the edge of the screen.
This simple opening provides a wealth of highly evocative visual material.
The central motif of the wallpaper is a floral pattern, evoking at once both the
flowers after which the lead characters in the folktale (Rose and Lotus) and
in the film (Su-mi, Su-yeon) are named and a mode of communication that
gained immense popularity during the Victorian era: the so-called ‘language of
flowers’. This method of symbolic exchange, according to authors of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, originated in the East and was intro-
duced into Europe via Orientalist literature of the same era.4 Authors made use
of the culturally established meanings of specific flowers to provide a medium
through which individuals (primarily, judging from the romantic overtones
evident in works such as those by Charlotte de la Tour and Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, between persons engaged in courtships or love affairs) could conduct
highly codified and therefore discreet exchanges that were, while not necessar-
ily ambiguous, certainly inexplicit. Its system of signification – indirect and yet
understandable, based, as it was, on a set of relationships that became, thanks
to countless reference works published throughout the Victorian age, a kind
of ‘open secret’ – relies upon recipients’ abilities to decipher otherwise seem-
ingly meaningless codes, much in the same way that the analyst records, rear-
ranges and interprets the symptoms of the hysteric. The mysterious wallpaper
beneath the titles, then, could be seen as an instance of the re-mystification of
the very flowers that once held specific meanings – a breakdown of the terms of
communication and a return to obscurity.

t he b e s t o f e v e r yt h in g
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

The specific choice of wallpaper, John Henry Dearle’s ‘Blackthorn’, origi-

nally produced for William Morris in 1892, represents yet another correlation
between the action of the film and the Victorian era – an age, like that of late
twentieth-century South Korea, of rapid modernisation, scientific and intel-
lectual progress, and economic growth marked by a disparity in wealth made to
seem even greater through the practice of conspicuous consumption (Veblen
1899), a phenomenon that cultural critics Jeongkoo Yoon and Hyeonho Seok
(1996) see at work in modern-day Korea. As Barry Curtis notes:

It was a feature of the grand houses that the income and investment that
elaborated and embellished spaces and surfaces came from far away.
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 162 robe r t l. ca g le

The obscure places of the world were mined, harvested and exploited
and traces or the source of wealth were displayed in eclectic patterns
and ornaments. (Curtis 2008: 41)

Curtis adds that what transformed the ‘grand house’ from a symbol of financial
privilege into something ‘sinister’ was the ‘ways in which it drew in resources
that were conspicuously lacking elsewhere’ (both in the working-class homes
of England and in the exploited colonies from which these exotic goods were
appropriated) – a display of unconscionable greed that Beatrice and Sidney
Webb found both ‘oppressively unpleasant’ and haunting (Curtis 2008: 41).5
Like the decorative elements that filled their homes, women, too, played a
role in signifying a family’s social standing: by denying the married woman the
right to work outside the home (or, in some cases, even within the home) – a
restriction that extended even to modes of dress, which hindered even basic
movement, let alone any type of activity related to work – the patriarch of
the bourgeois family displays the extent of his earning power (Veblen 1899:
341–2). With this in mind, parallels between Kim’s film and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892), in which a young woman slowly
loses her mind after being forced to ‘rest’ in a locked, upper-storey bedroom in
a rented house, become startlingly apparent. Relieved of responsibilities and
denied agency, the protagonist of Gilman’s story, like those in other similar
texts from the same time period – Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’ is another
key example – personifies the mental and emotional crises of the Victorian
woman who finds herself separated from intellectual stimulation or social
interaction, isolated and abandoned with nothing but time on her hands, ‘left
alone with [her own] fears’ (van Gorp 2008: 256).

s e c r e t s o f a so ul
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This web of intrigue opens, suitably enough, in a clinic, with a medium close-
up shot of an old-fashioned white washbasin seen from above. A door slams
from off camera, setting the water in the basin rippling, recalling the distur-
bance shown earlier in the title sequence and prefiguring, with its concentric
circles, the narrative vortex into which the viewer will soon be pulled. A doctor
in a white lab coat washes his hands in close-up and the image track cuts to an
establishing shot of a stark examination room, furnished only with the wash-
basin and stand, two chairs and a small wooden desk. The doctor stands poised
beside the basin and dries his hands on a towel that hangs on the chair in front
of him. He glances toward the camera as the sound of a door opening repeats
on the soundtrack. Although the two chairs are positioned directly under two
corresponding windows, the symmetry of the shot is thrown off balance: the
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 di a r y o f a l o s t g i r l 163

doctor and the washbasin form one half of the image, while the desk, windows
and empty chairs form the other (unequal) half. The asymmetrical composi-
tion both suggests the unbalanced state of mind of the patient, and at the same
time, sets up a dynamic in which the doctor, seen alone on the left-hand side of
the screen, is separated from a space for two people (arguably, the two person-
alities that Su-mi has internalised: her own, and that of the evil stepmother). A
nurse leads Su-mi (Im Soo-jeong), dressed in hospital pyjamas, into the room
and helps her into the seat on the right-hand side of the screen. The doctor
nods, signalling that the nurse is to leave, and he sits down, facing the patient.
The image tracks then shifts, as the doctor is shown in medium close-up from
the patient’s point of view (her head and shoulder fill the lower right-hand
portion of the screen). As the patient sits, motionless, the doctor begins asking
questions. ‘How was your day today? How was it?’
The doctor continues to stare fixedly at the patient as he lifts a tape recorder
from the table and, as he turns it on, continues with his interrogation. ‘Well,
then, shall we talk?’ He crosses his hands and leans forward in a move seen
in countless other films. ‘First tell me about yourself.’ He pauses and then
poses an enigmatic question: ‘Who do you think you are?’ When that gets no
response, he produces a snapshot from a pile of papers on the desk and asks,
‘Do you know who this is?’ Although he makes no clear distinction as to which
figure in the photograph that he wants the patient to identify, his index finger
nearly obscures the face of Eun-joo. When the patient still fails to respond,
he continues, ‘Don’t know? Hmm? It’s your family.’ He extends his hand,
his finger still clearly placed on Eun-joo, and asks, ‘Want to see it again?’ His
movement toward the patient is mirrored by the camera, which, static up to
this point, begins to track forward. ‘Fine, then. Can you tell me about that
day?’
As the patient slowly begins to disappear off the right-hand side of the
screen, the image track shifts from behind her to in front of her. However,
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unlike earlier shots of the doctor, which identified the point of view as the
patient’s by partially including her in the frame, the shot of Su-mi, presum-
ably from the doctor’s point of view, reduces the clinician to an arm in a white
lab coat in the lower portion of the screen. ‘What happened that day?’ he asks
again, as the camera continues the same forward-moving pattern as in the title
sequence, but moving toward sunlight rather than shadow, perhaps suggest-
ing, in visual terms, that the process of analysis will bring the shadowy secrets
to light.
Again, there is a switch, as the interview is once more shown from the
patient’s point of view, the camera moving forward. ‘You should be able to
remember it clearly.’ The camera draws nearer to the doctor, leaving behind
any trace of the patient. ‘It’s okay . . . Tell me what happened.’ The camera
switches positions one last time, continuing with its relentless forward motion,
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moving closer and closer to the patient, in so doing, mimicking the invasive
clinical gaze, and prefiguring the move from external (reality) to internal
(mental), from present to past (flashback) that is about to occur.
The association (never acknowledged, but clearly indicated by the doctor’s
placement of his index finger on Eun-joo’s figure in the photo) between the
question about the patient’s identity (‘Who do you think you are?’) and the
photographic image of the stepmother foreshadows the eventual revelation
that Su-mi suffers from a post-traumatic dissociative identity disorder – a
condition in which she incorporates the identity of Eun-joo, recast from nurse
/ mistress to the role of the wicked stepmother from the Korean folktale. The
strangely archaic-looking clinical setting, the helpful doctor and the aphasic
female patient, too, function as yet other links to the Victorian era, calling to
mind the then-new science of psychoanalysis, which brought to light the gap
between the inner (mental) and outer (everyday) life of the subject.

the l o st m o me n t
In her study of the women’s film of the 1940s, Mary Ann Doane (1987)
discusses the opening sequence of Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed (US, 1947),
which, focused as it is on the figure of a woman suffering from amnesia and
aphasia, strongly resembles the one-sided clinical dialogue that opens Two
Sisters. Louise Howell (Joan Crawford) is found wandering the streets of Los
Angeles, and is taken to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital for observa-
tion. There, she is given a drug to help her recover her memories, and more
even more important, to induce her to recount the events that have led her
to the state in which she finds herself at the film’s outset. Unlike Two Sisters,
though, the flashback that makes up the action of Possessed is punctuated by
voice-over narration provided by the female character herself. However, since
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

the patient narrates while under the influence of psychotropic drugs, her nar-
rative is halted, questioned, directed and analysed by the male doctors present
at her examination. ‘The woman’s narrative’, writes Doane, is ‘held in check
by recurrent withdrawals from her flashback account to the present tense of
the doctor’s diagnosis’ (Doane 1987: 55). She goes on to add, ‘Within the
encompassing masculine medical discourse, the woman’s language is granted
a limited validity – it is, precisely, a point of view, and often a distorted and
unbalanced one’ (ibid).
In Two Sisters, the doctor disappears after the initial consultation and the
film’s narrative – a flashback – opens not over voice-over narration, but rather
over musical accompaniment. Su-mi remains technically silent for most of the
film; her few attempts to communicate with her father are met with disbelief.
Her experiences are communicated to the spectator solely by virtue of her
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 di a r y o f a l o s t g i r l 165

position as protagonist, not by way of spoken language, and thus, no opportu-

nities for halting or redirecting her narration interrupt the story’s unfolding.
Indeed, the only other male figures (the individuals who, in Doane’s formula-
tion, might be able to ‘rescue’ the narrative and set it back on track) in the film
are Moo-hyeon, the girls’ emotionally distant father; Seon-gyoo, Eun-joo’s
younger brother, who appears in only two scenes; and Mr Jang, the gardener,
who appears briefly in one shot at the opening of the film. Eun-joo’s appear-
ance in what appears to be a man’s suit at the film’s shocking dénouement – the
moment at which the narrative is ‘put right’ – then, seems all the more signifi-
cant, in that it reveals the extent to which Eun-joo, as both the father’s trained
assistant and as the father’s mistress, is trusted and believed, while the girls
and their mother (seen alternately as immature and hysterical) are not.
Yet one more aspect of the film that conforms to Doane’s theories on the
woman’s film is that ‘[t]he illness of the woman is signaled by the fact that she
no longer cares about her appearance’ (1987: 41), as illustrated by Su-mi’s
ghastly appearance in the film’s opening sequences. The work of the doctor,
then, becomes a twofold project: the cure of the patient and the beautification
of the patient. As Doane argues, ‘The narratives thus trace a movement from
the medical gaze to the erotic gaze in relation to the central female figure, acti-
vating a process of despecularization / respecularization’ (1987: 41). Again,
this is clearly the case in Kim’s film, as the first shot we have of the ‘healthy’
or ‘cured’ Su-mi, arriving home from a hospital stay, is a somewhat fetishis-
tic shot of her legs (a representational tactic notably repeated several times
throughout the film) as she slides out of the back seat of her father’s car.
This sudden transformation from patient to object stands in for a more
significant shift that underscores the central psychic conflict between daughter
and stepmother: Su-mi has matured from child to adult. This development
serves to destabilise already volatile family relations, and provides the impetus
for what will be the final confrontation between Su-mi’s two competing identi-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

ties ([step]mother and daughter) – a battle that is at the heart of the classical
melodrama. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith notes, ‘the Hollywood melodrama
is . . . fundamentally concerned with the child’s problem of growing into
sexuality within the family, under the aegis of a symbolic law that the Father
incarnates’ (1987: 271).
Like the women’s film shaped around ‘the medical discourse’ (Doane 1987:
38), A Tale of Two Sisters commences with a doctor’s command that a young
female patient speak – that she narrate for him the details of her illness, from
its origins to the (diegetic) present. These events, given that they form the
focus of the clinical analysis that opens the film, are clearly then aligned with
the narrative enigma or disturbance that will drive the film to its ultimate con-
clusion. The ‘work’ of the film becomes a work of analysis, albeit an analysis in
which, as Doane indicates, speech is replaced by spectacle, in which
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 166 robe r t l. ca g le

the ‘talking cure’ is translated into the terms of vision. The flashback
structure is the means by which the character is depicted as
apprehending his or her past . . . In this mise-en-scène of memory, a
matching between self and scene is accomplished and that matching
generally marks the completion of the narrative. (Doane 1987: 47)

Following this logic, in Two Sisters, once the events of ‘that day’ are revealed
via flashback, order should be re-established. However, despite the fact that
the origin of the character’s illness is revealed, its disclosure does not bring a
full resolution. Rather than re-establish order (by clearly defining the differ-
ence between fantasy and reality, between pathology and wellness), this final
collection of images serves to complicate further the already convoluted story
that precedes it.
The series of flashbacks that set the film’s final explanatory movement into
motion begin immediately following the revelation that the conflicts between
Su-mi and Eun-joo have all taken place in Su-mi’s mind – that they have been
Su-mi’s own struggles with her memories and guilt. As the camera moves
forward, towards Su-mi’s face (from Eun-joo’s point of view), and the music
builds on the soundtrack, the film cuts back and forth from close-ups of Su-mi
in the present to several key moments from the storyline. The film presents
in explicit terms what it has hinted at in various ways throughout its running
time: that Su-mi and her father have been alone in the house since her return
from the hospital. With Su-mi’s illness clearly established (her psychosis has
taken the form of the classic Korean folktale, transforming herself, her sister
and her father’s mistress into the archetypal characters of victim-children and
evil stepmother), the spectator is left with at least some doubts as to the valid-
ity of her claims regarding Eun-joo’s mistreatment. Su-mi’s father hands her
two tablets of a presumably anti-psychotic drug. The image track cuts from
a medium close-up of the tablets in Su-mi’s hand, to an overhead shot as she
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

pops them into her mouth. The green glass pill bottle rolls away, and the image
fades to black, bringing to a close, in one economical set of images, the film’s
‘psychotic’ passages and placing the sequences that follow clearly in the realm
of diegetic reality.
But whereas Possessed follows up the revelation of its protagonist’s guilt
(and by extension, hopeless psychosis) with the intervention of a doctor who
offers to work tirelessly on curing poor, lost Louise, Two Sisters continues
to unravel and reveal more and more material, making its ‘resolution’ more
obscure, less certain. In the sequence that follows the fade to black, Eun-joo is
shown seated in the waiting room at the hospital. As a hospital staff member
and Su-mi’s father discuss her case, they look at Eun-joo. The forward track-
ing motion of the camera (closing in on Eun-joo) creates a visual suggestion
that the doctor seems to believe Su-mi’s claims – or at least that Eun-joo seems
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 di a r y o f a l o s t g i r l 167

to think that they are talking about her in a negative way. The image cuts from
Eun-joo in medium close-up to a medium shot (from behind) of Su-mi, once
again equating the two women. Eun-joo (shown from shoulders to knees)
walks into the room and sits next to Su-mi. A tense exchange follows, in which
Eun-joo feigns concern for a seemingly unresponsive Su-mi, who stares into
the distance. When Eun-joo stands to leave, Su-mi grabs her wrist, still staring
straight ahead. Her verbal claims of abuse, long ignored, become a physical
action that suggests a refusal to ‘let Eun-joo go’ unpunished.
Eun-joo and Moo-hyeon are then shown driving home together in the
car. The image track cuts back to Su-mi, in close-up, who recalls the events
of the day about which the doctor in the opening sequence has interrogated
her. A cut from Su-mi’s face to a pair of feet swinging in the air punctuates
the shift from present to past, as the film slips into a final spiral into pathos:
the sisters and their mother watch helplessly as the father brings his nurse /
mistress into the home for a family dinner with her brother and his fiancée.
For a moment, the father is shown, slightly out of focus and in the distance,
trapped between the figures of the two girls, whose earlier expressions of shock
and disdain seem to have provoked in him at least a slight reaction of guilt
and discomfort. The sisters are shown in medium close-up again, with Su-mi
looking on helplessly as Su-yeon seems on the verge of tears. Here, once again,
the image track cuts back to the diegetic present as a pensive Eun-joo is shown
seated alone in darkened dining room where two earlier confrontations have
taken place, but now, rather than warm reds and deep burgundies, the room
is lit almost entirely in cold blues. The once seemingly colourful Blackthorn
wallpaper shown in the opening credits now provides a greenish-grey back-
ground to the action, imbued once again, as it was in the title sequence, with
an aura of uncanniness.
Evidently triggered by Eun-joo’s own memory, the film cross-cuts once
again, taking the viewer back to the earlier family dinner. Su-mi slams her
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

spoon angrily down on to the table and storms away, leaving a confused-
looking Su-yeon to face Eun-joo’s wrath. Eun-joo rips the spoon from
Su-yeon’s hand, effectively denying the child the very food she needs to
survive (a classic melodramatic action), and the girl marches dutifully into the
kitchen to throw her uneaten juk into the sink. As the mournful strains of the
score rise on the soundtrack, Su-yeon walks into her bedroom and falls face
down on to the bed in tears.6 Her mother, weakened by illness and neglect,
does her best to comfort the girl.
The film cuts back to the hospital and Su-mi is shown seated, from behind,
as the sound of whistling is heard on the track. ‘Su-yeon,’ Su-mi says, as she
turns toward the sound, and smiles. The whistling continues, bridging a cut
from Su-mi to Eun-joo, who once again appears seated in the dining room,
her hands covering her face (perhaps in shame at the recollection of her brutal
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 168 robe r t l. ca g le

mistreatment of the girls). She, too, hears the sound of whistling and goes to
investigate. Eun-joo enters Soo-yeon’s room and turns on the light. There, she
is surrounded by a veritable riot of roses on the wallpaper and on the curtains.
An audience of dolls of different shapes and sizes sits on the bench next to the
window. The lights go out, the door slams shut, and Eun-joo approaches the
wardrobe that has played such a prevalent role in the film thus far. She sees a
tab of fabric sticking out from the folded bedding stored there and pulls on it,
bringing with it what is evidently the malevolent spirit of either the mother,
the younger sister, or both. As Eun-joo backs away, the dolls staring silently
behind her, her mouth opens wide and the sound of the spirit fills the air. As
the image track cuts to a long shot of the house from outside, we hear Eun-
joo’s scream fade into the night as the camera pulls away from the house and
into the darkness.
Still in the present, the film cuts once more to the hospital, where Su-mi
is shown lying in bed, a tear falling as she closes her eyes and says (to herself)
her sister’s name. The image fades to white, and returns to Su-yeon crying on
the bed in her room, where she has evidently fallen asleep. As she sits up and
looks toward the wardrobe, one of its doors swings open. Perplexed, Su-yeon
approaches the wardrobe and discovers her mother has committed suicide and
now hangs next to an emerald green hanbok (Korean traditional clothing).7
The girl tries desperately to free her mother, and inadvertently pulls the ward-
robe over on to herself, mortally injuring herself in the process. Here the film
stops for a moment to record the reactions of Eun-joo and her brother’s girl-
friend, Moo-hyeon and Eun-joo’s brother, and finally Su-mi, as they all turn
toward the sound of the crash. A sideways tracking shot unites the reactions of
Eun-joo, Su-mi and Moo-hyeon in a single motion, equating their responses
and creating what, it could be argued, functions much in the same way that
the tableau does in the classical stage melodrama. Brooks (1995: 48–9; 56–7)
sees these instances of action stilled as a key part of the stage melodrama, given
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

that these moments place the moral nature of each of the play’s characters into
stark relief, revealing formerly hidden ‘truths’ about each, and allowing the
spectator the opportunity to pause and reflect.
Eun-joo hurries up the stairs and discovers Su-yeon crushed under the
wardrobe, but still alive. Driven either by hatred or by shock, Eun-joo backs
out of the room. As she turns to go back in (and presumably save the girl),
she encounters Su-mi, who has emerged from her bedroom. Su-mi insults
the woman, accusing her of trying to take their mother’s place. In one of the
most significant and moving moments in the film, Eun-joo admonishes the
young woman to speak and act with greater care, as ‘one day you may regret
this.’ Su-mi spits a contemptuous response back at the older woman and runs
down the stairs, fleeing the house that is no longer her home, and unaware of
the consequences her actions have on her sister’s fate. She stops mid-flight and
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 di a r y o f a l o s t g i r l 169

turns to look behind her, catching a glimpse of Eun-joo standing in a balcony

doorway and staring coldly out at her. As their gazes meet, Eun-joo snaps the
shuttered doors closed, effectively shutting off Su-mi’s last point of access to
her home and everything in it, and signifying the separation from past and
present, ‘before’ and ‘after’. The camera dizzyingly circles the figure of the
young woman standing alone in a field of tall grass as music swells on the track
and the flow of images comes to a halt. The final image of Su-mi in the field
fades from colour to black and white as the camera zooms in closer and closer
to the now still photograph. Like the poster image, this shot of Su-mi takes on
the symbolic value of a memorial image – a representation of the last moment
of Su-mi’s life before she condemns herself to an existence of maddened, self-
inflicted punishment. A monochromatic image of the young woman seated on
a pier replaces this still, repeating one of the first shots of the film, and colour
and movement are restored once again, a little at a time. Su-mi looks to her
right and the image freezes as the end credits roll.
Although the narrative significance of this series of shots is in its original
context quite clear (it serves as an explanatory epilogue to a labyrinthine sto-
ryline, and translates the stepmother’s earlier admonition to the girl – ‘One
day you may regret this’ – into terrifyingly literal terms), the overall effect of
this final sequence extends far beyond mere exposition; as a moment of resolu-
tion, the sequence is imperfect, marred by the nagging presence of a memory
trace, symbolised by the empty space to the right of the young woman in the
final shot. Again, like the post-mortem photograph, this final image becomes
a material representation of loss of and longing for innocence – a melancholic
meditation that might equally stand in for the Victorian sensibility, the hys-
teric, and the melodramatic mode: a young woman, haunted by recollections,
endlessly repeats a series of traumatic events, evidently with the hope of some
day finding peace.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

no t e s
1. Critics have used terms such as ‘elegant’ (Lim 2009: 235), ‘poignant’
(Williams 2004: 85) and ‘lyrical’ (Elley 2003: 24) to describe the film’s look,
and Lim discusses its undeniable ability to stir ‘passion’ and ‘pathos’ (Lim
2009: 240) in viewers.
2. The story was adapted in 1924, as The Story of Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon
(Janghwa Hongryeonjeon) – although the Korean Film Archive identifies
the director of the 1924 adaptation as Kim Seo-jeong, other sources (Kim
2007: 34; Lee and Choe 1998: 36; and Lee 2000: 24) give directorial credit
to Park Jeong-hyeon (credited as ‘Planner’ in KOFA records) – again under
the same title in 1936, this time in a work directed by Hong Gae-myeong;
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 170 robe r t l. ca g le

again in 1956, as Jang-Hwa and Hong-Ryeon Story; and in 1962, as The

Story of Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon (Dae Jang-hwa Hong-ryeonjeon), both
directed by Chung Chang-wha. Finally, in 1972, the story was remade yet
again as Jang-Hwa and Hong-Ryeon: A Story of Two Sisters, and directed
by Lee Yoo-seop. Most recently, the tale surfaced again, although in title
only, in Kim’s 2003 feature and Lee Woon-ik’s 2009 150-episode television
drama, Love and Obsession (Janghwa Hongryeon), neither of which qualifies
as an adaptation.
3. Technologies of portrait photography in the nineteenth century required
subjects to remain motionless for extended periods of time, most often
in settings illuminated by strong daylight. Thus, subjects often appear
uncomfortable, ill at ease; very few are shown smiling, the preferred pose
for subjects of snapshots. Oh Hyeong-geun, the artist who created the
poster design for the film, remarks in an interview included as part of the
UK ‘Asia Extreme’ special edition DVD release, that he is fond of asking
subjects to smile in preparation for being photographed, and then leaving
them hanging for long periods of time in order to reach a moment at which
comfort and happiness (however feigned) are transformed into irritation,
anxiety and exasperation – thus forging an interesting representational link
between past and present, Victorian and contemporary.
4. ‘The notion that a language of flowers existed in the Orient became known
to Europe largely through the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from
Turkey in the eighteenth century. Earlier travelers had referred to the use
of flowers as “a mysterious language of love and gallantry . . . to express
the most tender and delicate of sentiments” . . . But it was Lady Mary who
brought it forcibly to people’s attention in 1718’ (Goody 1990: 2).
5. Interestingly, it is the Victorian home that has become the preferred locus,
in the popular imagination, for uncanny happenings and dark deeds, taking
the place once held by the gothic castle, an earlier symbol of even more pro-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

found socio-economic privilege and the frequent setting for horror stories
written during the Victorian era. See Lynch (2004) and Vidler (1994).
6. As I have noted in my work on the use of pop music in Korean television
drama (Cagle 2013), the important (indeed, defining) role played by music
has, in recent years, been undervalued, if not overlooked entirely in studies
of the melodrama. The haunting score written for Kim’s film by noted
Korean musician and composer Lee Byeong-woo stands out as one of the
best examples of how music (repetitions, variations and so on) both create a
sense of cohesiveness in the work, and at the same time, inform spectatorial
responses to it.
7. Su-yeon wears the hanbok in a photograph that falls to the ground and
breaks in this sequence, and the ghost of the ‘girl under the sink’ wears it in
the earlier ‘dinner party’ sequence in the film. The green dress is an explicit
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 di a r y o f a l o s t g i r l 171

reference to a similar item of clothing worn by one of the sisters’ ghosts in

many versions of the folktale.

wo r k s c i t e d
Bernheimer, Charles and Claire Kahane (eds) (1985), In Dora’s Case: Freud,
Hysteria, Feminism, New York: Columbia University Press.
Bown, Nicola (2009), ‘Empty Hands and Precious Pictures: Post-Mortem
Portrait Photographs of Children’, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies,
14: 2, pp. 8–24.
Brooks, Peter (1995 [1976]), The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry
James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Cagle, Robert L. (2013), ‘Don’t Forget: The Musical Dimensions of South
Korean Television Drama’, in J. Kim (ed.), Reading Asian Television
Drama: Crossing Borders and Breaking Boundaries, London: I. B. Tauris,
forthcoming.
Cho, Insoo (2008), ‘Midnight Rendezvous: Ardent Love and Heartache of
Separation’, Koreana, 22: 3, pp. 50–3.
Curtis, Barry (2008), Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, London:
Reaktion.
de la Tour, Charlotte (1819), Le Langage des fleurs, Paris: Audot.
Doane, Mary Ann (1987), The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Elley, Derek (2003), ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’, Variety, 391:8, p. 24.
Freud, Sigmund with Josef Breuer (1955 [1893]), ‘On the Psychical
Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’, in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Volume II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria, London: Hogarth, pp. 1–240.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1892), ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, New England
Magazine, 11: 5, January, pp. 647–57.
Gledhill, Christine (1987), ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in
C. Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the
Woman’s Film, London: BFI, pp. 5–39.
Goody, Jack (1990), ‘The Secret Language of Flowers’, Yale Journal of
Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities, 3: 2, pp. 133–52.
Ha, Tae Hung (1958), Folk Tales of Old Korea, Seoul: Korea Information
Service.
Hustvedt, Asti (2011), Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris,
New York: W. W. Norton.

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Kim, Mee-hyun (ed.) (2007), Korean Cinema from Origins to Renaissance,

Seoul: CommBooks.
Lee, Hyangjin (2000), Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, and
Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lee, Young-il and Choe Young-chol (1998), The History of Korean Cinema:
Korean Studies Series No. 12, trans. R. Greever, Seoul: Jimoondang.
Lim, Bliss Cua (2009), Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal
Critique, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lynch, Eve (2004), ‘Spectral Politics: The Victorian Ghost Story and the
Domestic Servant’, in N. Bown et al. (eds), The Victorian Supernatural,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 87–108.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1987 [1977]), ‘Minnelli and Melodrama’, in
C. Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the
Woman’s Film, London: BFI, pp. 70–4.
Oliphant, Margaret (1896), ‘The Library Window’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, 159, January, pp. 1–30.
Rousseau, G. S. (1993), ‘“A Strange Pathology”: Hysteria in the Early Modern
World, 1500–1800’, in S. L. Gilman et al., Hysteria Beyond Freud, Berkeley:
University of California Press, pp. 91–224.
Seaton, Beverly (1995), The Language of Flowers: A History, Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia.
van Gorp, Hendrik (2008), ‘The Gothic Novel as a Romantic Narrative
Genre’, in G. Gillespie et al. (eds), Romantic Prose Fiction, Philadelphia:
John Benjamins, pp. 249–61.
Veblen, Thorstein (1912 [1899]), The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic
Study of Institutions, New York: Macmillan.
Vidler, Anthony (1994), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern
Unhomely, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Williams, Linda Ruth (2004), ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’, Sight and Sound, 14:9,
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p. 85.
Yoon, Jeongkoo and Hyeonho Seok (1996), ‘Conspicuous Consumption and
Social Status in Korea: An Assessment of Reciprocal Effects’, Korea Journal
of Population and Development, 25: 2, pp. 333–54.
Zŏng In-sŏb (1952), Folk Tales from Korea, Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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 c h apter 12

From A Tale of Two Sisters

to The Uninvited:
a tale of two texts
Leung Wing-Fai

This chapter focuses on an analysis of the intertextual transformations pre-

sented in the South Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon,
Kim Ji-woon, 2003) (hereafter, Two Sisters) and its Hollywood remake, The
Uninvited (Charles and Thomas Guard, US, 2009). Scholarly work on recent
Hollywood remakes of East Asian films has taken the approach of industrial
contexts (Xu 2008), fan reception (Hills 2005) and gender politics (Wee 2011),
and examined them through the comparative analysis of the texts. This kind
of study reveals much about the political economy of global cinema, and the
cultural and social differences in the consumption of contemporary film. The
folktale Janghwa Hongryeon-jeon (The Story of Rose and Lotus) was adapted to
film six times (two during the silent period, and four made subsequently in
South Korea). The Uninvited came at the end of a line of American remakes
of Asian films that were connected to the producer Roy Lee, nicknamed the
Remake King, since the success of remaking Ring (Ringu, Nakata Hideo,
Japan, 1998) as The Ring (Gore Verbinski, US, 2002). In an interview after
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

the initial success of remaking mostly Japanese horror films, Lee paradoxically
emphasised that:

what impresses the audience most of all is the quality of a story.

The film industry is now transcending national borders. The role
of Japanese films and how they will be evaluated in Hollywood will
depend on how much their original content can directly appeal to the
American people. (cited in Heianna 2005)

Film remakes are a type of adaptation of earlier films (Mazdon 2000; Grindstaff
2001; Horton and McDougal 1998). Recent studies in relation to adaptation
tend to go beyond debating cultural differences, and ‘influences’ or fidelity
(Stam 2000), although it may be argued that all genre films are reworking,
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 174 leu ng w in g- f a i

extension or transformation of texts (Neale 1990: 58). Linda Hutcheon points

out that adaptations may be so common because we take pleasure in adaptation
as a form of ‘repetition with variation’ and the ‘comfort of ritual combined
with the piquancy of surprise’ (Hutcheon 2006: 4). In examining new ver-
sions of an earlier film, it is a legitimate subject to focus on how an adapta-
tion departs from sources ‘because of new cultural or historical contexts it
addresses’ (Leitch 2008: 66). In analysing Two Sisters and The Uninvited¸
this study highlights which elements of the narrative have enduring appeal
and why certain aspects disappear as the story is adapted cross-culturally, as
well as the resulting theoretical implications. I shall focus on two particular
themes: time and space. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope (time–
space) is the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships
that are artistically expressed in literature (Bakhtin 1986: 84). The concept is
particularly appropriate for the analysis of cinema, a medium that is rooted in
its temporal and spatial representations; Gilles Deleuze sets out in Cinema 1:
The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image how cinema is like no
other art form in its relations to the experience of time and space (1986, 1989).
Bakhtin argues that time and space are inseparable, the intersection of the two
creating the integral whole as ‘space becomes charged and responsive to the
movements of time, plot and history’ (1986: 85). In order to discuss the time,
plot and history of the two adaptations, I also employ the concepts syuzhet (the
plot) and fabula (story) (Bordwell 1985: 50). The terms are taken from Russian
formalist writings, with which Bakhtin’s works are associated: syuzhet (plot)
‘is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film’ (ibid).
An analysis of Two Sisters and The Uninvited will reveal how time and space
are arranged within the film texts and if these films relate to their respective
cultural and historical contexts.

a tale of two sisters : h o me a s a sit e of fema l e

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m al a d y
The Story of Rose and Lotus is thought to have been written during the Joseon
period (1392–1897 / 1910), a long, imperial dynasty that was deeply influential
in embedding Confucian thought in Korean society (Kang 2006). I shall give a
brief summary of the anonymous classic ghost novel, taken from Jeong In-seob
(Zŏng In-sŏb)’s version in Folk Tales of Korea (1952), though slight variations
of the story exist.
Once upon a time, a man named Bae and his first wife had two daugh-
ters whom they named Janghwa (Rose Flower) and Hongryeon (Lotus).
Unfortunately, the girls’ mother died when they were young, and their father
remarried. The stepmother was cruel and ugly, and abused her stepdaughters.
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 a t a l e o f t wo t e x t s 175

When Janghwa turned seventeen, the stepmother placed a skinned rat in

her bed and accused her of having a miscarriage out of wedlock. In shame,
Janghwa drowned herself in a nearby lake. Hongryeon soon followed her older
sister and committed suicide. New magistrates arriving in the town all died
suddenly until a brave official arrived who listened to the ghosts of the two
sisters. The evil stepmother was executed, but the father was released because
he was thought to know nothing about his wife’s evil deeds. Bae remarried
again and the couple gave birth to two girls – the reincarnations of Janghwa
and Hongryeon. The novel is called a gongan (kongan, or a public case) story,
a cautionary tale about how justice prevails even under extraordinary circum-
stances (Bush 2001: 31). Laurence Bush suggests that when the novel was
summarised by Jeong under the title ‘The Two Sisters, Rose and Lotus’, the
supernatural element was downplayed. Instead, the story emphasised moral
purity and righteousness, and proper conduct within the family, reflective
of Confucian teaching, and therefore the folklore is a powerful exemplar of
literature that demonstrates what Bakhtin identified as an ‘extremely produc-
tive wave of national-historical time that exerted an immense influence on the
development of the historical outlook in general and on the development of the
historical novel in particular’ (Bakhtin 1986: 52, original emphasis).
Bakhtin is particularly concerned with historical epochs that appear in and
inform literature. The Story of Rose and Lotus was a traditional ghost story,
provided a Confucian message, chronotopic, and is reflective of national–
historical time. The number of adaptations and the folktale’s endurance would
suggest that the story was also able to relate to different historical contexts.
Folklores are rich sources of horror and many provide repetitive elements
found within the horror film genre (Twitchell 1985). Carol Clover suggests
that horror movies are similar to folktales because they are fixed types that
generate endless variations in sequels, remakes and rip-offs (Clover 1992:
10). The pleasures of repetition with variation explain the similarity between
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

horror and the oral narrative, as they are both usually enjoyed in a social
group. With the remake, the narrative should continue to relate to its specific
national–historical context. Two Sisters and The Uninvited retain some of the
elements from the folktale: the two sisters, the death of their mother, the cruel
stepmother and an ‘innocent’ father, but not the circumstances of the mother
and sister’s deaths, the arrival of the official and the resolution. Most impor-
tantly, they both feature a surviving sister who is the organising centre of the
films. It is the adaptation of the classic ghost story to the filmic conventions of
horror and mystery by these two films that explains the increasing disjuncture
between space and time within the narratives and their cultural frameworks.
At the beginning of the Two Sisters, the sisters (now named Su-mi and
Su-yeon) arrive home and the narrative presents a schizophrenic episode
over three days, ending with Su-mi returning to the hospital. The developing
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 176 leu ng w in g- f a i

mental illness of Su-mi is not made clear at the beginning, and the temporal
arrangement of the film is essential in concealing this. In K. K. Seet’s study
of the film, alongside Dark Water (Nakata Hideo, Japan, 2002), he considers
the generic exchange between horror and family melodrama in what he calls
Asian domestic gothic (2009). He discusses how these films are ultimately
conservative and act as a form of containment, ‘the modern purification ritual
that emphasizes the need for recuperation into the male order of things’ (ibid.:
143). Two Sisters mostly consists of one long flashback, which shows a three-
day period after Su-mi first returns from psychiatric hospital, then a shorter
flashback and an epilogue explaining the deaths in the family and the moment
that caused her madness. As discussed in other chapters in this volume, con-
temporary Korean horror often hinges on the flashback. The Asian ghost film
presents the space as a site of memory, in particular of traumatic recollection
(Lim 2009: 205). In terms of time and space, therefore, Two Sisters can be
interpreted as conventional among contemporary Korean horror.
The first scene in the mental institution is, in fact, the end of the story, after
Su-mi returns to hospital. The doctor asks her who she thinks she is, which
triggers the flashback. The narrative centres on the individual, and the past
is therefore understood through Su-mi’s personal memory. This individual
journey is none the less located within the familial space, which is presented as
an evil space of conflicts in Two Sisters. The outside of the house is where the
viewers first see the two girls, and it is light and idyllic, in sharp contrast to the
indoor scenes. In the scene of the two sisters sitting on a pontoon by the reser-
voir that takes place shortly after their arrival, they dip their toes in the water;
the mise-en-scène juxtaposes clear blue sky with the green water and the sisters’
red-coloured clothes. The same colours are used in the interior scenes but the
inside of the house is dark and stuffy, and lined with wood panels and antique
furniture, in sharp contrast with the outdoor scenes. The William Morris
wallpaper gives the house a retro atmosphere and a decaying ambiance. The
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girls’ clothes are also floral, sometimes lacy, and exude nostalgia for time past.
The mise-en-scène, designed by Jo Geun-hyeon, manages to evoke Victoriana
as a more universal time of traumatic memory (these concepts are discussed
in greater detail in Robert Cagle’s chapter in this collection). The four main
characters – the sisters, the father (Bae) and the stepmother (Eun-joo) – are
all comfortable in their own spaces with distinctive mise-en-scènes. For the
sisters, these spaces are feminine and flowery, while the father sleeps in a
grey-blue office. Each character occupies a separate and personalised space,
which is symbolic of the tension among them. The first time Su-mi enters
her room, she winds the clock that has stopped since her mother and sister
died. This is symbolic, as the film is, according to the commentary by director
Kim Ji-woon, about a broken soul destroyed by a fraction of a moment. The
family home therefore interacts with Su-mi’s memory of the past. In Su-mi’s
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 a t a l e o f t wo t e x t s 177

illusion, Eun-joo’s despair at not being accepted by the two sisters leads to a
key scene in which she shuts Su-yeon in a cupboard after finding her pet bird
in bed, believing Su-yeon to be responsible. The dead animal in bed seems to
be a tenuous reference to the dead rat in the folktale. Eun-joo tells Su-yeon
that she must stay there until she is sorry. Su-yeon is released by Su-mi, who,
with obvious devotion, promises not to let it happen again; the whole episode
is cathartic for Su-mi, allowing her to repent and resolve her guilt. When her
father finds Su-mi and tells her that Su-yeon is, in fact, dead, shaky camera
work shows the disbelieved Su-yeon in tears, unable to accept her own death
and screaming. This re-enactment of a conflict between Eun-joo and the two
sisters allows Su-mi to ask for forgiveness. As the organising centre of the
story, Su-mi goes through the individual changes that are typical for a fictional
hero – guilt, punishment and redemption (Bakhtin 1981: 119–28). Through
moments of crisis, the individual ‘becomes other than what [she] was’ (ibid.:
115) at the end of the narrative.
A main site of painful personal memory is the dining table and kitchen,
a traditionally important meeting place for the Korean family (Pettid 2008).
The mise-en-scène of the setting is central in portraying this conflictual space;
the red (floor) and green (wallpaper and cupboards) exaggerate this clash, and
intensify the power of the space that represents family tension. Towards the
end of the film, a flashback of an argument in the kitchen shows the trigger for
the deaths of the mother and Su-yeon. Following a conflict during a family
meal, Su-yeon discovers that her mother has hanged herself in the ward-
robe. While trying to take her mother’s body down, the cupboard topples on
Su-yeon. Eun-joo could have saved Su-yeon but she decides not to after Su-mi
angrily tells her to stay out of their lives. Su-mi therefore misses the oppor-
tunity to save her sister’s life, and this is the turning point for her, and most
certainly the moment that causes her mental illness. Bakhtin’s analysis of the
turning point in folklore suggests that it is when:
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space becomes more concrete and saturated with a time that is more
substantial: space is filled with real, living meaning, and forms a
crucial relationship with the hero and his fate. This type of space so
saturates this new chronotope that such events as meeting, separation,
collision, escape and so forth take on a new and markedly more concrete
chronotopic significance. (1981: 120)

While the time of the deaths of Su-mi’s mother and sister is crucial for her,
the breakdown of the family in Two Sisters is presented as an inevitable facet of
modern life – Eun-joo declares that she is the only one Su-mi can call ‘mum’
because ‘that’s how the world is.’ The uncle and aunt are the only outside wit-
nesses to Su-mi’s madness. At dinner after Su-mi’s return from the hospital,
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 178 leu ng w in g- f a i

Eun-joo becomes hysterical and the two guests are unable to respond. This
Eun-joo is Su-mi’s imaginary alter ego, the one who interrogates the uncle
when he says he cannot remember a particular childhood incident. Su-mi /
Eun-joo tells him, ‘Why can’t you remember? Are you crazy?’ This is ironic
because a montage is subsequently used to explain that her sick mind has
invented the confrontations during the three days, and this invention comes
largely from the painful memory of family conflicts. During Su-mi’s final
breakdown, it is revealed that the convergence of Su-mi and Eun-joo is part of
her illusion, which creates a series of enigmas in the fabula. If the fabula should
embody ‘the action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occur-
ring within a given duration and a spatial field’ (Bordwell 1985: 49–53), the
enigmas in Two Sisters deliberately cause temporal confusion, and an emphatic
gap between story and plot, creating the ambiguity in the film (Lim 2009: 242).
Two Sisters constructs the family home as an unreality imagined by Su-mi,
which privileges the (gendered) individual’s worldview often seen in classic
American horror, rendering the narrative less directly relevant to the con-
temporaneous South Korean context. So this adaptation universalises the
folk-story into a (mostly) psychological horror centring on Su-mi’s schizo-
phrenic episode, which helps to reconcile her role in the deaths of her mother
and sister. It is especially significant that the film is bracketed with Su-mi’s
treatment and arrival at the mental institution. The film deals with personal
memory and trauma, and individualises the female protagonist’s mental state
as a symptom of the familial condition. In her seminal work Female Malady
(the term used to refer to hysteria), Elaine Showalter criticises R. D. Laing’s
anti-psychiatry in that it ignores the oppression of women within the family,
which she asserts is central in explaining many of Laing’s female patients’
schizophrenia (Showalter 1985: 220–47). On the contrary, Two Sisters empha-
sises that Su-mi’s condition is the result of familial, especially patriarchal,
oppression. The arrival of the nurse Eun-joo to care for the sisters’ sick mother
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disrupts the nuclear family. Unlike the traumatised men often featured in New
Korean Cinema (Kim 2004), the patriarch in Two Sisters seems permanently
unable to connect with the emotions of the eternally suffering female members
of the family. As in the folktale, the patriarch is absolved of responsibility,
though he is the trigger of the feud. In Two Sisters, the father is incredibly
powerful while acting as a bystander to the women’s arguments; his cold,
rational manner contrasts sharply with the hysteria and familial preoccupation
of the female protagonists. Eun-joo / Su-mi metaphorically fight over the duty
to clean and iron his laundry. Su-mi declares that the family is making her sick
– the female malady is caused by domestic upheaval, and the claustrophobic
interior scenes reflect the oppression in the modern home.
The long finale starts with dreams and hallucinations of Su-mi, who has
been left on her own in the house while her father goes out to look for help.
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 a t a l e o f t wo t e x t s 179

This is also when Su-mi and Eun-joo eventually collide, ending in a fight –
Su-mi literally battles with her own demon. Her father comes home to find
her on the floor, bloody from self-harm and lying among the broken pieces of
a see-no-evil statue. However, the first time this sequence is shown, the audi-
ences take up Su-mi’s viewpoint in that Eun-joo appears to be the one who
is hurt and suffering from hysteria, lying on the floor. Then, the father puts
Eun-joo on the sofa, who looks up to someone in a grey-blue suit entering
the room. The camera dollies to behind the back of Eun-joo to reveal that the
real Eun-joo is the one who has just entered the room. The camera reverses
to the back of the standing Eun-joo, and tilts down and zooms in to a close-
up to show that it is in fact Su-mi who is on the sofa, facing her imaginary
antagonist. The sequence is then presented a second time to show Su-mi’s
manic episode, after being left home alone. These repeated scenes are delib-
erately disorientating. The turning point of Su-mi’s journey – the deaths of
the mother and Su-yeon – is shown in an epilogue (flashback), and intercut
with the ‘present’. Eun-joo, knowing that Su-yeon is calling for help under the
cupboard, tells Su-mi that she might regret the moment. Su-mi walks away in
a rage. She stops for a second to look back at the house but does not return.
The frame turns black and white as Su-mi stands with her back to the house.
Through this profoundly sad ending, the film suggests that one moment can
become something so important in life that it becomes etched in the memory.
The gender-focused conflict is reflected by the collision between the three
real and imaginary female characters, the stepmother and two sisters, and
symbolised by the presence of menstrual blood, another trope often used in
American horror, most famously in Carrie (Brian De Palma, US, 1976), in
which the protagonist’s period is the source of her pain that also ‘becomes the
source of her power’ (Clover 1992: 3). Menstruation signifies feminine power
but is also a threat that often triggers male fear of castration. The motif first
appears when we encounter the apparition of the dead mother in Su-mi’s
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dream. Su-mi wakes to find Su-yeon’s period has come. It is, in fact, Su-mi’s
period and this naturally coincides with the period of the imaginary Eun-joo.
The menstrual blood is the abject that ‘defines what is fully human from what
is not’ (Kristeva 1982: 65); through confronting her own body horror and the
ghostly figure of her sister and the imagined Eun-joo, Su-mi finds the fragile
‘I’. As such, the film is closer to the conventions of American horror in por-
traying a central female monster–victim–hero (Clover 1992), in which the
menstrual blood symbolises the convergence of the three female roles (Creed
1993). The difference from the conventions of American horror is that there is
no catharsis at the end for the monstrous hero, Su-mi. In her delusional state,
she (via the imaginary Eun-joo) tells herself, ‘You want to forget something
[. . .] but you never can. It follows you around like a ghost.’ So the ghost in
this story is the broken soul that is the result of an oppressive family. If a local
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 180 leu ng w in g- f a i

cult is rooted in a geographical location, Two Sisters takes place in an unreality

imagined by a mentally ill woman, caused by a broken family that oppresses.
The film also exemplifies the modern adaptation of a folktale to horror conven-
tions that foreground the plight of the gendered individual, while the specific
locale, and the family within its social and historical contexts of contemporary
South Korea, become less significantly related.
In Bakhtin’s conceptions of chronotope, ‘it is not private life that is sub-
jected to and interpreted in light of social and political events, but rather the
other way around – social and political events gain meaning in the novel only
thanks to their connection with private life’ (Bakhtin 1981: 107). While the
classic Korean novel is concerned with morality resonant of the Joseon period,
as a genre film, the time–space relationships are intratextually significant in
Two Sisters: that is, the temporal organisation within the texts is important
in how the story is revealed. None the less, the film’s relationship to contem-
poraneous social and political events is less obvious, as the story is presented
as the personal and individualised journey of Su-mi, and employs tropes that
are common in American horror. Graham Pechey writes that ‘Bakhtin “his-
toricizes” what Freud seems to “biologize”’ (Pechey 2007: 100), in that sexual
repression is manifested in the individual’s temporal and spatial experiences.
Two Sisters centres on the domestic space as a site for painful memories, but
the individualised and gendered experiences of time and space betray the
influences of both Hollywood horror genre and more universal, modern ideas
about the family.

the uninvited : r e p r e ssio n a n d t h e a mer ic a n

f am i ly
The Uninvited further Americanises and universalises the story of the two
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

sisters. Bliss Cua Lim’s analysis of the importance of genre in American

remakes is insightful:

Genre is conceived of not only transhistorically but also cross-nationally

and industrially; temporality is explored along the axes of generic
repetition and the speed of film-industrial appropriation; and finally,
translation refers us to the work of deracination and refamiliarization in
global Hollywood’s remakes of screen rivals from Asian film industries.
(Lim 2009: 191, original emphasis)

Unlike the highly stylised location of Two Sisters, this is a suburban, wealthy
household that represents the imagined American bourgeois nuclear family.
The protagonist is now the younger sister Anna, who avenges the deaths of
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 a t a l e o f t wo t e x t s 181

her ailing mother and older, wayward sister Alex. The sick mother is confined
to the boathouse, away from the main home, and communicates only through
a bell; a nurse, Rachel, has been brought in to provide care, and Anna’s father
plans to marry her after his wife’s death. Early exposition includes Anna’s
statement to the psychiatrist, ‘There’s something wrong. There’s something
evil in the house.’ This is a self-conscious statement, as are the repetitions of
the dead mother’s presence and the sound of the bell, which constantly remind
the viewer of the enigma. The change in the title already suggests the central
role played by the intrusion of Rachel and the importance of the mystery
element of the story, and in this sense the character both intrudes into the
space (the family home) and delays the resolution.
The house is set in an isolated wooded area flanked by a lake. The film was
shot in Steveston, British Columbia, Canada, a stand-in for a generic North
American suburb. A similar scene to the above-mentioned pontoon sequence
in Two Sisters takes place early in this film: Anna changes into a summer top
and shorts, and meets Alex in a bikini and an opened shirt by the pontoon
that serves their home. Basking in hot sun, the sisters talk about the evil ‘step-
mother’, thus laying out the conflicts, unlike the idyllic scene in Two Sisters.
The kitchen in the house does not serve as a family space, as it does in Two
Sisters, though the first thing that Anna notices upon returning home from
the psychiatric hospital is that Rachel has redecorated the kitchen, the family
hearth, and their old chalkboard has been removed. Anna duly restores this
childhood reminder, and in the process damages the wall, symbolic of what
she is about to do. The interior is much more light and airy than that in Two
Sisters, and the film does not rely on the mise-en-scène to portray the sense of
oppression and conflict. Rather this is a ‘traditional’, wealthy North American
suburban home, a space that appears to be threatened by Rachel, and her
presence in the narrative delays the final revelation.
The Uninvited is told in a linear narrative after Anna returns home from a
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

stay in the psychiatric ward, followed by a shorter epilogue which resolves the
mystery. This resolution may be termed ‘delayed and concentrated exposi-
tion’; as Bordwell explains, the concentrated exposition of syuzhet is typical
at the end of detective stories (Bordwell 1985: 56). The Uninvited turns the
folktale into a crime mystery, in which the use of concentrated exposition at
the end provides a resolution to the enigma of how the mother and Alex die,
and what happens after Anna’s return from hospital. The Uninvited is set in
the present (2008), but little refers to the immediate political and historical
contexts; rather, the film speaks to a more universal cultural milieu. In Robin
Wood’s seminal work on American horror, he distinguishes between the
universal, ‘basic repression’ that makes us ‘distinctively human’ and surplus
repression that is culturally specific (Wood 1985: 197), so the monster in
American horror represents the dual concept of the repressed / the Other to
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 182 leu ng w in g- f a i

capitalist ideology (ibid.: 200–1). Wood further argues that it is possible to

extend the monster figure to other genres (ibid.: 204). In The Uninvited, both
Rachel (female sexuality) and Anna (the victim / monster / terrible child) are
the challengers to family unity and must be destroyed at the end in a return
to repression. With the lack of culturally and historically specific references,
the repression of both female sexuality and the monster can be interpreted as a
more general extension of the lineage of the genre.
The Uninvited builds up the fabula through standard cinematic tropes used
in mysteries, such as dead ends and red herrings. ‘It is a convention of mystery
and detective tales that the narration can inject hints, clues, and false leads . . .
as long as the solution to the mystery is not given away prematurely’ (Bordwell
1985: 59). The narrative centres on the mystery of ‘who’ has murdered the
mother of the family. Rachel‘s role in the narrative is clearly a decoy, who leads
the audience to believe as long as possible that she is the ‘uninvited’ to familial
unity. Much of the main narrative is from the perspective of Anna, the unreli-
able witness – her dreams and delusions lay down false clues that Rachel may
be the evil murderer. The ‘horror’ elements in the film are now connected to
the ghosts of three dead children from a local murder case that occurred twelve
years previously. Rachel’s false name and the recurring references to these
murders, committed by another murderous nurse who stabbed to death three
children under her care after their mother died, are the false leads.
The heart of the conflict in this version of the story is sexuality within the
American nuclear family. Rachel re-sexualises the family, and it is her love-
making with the sisters’ father that leads to Anna’s rage and madness, though
her father is also seemingly untouched by the emotional turmoil around him.
The film begins with Anna’s narration for the psychiatrist, ‘I’m at a party but
all I want to do is to get home.’ She interrupts sex with a local boy, Matt, to get
home when she encounters the ghosts of three children for the first time. The
family is therefore where sex is repressed, in which the demonic and sexually
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

liberalised intruder has to be controlled. When Anna asks Rachel why she has
traded in her mother’s car, Rachel answers, ‘The family needed something
more fun.’ This is another exposition that emphasises the dangerous libera-
tion that the new girlfriend represents. The two sisters find a vibrator and sexy
underwear in Rachel’s drawer and they are repulsed; Alex immediately takes
the battery out in order to stop Rachel ‘having fun’. On the night of the party,
Anna decides to get petrol to set fire to the house after spying on Rachel and the
father having sex, and this leads to the accident that kills her mother and sister.
In his introduction to Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American
Horror Film (1996), Tony Williams contends that the excessive representa-
tion of blood and violence in these films is a fetishistic component that aims at
diverting attention from something else, be it the dangers of female sexuality
or repression in the family. The fire and accident therefore serve as a rationale
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 a t a l e o f t wo t e x t s 183

and obsession for Anna to pursue revenge on Rachel, but the real repression
within the family is control of female sexuality. Upon returning home from
the hospital, when Anna hears Rachel and her father having sex next door,
she encounters another dream of the ghostly figure of her mother, who is now
the spirit of repression. Laura Mulvey’s seminal thesis on classic Hollywood
cinema suggests that the female protagonist might be destroyed or controlled
by the male gaze and authoritative figure (1975). In The Uninvited, the punish-
ment of the object of sexual desire (Rachel) is through eventual destruction
by the young female protagonist (Anna) acting in the name of revenge. Seet
suggests that since the 1980s, ‘As patriarchy [in the US] is threatened, the
children assume the guise of changelings who exercise a deconstructive force
on patriarchal culture’ (Seet 2009: 142). Anna and, to a large extent, Su-mi
are ‘final girls’ (Clover 1992) – the last female survivor in a horror film – with
a difference: both protagonists assume the role of the authoritative figure, but
are also seemingly declared ‘insane’ and therefore unreliable as stable subjects.
Both films accentuate the roles of the individuals in the modern family rather
than the social norms and community as in the original folktale.
The presence of the dead sister in the two films functions differently. In
Two Sisters we have entered Su-mi’s worldview and the narrative is deliber-
ately confused to reflect her state of mind. This schizophrenic episode arises
out of guilt and regret over her sister’s death, so the resolution at the end of
the film serves to reconcile and explain Su-mi’s behaviour. In The Uninvited,
Anna’s mental state is less driven by guilt, but rather by her desire to eliminate
Rachel as the person ultimately responsible for the death of her older sister
and mother. In this sense, Alex only reappears as an imaginary accomplice
rather than the source of Anna’s emotional state. The respective ‘accidents’ of
the two films present the major cultural difference: the suicide and suffocat-
ing of the mother and Su-yeon in the cupboard that is a domestic, feminine
space as opposed to the dramatic explosion of the summerhouse – the symbolic
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

incendiary result of female sexuality. Two Sisters individualises through the

depictions of the human psyche while constructing the family as an isolated,
conflictual space. The Uninvited represents the American family as an oppres-
sive space ripe for a classically structured mystery. In both cases, therefore,
the diegetic spaces are divorced from the actual spatial and temporal contexts
(contemporary South Korea and the US), while conforming to the generic
conventions of South Korean and American cinemas.

c onc l u s i o n
The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and
enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of
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 184 leu ng w in g- f a i

the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in

a continual renewing of the work through the creative perception
of listeners and readers. Of course this process of change is itself
chronotopic: it occurs first and foremost in the historically developing
social world, but without ever losing contact with changing historical
space. (Bakhtin 1981: 254)

The Korean Joseon period folktale The Story of Rose and Lotus is about the
return of the sisters seeking justice, so the folklore acted as a morality tale for
the community. Using the Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope, this chapter
considers the intersections of space and time in both films, but also how the
adaptations over time, cross-culturally, have played a part in the changes; this
development, as Bakhtin identifies above, is itself chronotopic. The ghost
story is updated to an individual’s battle in a vaguely contemporary and eerily
oppressive setting in Two Sisters. Critic Kim Hyeong-seok labels the film
‘subversive horror’ because, rather than staging a confrontation between the
subject and the other, it ‘ultimately locates the other within the subject’ (cited
in Paquet 2009: 95), so the temporal confusion serves to highlight the trau-
matic journey of the subject. Then the story is transposed to another general-
ised modern North American location in The Uninvited.
The dialectical relationship between the unreliable witness (the surviving
sister) and the stepmother forms the basis of dramatic development, though
they differ in emphasis in the two versions. The generic conventions present
in the two films are employed here to explain the changes in the temporal and
spatial arrangements as the story is adapted. Two Sisters is a horror film with
elements of domestic drama that references tropes of American horror and
ideas about the psychiatrically disturbed female protagonist. The Uninvited
turns the story into a mystery, and as such employs tropes such as the con-
centrated exposition in the syuzhet, alongside the intrusion of the sexualised
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

‘stepmother’ in the family. At the heart of these two texts is the vulnerable soul
of the individual in the family home (A Tale of Two Sisters), and the failure of
the imaginary nuclear family framed within a classic mystery narrative (The
Uninvited). Though the space and time in both films are abstracted from their
immediate contexts, the two adaptations make reference to South Korea and
American cinematic traditions as a result of the development of genres, a
process that can be seen as chronotopic.

wo rk s c i t e d
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
Austin: University of Texas Press.
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 a t a l e o f t wo t e x t s 185

— (1986), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Bordwell, David (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film, London, Methuen.
Bush, Laurence C. (2001), Asian Horror Encyclopedia: Asian Horror Culture in
Literature, Manga, & Folklore, Lincoln, NE: Writers Club Press.
Clover, Carol (1992), Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film, London: BFI.
Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and
Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, London:
Athlone.
— (1989), Cinema 2: Time-Image, London: Athlone.
Grindstaff, Laura (2001), ‘A Pygmalion Tale Retold: Remaking La Femme
Nikita’, Camera Obscura, 16, pp. 133–75.
Heianna, Sumiyo (2005), ‘Interview with Roy Lee, Matchmaker of the
Macabre’, Kateigaho International Edition; [Link]
win05/[Link]; accessed 17 October 2011.
Hills, Matt (2005), ‘Ringing the Changes: Cult Distinctions and Cultural
Differences in US Fans’ Readings of Japanese Horror Cinema’, in J. McRoy
(ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 161–74.
Horton, Andrew and Stuart Y. McDougal (1998), Play It Again, Sam: Retakes
on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hutcheon, Linda (2006), A Theory of Adaptation, New York and Abingdon:
Routledge.
Kang, Jae-un (2006), The Land of Scholars: Two Thousand Years of Korean
Confucianism, Paramus, NJ: Homa & Sekey.
Kim, Kyung-hyun (2004), The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
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Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York:

Columbia University Press.
Leitch, Thomas (2008), ‘Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads’, Adaptation, 1:
1, pp. 63–77.
Lim, Bliss Cua (2009), Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal
Critique, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mazdon, Lucy (2000), Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema, London:
BFI.
Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16: 3,
pp. 6–18.
Neale, Steve (1990), ‘Questions of Genre’, Screen, 31: 1, pp. 45–66.
Paquet, Darcy (2009), New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, London:
Wallflower.
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 186 leu ng w in g- f a i

Pechey, Graham (2007), Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World, London:
Routledge.
Pettid, Michael J. (2008), Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History, London:
Reaktion.
Seet, K. K. (2009), ‘Mothers and Daughters: Abjection and the Monstrous-
Feminine in Japan’s Dark Water and South Korea’s A Tale of Two Sisters’,
Camera Obscura, 24: 2, pp. 139–59.
Showalter, Elaine (1985), The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English
Culture, 1830–1980, London: Virago.
Stam, Robert (2000), ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in
J. Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Twitchell, James B. (1985), Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wee, Valerie (2011), ‘Patriarchy and the Horror of the Monstrous Feminine’,
Feminist Media Studies, 11: 2, pp. 151–65.
Williams, Tony (1996), Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American
Horror Film, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.
Wood, Robin (1985), ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in
B. Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Volume II, Berkeley: University of
California Press, pp. 195–220.
Xu, Gary G. (2008), ‘Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood’,
in L. Hunt and W. F. Leung (eds), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring
Transnational Connections on Film, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 191–202.
Zŏng In-sŏb (1952), Folk Tales from Korea, Westport, CT: Greenwood.
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 c h apter 13

Oldboy goes to Bollywood: Zinda

and the transnational appropriation
of South Korean ‘extreme’ cinema
Iain Robert Smith

On 8 July 2011, Vishesh Films released Murder 2, a sequel to their 2004 hit
Murder. Written and produced by the brothers Mukesh and Mahesh Bhatt,
the film was an unlicensed Bollywood remake of the South Korean thriller
The Chaser (Choogyeogja, Na Hong-jin, 2008). Taking various elements of the
plot from the earlier film without any acknowledgement of its source, Murder
2 exemplifies a trend within Bollywood cinema for producing unlicensed
remakes and adaptations of international cinema. Indeed, the earlier Murder
was itself an unacknowledged remake of the Hollywood film Unfaithful
(Adrian Lyne, 2002), forming part of a long history of plot borrowings from
Hollywood to Bollywood.1
What is significant with regard to Murder 2, however, is that rather than
choosing to rework another Hollywood feature, the Bhatt brothers elected
to adapt and transform the plot of a South Korean film. This reflects a wider
global phenomenon over the last decade in which a number of industries
have been remaking South Korean films. From the Hollywood horror feature
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Mirrors (Alexandre Aja, 2008), which reworks Kim Seong-ho’s Into the Mirror
(Geoul sokeuro, 2003), through to the Japanese zombie musical The Happiness
of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no kôfuku, Miike Takashi, 2001), which reworks
Kim Ji-woon’s The Quiet Family (Joyonghan gajok, 1998), there has been a
trend for filmmakers around the world to take inspiration from South Korean
cinema. Within Bollywood alone, many of the most popular contemporary
Korean films have been remade, including the thriller A Bittersweet Life
(Dalkomhan insaeng, Kim Ji-woon, 2005) as Awarapan (Mohit Suri, 2007)
and the romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (Yeopgijeogin geunyeo, Kwak Jae-
yong, 2001) as Ugli Aur Pagli (Sachin Kamlakar Khot, 2008). While some
scholars have recently begun to engage with Hollywood remakes of South
Korean cinema, existing studies have so far failed to account for the growing
relationship between Bollywood and South Korea.2 Taking inspiration from
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 188 iain r o be r t s m it h

Koichi Iwabuchi, who argued in his book Recentering Globalisation that we

should move our attention away from seeing globalisation purely in terms of
East–West exchanges and instead begin to grapple ‘with the fascinating but
underexplored study of cultural globalisation in the context of intra-Asian
interactions’ (2002: 210), it is my contention that the relationship between
these two industries has much to tell us about the dynamics of world cinema
in the twenty-first century.
This chapter will therefore centre its analysis on Zinda (Sanjay Gupta,
2006), a Bollywood feature that reworks the iconic South Korean film Oldboy
(Oldeuboi, Park Chan-wook, 2003). Exploring the ways in which the film
adapts and alters the more violent and sexually transgressive material from its
source, the chapter will consider what this tells us about the global circulation
of horror imagery. Furthermore, given that Oldboy itself is already an adapta-
tion of a Japanese manga (comic book), this account will propose that the film
needs to be seen not simply in terms of its South Korean national context, but
also within the broader transnational context of the ‘global extreme’ cycle.
By shifting attention from the national to the transnational in this way, the
chapter will ultimately explore what this tells us about the Koreanness, or
otherwise, of Korean horror cinema.

oldboy a n d q ue st i o ns o f t h e n a t ion a l
For many scholars of South Korean cinema, from Darcy Paquet through to
Jeeyoung Shin, Oldboy has come to be emblematic of the New Korean Cinema.
Released by Show East in 2003, the film won the Grand Prize at the Cannes
Film Festival and went on to achieve unprecedented international box-office
returns. Helping establish a model for success at major overseas film festivals,
Oldboy assisted in raising the visibility of South Korean cinema on the world
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

stage and became an iconic centrepiece of the New Korean Cinema movement.
Indeed, the significance of the film for the South Korean industry has led
some commentators to read it through the prism of national culture. Joseph
Jonghyun Jeon, for example, situates Oldboy in the wake of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in South Korea, reading the protagonist Oh
Dae-su ‘as an embodiment of the anxieties and vexations of the salary men
working for the chaebols at a time of economic collapse’ (2009: 713). Moreover,
Darcy Paquet argues that while ‘Oldboy was adapted from a Japanese manga
. . . there is something in the situation faced by its protagonist that seems to
echo the pent-up frustrations of life in pre-democratic Korea’ (2009: 1).
Within Korea itself, however, there has been some debate about how rep-
resentative this film actually is of specifically Korean concerns. As Nikki J. Y.
Lee has observed in her research on the movie, many Korean commentators
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 s o ut h ko r e a n ‘e x t r e m e ’ c i n e m a 189

have argued that the success of Oldboy at Cannes was less to do with any par-
ticular Korean qualities and more to do with ‘its supposedly universal or famil-
iar styles, themes and generic thriller elements’ (2008: 210). Furthermore, the
fact that the film is an adaptation of a Japanese manga series that began pub-
lication in 1996, before the IMF crisis in South Korea, complicates attempts
to read the film as a form of national allegory of this period. As I will discuss
later, many of the narrative elements which were identified as reflecting the
South Korean context were, in fact, present in the Japanese manga. Given
that the Bollywood film Zinda is generally understood to be a remake of the
South Korean film, this reflects a wider phenomenon that Julian Stringer has
noted in relation to Ring (Ringu, Nakata Hideo, Japan, 1998), in which the
designated ‘original’ text is itself an adaptation, presenting us ‘with an extreme
confusion over what is the “original” and what is the “copy”’ (2007: 299).
Therefore, rather than positioning Oldboy as the ‘original’ text framed in
terms of its South Korean background, it is more productive to consider the
film within a broader global context of intertextual exchanges and borrowings.
In its transformation from the Japanese to South Korean to Indian incarna-
tions, we can trace the ways in which various textual elements have been
adapted and reworked across these national borders. Shifting attention away
from the limiting conceptual framework of the single nation, such a perspec-
tive allows us to consider how certain styles and themes are shared across these
different contexts while other elements are changed and altered. Specifically
looking at how the narrative and aesthetics of Oldboy are adapted from the
Japanese manga into the South Korean incarnation and finally the Bollywood
remake, we can analyse the complex and dynamic relationships between these
three contexts.
Of course, while this case study allows us a privileged perspective into the
differences between divergent generic traditions, we should be wary of reading
the changes as simply being the result of essentialised national characteristics.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

As Rashna Wadia Richards has argued, the predominant theoretical model for
understanding this kind of cross-cultural remake has been to position it as ‘a
simple act of translating’ from one context to another, where the filmmaker
adapts the text ‘by reconstructing its narrative to conform to [different] cul-
tural practices’ (2011: 342). In other words, scholars have been interpreting
the cross-cultural remake using a symptomatic methodology in which changes
and differences are understood largely in terms of national traits. For Oldboy,
therefore, the differences between the three versions of this story would be
understood in terms of ideological reformulations where the Japanese values of
the manga were reformulated for the South Korean context and subsequently
reformulated for the Indian context. The problem with such an approach is
that it focuses on elements which can be understood as nationally specific
while missing the more complicated transnational dimensions at play in each
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 190 iain r o be r t s m it h

adaptation. As I will now explain, a more relevant critical perspective is to see

these dynamics in terms of cross-cultural exchanges within the globalisation
of horror.

zinda a nd t h e ‘g l o b a l ho r r or ’ g en r e
David Desser has recently argued that one of the problems with basic genre
theory is that it arose to account for nationally specific genres. Focused on
understanding how a genre responds to issues within that national culture,
basic genre theory fails to account for those genres in which examples appear
across the globe. Instead, Desser proposes that scholarship engage with tran-
snational genres such as ‘global noir’, which consists of ‘crime films of the
last two decades produced in global cities for global markets [which] reveal
startling similarities of style, theme and characterisation’ (2003: 516). Citing
examples including Hong Kong noir City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987), Korean
noir – Nowhere to Hide (Injeong sajeong bolgeot eobtda, Lee Myung-se, 1999),
Mexican noir – Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) – and
Japanese noir – Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl (Samehada otoko to momo-
jiri onna, Ishii Katsuhito, 1998), Desser suggests that this phenomenon relates
to a global cinephilic culture of young people ‘conversant with postmodern
technologies, including videocassette, DVD, VCD, computers and the inter-
net’ (2003: 534), which help provide easy access to international cinema. It is
this impulse towards cinephilia which facilitates ‘the ability and necessity of
acknowledging the intertextual chain of references, borrowings and rework-
ings’ (ibid.: 528), meaning that stylistic and thematic similarities emerge
between films produced in vastly different filmmaking traditions.
Significantly, Sanjay Gupta, before directing Zinda, produced a number
of Bollywood features that fit into this global noir genre. A controversial
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

presence within Indian cinema, Gupta started his career with Aatish: Feel
the Fire (1994), an unacknowledged reworking of the Hong Kong thriller A
Better Tomorrow (Ying hung boon sik, John Woo, 1986), and he has contin-
ued to produce films that sit at odds with the prevalent styles and themes of
the Bollywood mainstream. Prior to Zinda, Gupta’s most notable work was
his Indian entry in the ‘heist gone bad’ strand of global noir, Kaante (2002).
Reworking elements from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (US, 1992) and
Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (US, 1995), and shot within Los Angeles,
this action thriller is representative of Gupta’s attempt to work outside the
dominant trends of Bollywood and engage with a global culture of cinephilic
intertextual referencing. Furthermore, given that Reservoir Dogs was itself
famously indebted to the aforementioned Hong Kong film City on Fire, it is
possible to trace the global impact of this strand of noir through the contexts of
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 s o ut h ko r e a n ‘e x t r e m e ’ c i n e m a 191

Hong Kong, America, India and beyond. As such a case study indicates, this is
not a simple uni-directional process of influence but rather part of what Robert
Stam terms ‘the ongoing whirl of intertextual references and transformation,
of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transforma-
tion and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’ (2000: 66). This approach
therefore moves away from the concept of an ‘unbroken vertical axis which
leads from the “original” text to the remake as “copy”’ and instead replaces
it with the more productive ‘circles of intertextuality and hybridity’ (Mazdon
2000: 27).
While Desser focuses solely on global noir, this is not the only example of
a genre that transcends a national framework. The cinephilic impulses which
result in similarities of style, theme and characterisation across divergent
national contexts can also be traced within the horror genre. As Steven J.
Schneider and Tony Williams argue in the introduction to their collection
Horror International, ‘more than ever before, the horror film traditions of
. . . national and regional cinemas are engaged in a dynamic process of cross-
cultural exchange’ (2005: 2). Within Asia, this is most evident in those films
distributed in the UK / US by Tartan Films under the ‘Asia Extreme’ banner,
collecting together films according to generic similarities across a range of
national traditions including South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand.
While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the ramifications of
the Asia Extreme cycle for South Korean cinema, it is important to note that
Oldboy played a central role within Tartan’s construction of its Asia Extreme
brand and that the violent and transgressive material from the film was a key
part of its promotion in the West (Shin 2009).
Gupta’s choice, therefore, to follow up his latest entry into the global noir
cycle with a reworking of Oldboy has much to tell us about the cross-cultural
nature of Asia Extreme and the global impact of South Korean horror cinema.
Furthermore, while the South Korean adaptation of Oldboy achieved unprece-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

dented international success, its Bollywood remake was largely unsuccessful in

both the domestic and the foreign markets. Although this could be attributed
to a myriad of factors, it is important that we resist the temptation to focus on
whether the source film or the remake is the ‘better’ text, and instead interro-
gate the ways in which these films ‘construct and articulate their shared iden-
tities and their difference’ (Mazdon 2000: 150). Engaging with the dynamic
relationship between their respective industries, this approach can tell us a lot
about the nature of cross-cultural borrowings and the circumstances in which
they emerge. Therefore, through a detailed comparison of the ways in which
the transgressive and horrific elements in the text are treated within the manga,
the South Korean adaptation and the Bollywood remake, I will now interro-
gate what this tells us both about their specific national contexts and about the
broader globalisation of horror imagery.
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 192 iain r o be r t s m it h

All three versions of this narrative focus on the same storytelling conceit.
The central character (named Goto in the Japanese manga, Oh Dae-su in the
Korean adaptation and Balajit in the Bollywood remake) is kidnapped and
wakes to find that he has been locked in a cell. He is given no information as to
why he has been imprisoned and his only contact with the outside world is a
television set in his room. He is left in this cell for a significant period of time
(ten years, fifteen years and fourteen years respectively), and when he is finally
released, his sole motivation is to discover who imprisoned him and why. The
narrative then follows the protagonist as he locates the prison in which he was
trapped, interrogates the jailer for information and then follows a number of
clues to track down his kidnapper. The story concludes with a shocking revela-
tion about the protagonist that resolves the mystery behind his kidnapping.
This core structure is repeated in each adaptation with only limited
variation. As Nikki J. Y. Lee has observed, however, the South Korean
film ‘took its plotline from [the] Japanese manga of the same title, but was
then developed and transformed into something else entirely’ (2008: 203).
Specifically, I would contend that the transformation is largely the result of
alterations to the treatment of transgressive and horrific material in the text.
While the central narrative remains consistent throughout the three versions,
the most significant area of difference regards how the film utilises excessive
images of sexual and violent spectacle.
Firstly, Park Chan-wook makes a number of changes to the central charac-
ter Goto / Oh Dae-su, who shifts from being a quietly confident protagonist
in the manga into the desperate, deranged character portrayed in the film.
Representative of this shift, and in a sequence containing some of the most
iconic horror imagery, Dae-su uses scissors to cut off his own tongue in atone-
ment for the tragedy he has caused. This is a particularly bloody sequence,
which was not present in the Japanese manga and was added by the South
Korean filmmakers. Secondly, the Korean adaptation also adds a sequence
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

soon after the release of Dae-su, in which he eats raw, live squid. Served by
sushi chef Mi-do, whom Dae-su recognises from her appearances on televi-
sion during his incarnation, the sequence lingers upon the writhing tentacles
of the squid as our protagonist attempts to eat it using only his fingers and
teeth. Thirdly, and most importantly, the adaptation alters the rationale that
is offered to explain why the protagonist had been locked up in a cell for ten
/ fifteen years. While the reason in the manga is that Goto had unknowingly
upset his captor Kakinuma through a childhood expression of pity, Dae-su
in the South Korean adaptation angered his captor Woo-jin by spreading a
rumour about an incestuous relationship he had been having with his sister.
This then leads to the shocking revelation, absent in the manga, that Oh
Dae-su has been manipulated throughout the narrative into committing incest
with his own daughter. Together, these changes are representative of a shift
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 s o ut h ko r e a n ‘e x t r e m e ’ c i n e m a 193

towards a substantially more violent and transgressive narrative. Importantly,

all three of these elements fit within a discourse of ‘extreme’ Asian cinema,
which Oliver Dew has argued relates to an exoticised imaginary of Asia present
within the West:

It is not enough that the film be marginal in terms of its language or

other cultural content; it must also be marginal by dint of its location
in a critically disreputable genre, and by its excess, in terms of (sexual
or violent) spectacle, or its transgression of social or aesthetic norms.
(2007: 60)

It is significant, therefore, that the South Korean adaptation of the manga

adapts and reworks the basic narrative to incorporate these kinds of transgres-
sive elements. On the other hand, the Bollywood remake Zinda removes or
alters each of these images of sexual or violent spectacle. Neither the sequence
where the protagonist eats a live squid, nor the sequence where he cuts out
his own tongue is present in the remake. Furthermore, Sanjay Gupta alters
the central relationship between the protagonist and his female companion
so that Balajit is no longer accompanied by his daughter but rather is helped
throughout the narrative by a female taxi driver. The revelation about incest
committed with his daughter is therefore replaced by a less transgressive twist
in which we discover that his daughter, who has been absent throughout the
rest of the film, is being entered in a ‘virginity auction’ attended by a crowd of
men. These changes reflect a tendency which Tejaswini Ganti has observed
in the Bollywood industry, whereby Hindi filmmakers ‘operate as cultural
mediators, evaluating the appropriateness for their audience of stories, char-
acterisations, and themes from . . . [source] films’ (2002: 283). Indeed, the
term used within Bollywood story sittings to indicate elements that need to be
changed is ‘yeh to accept nahin hoga’, which means ‘this will not be accepted’
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

by Indian audiences.
However, I would contend that, in the case of Zinda, the changes made to
the story are less significant than the shared elements which are retained. In
other words, while the film makes some changes to the transgressive elements
present in the text, the film actually functions less as an attempt to ‘Indianise’
the source text than as an attempt to create a Bollywood film which engages
with the common stylistic and narrative tropes of the global horror genre.
Working outside the generic conventions of the masala film that dictate that
a mainstream Bollywood feature must be close to three hours in length and
contain four to eight musical sequences, Gupta has attempted to pioneer
a form of Bollywood film which is much closer to the format of the South
Korean film it is adapting. Unlike the vast majority of Bollywood feature films,
therefore, Zinda runs for less than two hours and replaces musical numbers
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 194 iain r o be r t s m it h

with montage sequences cut to a non-diagetic soundtrack. According to

Tejaswini Ganti, this is far from conventional in India, with the shortened
length and lack of songs signifying that ‘the film is outside the mainstream
of the Bombay film industry . . . which to most people in the industry means
death at the box office’ (2002: 295).
Furthermore, while some elements were removed, many of the violent
and horrific sequences from the South Korean adaptation are still recreated,
including the corridor fight sequence in which Dae-su / Balajit battles against
a large gang of men armed only with a hammer. While the camera movement
has changed from the smooth horizontal tracking shot in the South Korean
film to a pan / tilt from a fixed position in the Bollywood remake, the sequence
retains the emphasis on violent excess throughout its extended length. Even
more unusually, given the general reluctance to depict gruesome imagery
within the Bollywood mainstream, the film also retains the tooth torture
sequence in which Dae-su / Balajit extracts teeth from the jailer who runs the
prison. As director Gupta has himself discussed, Zinda is part of an attempt
to create ‘films that do not follow the conventional formula’ and that ‘break
barriers and take risks’ (Gupta in Jhunjunwala 2006). Indeed, the professed
aim of his production company White Feather Films, which Gupta set up
with star Sanjay Dutt, was to ‘chart out hitherto unknown territories in the
realm of Hindi cinema’ (Gupta 2001). As one of the flagship titles from this
venture, the film draws on a number of influences from international cinema
as part of a strategy to move beyond the conventions of the Bollywood form.
This is further exemplified by the shooting locations and intra-Asian produc-
tion arrangements which led to Zinda’s development. The film was largely
shot on location in the Thai cities of Bangkok and Pattaya, with support from
the Thailand Film Board and co-ordination support from the Bangkok-based
production house Digital Asia Concepts Ltd. Given that Thai cinema is very
much part of the ‘Asia Extreme’ cycle of global horror, with representative
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titles including Bangkok Dangerous (Oxide Pang and Danny Pang, 1999) and
The Eye (Gin gwai, Oxide Pang and Danny Pang, 2002), I would contend that
Gupta’s choice of location evokes many of the associations with the exoticised
imaginary of Asia that Dew (2007) and others have identified in this cycle.3
Given all of this, it makes no sense to see the film primarily as an ‘Indian’
reworking of Oldboy; rather we should broaden our perspective to see Zinda
as an attempt to create a Bollywood film which reaches out beyond India to
engage with this global genre of horror and excess.
Therefore, to help explore what this case study tells us about the respective
positions of South Korean and Bollywood cinema within the global dynam-
ics of horror, I would like to turn now to a more macro-level consideration of
national cinemas and intertextuality in the age of globalisation. In his research
into Australian national cinema, Tom O’Regan proposes a useful model for
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 s o ut h ko r e a n ‘e x t r e m e ’ c i n e m a 195

understanding the relationship between national cinemas and cross-cultural

exchange. Drawing on the work of Russian cultural theorist Yuri Lotman,
O’Regan proposes five stages of development in which a national cinema shifts
from being a receiving culture into a transmitting culture. Given the impor-
tance of the global / local dynamics in both Oldboy and Zinda, and by exten-
sion the contemporary South Korean and Bollywood industries, this paradigm
helps us consider the particularly transnational position of these cinemas.
The model describes the various ways in which a receiving culture adapts
and reworks elements from imported traditions, becoming more autonomous
as it grows and develops. The final stage of development is when ‘the receiving
culture . . . changes into a transmitting culture and issues forth a flood of texts
directed to other, peripheral areas of the semiosphere’ (O’Regan 1996: 221). At
this point, the cinema under consideration has completed the shift from being
seen primarily in terms of how it is shaped by other national cinema traditions,
and moved into a position where it is helping to shape other national cinemas.
In other words, this is a model of cultural exchange that emphasises the
changing dynamics of negotiation with global flows rather than attempting to
identify how a text fits within a particular national culture. O’Regan therefore
postulates that the distinctiveness of a national cinema may rest less in some
notion of intrinsic national identity but rather ‘may be found in its negotiation
of cultural transfers’ (ibid.: 221).
From such a perspective, we can see that the distinctiveness of South
Korean and Bollywood horror cinema relies less upon essentialised ideas of
cultural tradition and more upon their mutual negotiation of global cultural
transfers. As Jeeyoung Shin has argued in relation to Korean cinema more
generally,

the recent success of Korean films has in large measure been a result
of creative interaction between the transnational and the local media,
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

rather than a regressive insistence on ‘traditional’ cultural heritage or a

simple adoption and imitation of foreign culture. (2005: 57)

Such a way of understanding Korean horror cinema allows us to see this

movement in terms of an industry moving from being a cinema which is seen
primarily in terms of its domestic sphere into a cinema which is itself helping
reshape other national traditions – a cinema which provides a model for other
national cinemas looking to move beyond the domestic market.
In the case study of Zinda we see the value in such a transnational per-
spective as it shifts our attention away from what is distinctly South Korean
about Oldboy and instead helps us consider how it relates to broader circles of
intertextuality and hybridity surrounding the globalisation of horror imagery.
Korean horror cinema from this perspective establishes its importance on the
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 196 iain r o be r t s m it h

world stage through the ways in which it negotiates cultural transfers, rework-
ing certain stylistic and thematic elements and helping develop new trends in
global horror cinema.

co nc l usi o n
It was confirmed on 12 July 2011 that Hollywood studio Mandate Pictures will
be producing a remake of Oldboy, to be directed by Spike Lee. The announce-
ment forms part of a recognised current trend for Hollywood to rework suc-
cessful examples of South Korean cinema. Underexplored, however, are the
many appropriations of Korean films that have appeared beyond Hollywood
in contexts as diverse as Germany, where The Contact (Jeobsok, Jang Yoon-
hyeon, 1997) was remade as Frau2 sucht HappyEnd (Edward Berger, 2001);
Thailand, where The Letter (Pyeonji, Lee Jeong-gook, 1997) was remade
under the same title (Pa-oon Chantornsiri, 2004); and China, where Joe Ma
produced an unofficial sequel to My Sassy Girl simply titled My Sassy Girl 2
(Wode yemannuyou 2, 2010).
Darcy Paquet has observed that the unprecedented box-office success of
Korean cinema since 1999 has ‘translated into a proliferation of film companies
and increasing success in exporting Korean films to other Asian countries and
the rest of the world’ (2005: 47). While the craze for Korean popular culture
in other Asian countries, often referred to as Hallyu (the Korean Wave), never
managed to penetrate the Indian market, we have seen in this chapter how the
styles and themes present in Korean horror cinema have been adapted and
reworked by filmmakers in Bollywood. Indeed, this is a dynamic relationship
that is still in process. While this chapter has discussed an unofficial remake
of South Korean cinema in Zinda, it is significant that an official deal has
recently been reached between the Korean studio Lotte Entertainment and
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

the Indian production company UTV Motion Pictures to produce a remake

of My Girlfriend is an Agent (7geup gongmoowon, Shin Terra, 2009). This will
mark the first time that a Bollywood remake of a Korean film has been officially
licensed, representing a significant shift in the relationship between these two
industries.
As I have argued in this chapter, therefore, it is time to pay attention to the
transnational status of New Korean Cinema, especially the relatively unex-
plored intra-Asian dynamics. Too often, globalisation is seen purely in terms
of American popular culture dominating the world, and it is important that we
identify the ways in which South Korean texts are now forming part of quite
complex global flows and borrowings across Asia. Case studies such as Zinda
and Oldboy remind us to be wary of ascribing readings purely in terms of a
national context and instead to see them in terms of intertextual exchanges
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 s o ut h ko r e a n ‘e x t r e m e ’ c i n e m a 197

which cross national traditions. Given the transnational nature of global

horror, it makes sense to read these films less in terms of how they reflect and
refract specific national traditions and rather to interrogate what they tell us
about how these industries are negotiating cultural transfers from across the
world.

no t e s
1. Continuing this intertextual thread, Unfaithful was itself a reworking of the
Claude Chabrol film La Femme infidèle (France, 1969) and the film similarly
inspired the Bollywood films Hawas (Karan Razdan, 2004) and Tezaab:
The Acid of Love (Shakeel Noorani, 2005).
2. See, for example, Bliss Cua Lim (2007), Gary Xu (2008) and Leung Wing-
Fai’s chapter in this collection.
3. Interestingly, The Eye was given its own unlicensed Bollywood remake in
the film Naina (Shripal Morakhia, 2005), demonstrating that this attempt
to rework the conventions of ‘Asia Extreme’ titles is part of a wider
trend.

wo r k s c i t e d
Choi, Jinhee (2010), The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers,
Global Provocateurs, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Desser, David (2003), ‘Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of
Transnationalism’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III, Austin:
University of Texas Press, pp. 516–36.
Dew, Oliver (2007), ‘Asia Extreme: Japanese Cinema and British Hype’, New
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 5: 1, pp. 53–73.

Ganti, Tejaswini (2002), ‘“And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian”: The Bombay
Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood’, in F. D. Ginsbury,
L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New
Terrain, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 281–300.
Gupta, Sanjay (2001), ‘The Inception’, White Feather Films; [Link]
[Link]; accessed 21 November 2011.
Iwabuchi, Koichi (2002), Recentering Globalisation: Popular Culture and
Japanese Transnationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun (2009), ‘Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in
Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy’, positions, 17: 3, pp. 713–40.
Jhunjunwala, Udita (2006), ‘Zinda Was Exhausting: Sanjay Gupta’, Hindustani
Times, 11 January; [Link]
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 198 iain r o be r t s m it h

Zinda-was-exhausting-Sanjay-Gupta/[Link]; accessed 21
November 2011.
Lee, Nikki J. Y. (2008), ‘Salute to Mr Vengeance!: The Making of a
Transnational Auteur Park Chan-wook’, in L. Hunt and W. F. Leung (eds),
East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, London:
I. B. Tauris, pp. 203–19.
Lim, Bliss Cua (2007), ‘Generic Ghosts: Remaking the New “Asian Horror
Film”’, in G. Marchetti and T. S. Kam (eds), Hong Kong Film, Hollywood
and the New Global Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 109–25.
Lotman, Yuri (1990), The Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture,
London: I. B. Tauris.
Mazdon, Lucy (2000), Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema, London:
BFI.
O’Regan, Tom (1996), Australian National Cinema, London: Routledge.
Paquet, Darcy (2005), ‘The Korean Film Industry: 1992 to the Present’,
in C. Y. Shin and J. Stringer (eds), New Korean Cinema, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, pp. 32–50.
— (2009), New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, London: Wallflower.
Richards, Rashna Wadia (2011), ‘(Not) Kramer vs. Kumar: The
Contemporary Bollywood Remake as Glocal Masala Film’, Quarterly Review
of Film and Video, 28: 3, pp. 342–52.
Schneider, Steven Jay and Tony Williams (eds) (2005), Horror International,
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Shin, Chi-Yun (2009), ‘The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films’,
in J. Choi and M. Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme: Changing
Boundaries in Asian Cinema, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
pp. 85–100.
Shin, Jeeyoung (2005), ‘Globalisation and New Korean Cinema’, in C. Y.
Shin and J. Stringer (eds), New Korean Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

University Press, pp. 51–62.

Stam, Robert (2000), ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in
J. Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, pp. 54–78.
Stringer, Julian (2007), ‘The Original and the Copy: Nakata Hideo’s Ring
(1998)’, in A. Phillips and J. Stringer (eds), Japanese Cinema: Texts and
Contexts, London: Routledge, pp. 296–307.
Xu, Gary G. (2008), ‘Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood’, in
L. Hunt and W. F. Leung (eds), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational
Connections on Film, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 191–202.

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 c h apter 14

Park Chan-wook’s Thirst:

body, guilt and exsanguination
Kyu Hyun Kim

Park Chan-wook’s films, at least since Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun
naui geot, 2002), have garnered much praise on the international festival cir-
cuits and amongst European and North American film critics and enthusiastic
fans of Asian cinema, as well as those who love darkly flavoured thrillers and
neo-film noir. His breakout international success, Oldboy (Oldeuboi, 2003),
received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Yet Park’s films have
also generated considerable controversy not only among consumer–viewers
but also among professional commentators and academics. Few would dismiss
his films as commonplace or mundane, yet many critics, as well as film scholars
(worldwide, not just in Korea), have indicated their reluctance to designate
him as an important filmmaker who has engaged with the cinematic medium
in an innovative or creative manner.
Many will acknowledge that it is not easy to write summary opinions
of Park’s motion pictures. On the surface, they often appear to be simply
‘well-made’ commercial films with no other ambition than fulfilling certain
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

genre expectations. Therefore, many viewers, critics and scholars are some-
times stunned, disturbed or even baffled by, for instance, Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance, when it refuses to stop at being an intelligent and poignant film noir
and goes on to inculcate a suffocating sense of dread and existential despair
befitting an extreme horror film (Kim 2005). A similar observation can be
made about Oldboy, in which the deliriously unrealistic narrative (adopted
from a Japanese comic book) is combined with dazzling cinematic techniques
and topped by a provocative conclusion that plays havoc with conventional
morality as understood in most industrial societies, abandoning the good-
versus-evil ethical stance of a typical thriller. Park’s films sometimes appear to
aim for satire or black comedy, yet they also generate uncomfortably genuine
emotions, flooding the ironic distance between viewer and characters. Park
appears to play with genre conventions in such complex and virtuoso (or,
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 200 k y u hyun k im

depending on where you stand, confusing) ways, mixing and matching seem-
ingly incompatible categories of classification and cultural lineages, so that the
usual tools or languages of analysis become inadequate. Look, for instance, at
the way I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (Ssaibogeu jiman gwenchana, 2006) veers
away from a Tim Burton-like, garishly pre-adolescent ‘modern fairy tale’ to
become a hospital-set psychodrama and then morphs into an almost perversely
authentic eruption of Japanese science-fiction anime sensibilities and aesthet-
ics (more ‘Japanese’ than the Japanese works themselves). Finally, Park’s films
are problematic for any critic or scholar who wants to use them as referents
pointing to the ideological features of South Korean society, usually in the
guise of socio-political concerns, or conversely, who wishes to dismiss them
out of hand as complete fabrications with no meaningful connection to Korean
culture and history; neither ‘reading’ is particularly persuasive and each seems
to miss rather than hit the target.
Given this often (seemingly) self-contradictory and even befuddling quality
to Park’s works, it is not surprising that they have given rise to a few exam-
ples of extremely negative reactions among North American critics; these
include Rex Reed’s (2005) borderline-racist ‘review’ of Oldboy in the New
York Observer, which he later apologised for and retracted after protests from
the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. However, these
instances should not obscure the fact that North American critics have, by and
large, supported Park, even if few of them have marked him out as a world-class
filmmaker in the same league as, say, Martin Scorsese or Bernardo Bertolucci.
This is apparent in the case of Thirst (Bakjwi, 2009), as well.1 It is therefore
rather misleading to claim that the ‘foreign’ (or ‘American’) critics wilfully
misunderstand or vilify Park. The director’s sheer mastery of genre idioms and
his stylistic exuberance are frankly reason enough for many critics to take his
work seriously. An awareness of the critically elusive and allegedly ‘perverse’
nature of Park’s works informs my discussion of Thirst in this chapter, but
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

at the same time I have no intention of teasing out a few profound meanings
from the film via the application of theoretical apparatuses, psychoanalytic or
otherwise. What I attempt here is simply to illuminate some possible paths that
readers / viewers can navigate in order to reach their own interpretations of
the film. It is my view that taking the genre identity of the film seriously (and
the genre literacy of Park as filmmaker and film fan), as well as looking at its
‘spiritual concerns’, can make such an endeavour more fruitful.
In addition, I believe that there should be no conflict between reading
Thirst in the context of Korean culture, history and society and assessing its
merit and power in terms of its relation to the horror film genre. The assess-
ment of Park’s movies and, to a certain extent, the works of those directors
identified by Kim Young-jin as trying to map ‘the third way’ between conven-
tional art-house cinema (unfortunately, this phrase is not an oxymoron) and
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 b o d y, gu il t a n d e x s a n g u i n a t i o n 201

commercial motion pictures (this includes Ryoo Seung-wan, Bong Joon-ho

and Kim Ji-woon) suffers to a degree, I feel, from internalised exoticism on
the part of many viewers (Kim 2004: 12–14). To be blunt, much of what a fair
number of (non-Korean and a surprising number of Korean) critics assume
to be ‘foreign’ or ‘fictive’ elements in Park’s works is ‘Korean’ and ‘realistic’,
entirely commensurate with the actual lived experiences and histories of the
Korean people. This is as true of their characters, narratives and production
details as of their themes and ideas. There is absolutely nothing ‘Western’,
for instance, about the fact that Sang-hyun, Thirst’s protagonist, is a Catholic
priest. The history of Korean Catholicism is as long as the national history
of the United States (the first Korean Catholic was baptised in 1784). More
importantly, both the Catholic Church and lay Catholics have been a powerful
minority in political and social spheres throughout Korea’s modern history.
Park himself is from a Catholic family and majored in Philosophy at the pres-
tigious Sogang University, founded by the Jesuits in 1960. One could easily
emphasise the Catholic milieu (regardless of how he feels about theological
issues today) in which Park grew up over his Korean identity, just as one could
stress Scorsese’s New Yorker–Catholic background rather than his status as an
American filmmaker. The other side of the coin with this type of subtle cul-
tural prejudice is the North American–European critic’s unquestioningly pos-
itive response to the deliberately orchestrated exoticism of, say, Kim Ki-duk’s
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul
geurigo bom, 2003). Most of the ‘Buddhist’ rituals, decors and behaviours in the
film are completely fabricated by the director, who is not a Buddhist, practis-
ing or otherwise. The Buddhist backdrop is functionally no different from the
references to ‘Western’ artists such as Henri Magritte that pepper the film and
is in no way indicative of its ‘alternative spirituality’ or ‘Korean-ness’; but of
course, that is not how the film was perceived outside Korea. This observation
is applicable to the select use of ‘exotic’ practices and props such as mahjong
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(widely played by Koreans of a certain generation, although Chinese in origin),

Russian vodka and the Japanese-style architecture found in Thirst.2 In the
same vein, I see no contradiction in regarding Thirst as an ‘authentic’ vampire
film and, at the same time, an artistically serious adaptation of Émile Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin (1867). I see no reason why such co-habitation of an adaptation
of a canonised work of (Western) literature and an entry in a ‘vulgar’ genre like
horror should be considered inherently suspect.

v a m pi r e s, mo d e r n a nd e mb o d ied
What kind of film, then, is Thirst (the Korean title is Bakjwi, literally meaning
‘The Bat’)? Let us look briefly at the plot. Sang-hyun, a priest struggling
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 202 k y u hyun k im

with his faith, volunteers as a human guinea pig at an African research facil-
ity, working on the vaccine for a virulent strain of virus dubbed Emmanuel.
The virus kills him, but he is miraculously resurrected by a blood transfu-
sion. Unfortunately, the cure comes with a serious side-effect: he turns into
a vampire. Only a continuous supply of fresh human blood can reverse the
symptoms of infection. While grappling with his disturbing new habit – and
superpowers – Sang-hyun becomes attracted to Tae-joo, unhappily married
to his childhood friend Kang-woo, a bizarrely infantile hypochondriac living
under the thumb of his manic dressmaker mother Ms Ra. Sang-hyun con-
spires with Tae-joo to drown Kang-woo, yet both are tormented by guilt.
When he finds out that Tae-joo has deliberately misled him about the physical
abuse she supposedly suffered at the hands of Kang-woo, he kills her in a rage.
Then he drinks her blood and feeds her his, turning her into vampire. Tae-joo,
revived, promptly reduces Ms Ra to a state of near-total paralysis, only capable
of batting her eyelids to indicate ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and enthusiastically delves into
the lifestyle of a nocturnal predator, killing most of the supporting characters
in the process. Sang-hyun eventually deceives her and drags her to a precipice,
where he uses the sunlight to commit double suicide with her; all the while,
the disabled Ms Ra looks on with apparent joy at the self-annihilation of her
son’s murderers.
The above synopsis makes one thing abundantly clear: Thirst is a movie
about vampires. It is a movie about ingesting blood as a means of survival
for the central protagonist and also of transformation for his main opponent
/ partner. In Euro-American popular culture, the vampire archetype has
always been pliable and malleable, one of the keys to its longevity. The best-
known Western literary examples of vampires are associated with gothic and
Romantic traditions, as personified by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897).
However, the metaphorical meaning of ‘blood’ itself has been subjected to as
many explanations as the question of what the Count really signifies. David
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Glover (1996), for instance, characterises Dracula as a foe of the progressive

liberalism of nineteenth-century England and Ireland that Stoker had sup-
ported, a monster who could ‘pass for’ an ordinary human being, his subsist-
ence on blood a sign of alien lineage (and further masking a devious national
character). Nina Auerbach (1995), on the other hand, considers Stoker’s
Dracula to be reconstituting the patriarchy, all the while highlighting the
physical and sexual attraction of the vampire, and distinguishing himself from
the vampire as a ‘special friend’ who could provide intimacies unavailable from
‘normal’ relationships, exemplified by the Byronic figure cut by Lord Ruthven
in John Polidori’s Vampyre (1819). Auerbach notes that the quarantining of
Dracula from humans brought physiological (and sexual) characteristics to
the fore, and sees its logical evolution in the British Hammer studio’s robustly
physical vampires. She suggests that the Hammer vampires are the first of
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their kind to be graphically destroyed by sunlight (specifically in the exciting

climax of Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, UK, 1958), in which Dracula’s
body literally disintegrates into heaps of ash), and also to sport distinctive
fangs. Expanding upon Auerbach’s observation, Stacey Abbott also argues
that the predominantly gothic image of Dracula and other vampires has been
adapted into the modern figures in their cinematic incarnations, even in the
Universal and Hammer films, which consciously attempt to display their
gothic provenance (2007).
At first glance, we might associate the Catholic ambiance and quasi-
melodramatic adultery–murder plot of Thirst with gothic conventions, but a
careful re-viewing confirms that the film is not really interested in presenting
its vampires as inheritors of the gothic tradition. Sang-hyun’s predicament
may be construed as an ironic statement about the impotence of the religious
authorities. However, there is little that is derogatory or facile about Park’s
presentation of the priest’s agonies over his vows of celibacy that come into
conflict with the sensual pleasures newly available to him. Moreover, the film
scrupulously avoids any concrete manifestation of the spiritual authority of the
church, or any scene in which a particularist theology or religious worldview
is confirmed. There is no staking of the heart or repelling of the blood-suckers
with crosses or other religious symbols. Park’s vampires are not afraid of sac-
raments or holy water (nor of garlic, shamanistic rituals or Buddhist incanta-
tions, for that matter). Sang-hyun and Tae-joo are strictly modern vampires;
their vampirism is defined by the ‘foregrounding of their bodies’, as is the case
with Hammer and the post-1960s American vampires (Abbott 2007: 125–30).
Indeed, in Thirst, the medical environment (the priest turns to a comatose
patient he used to counsel as a substitute for a live victim), knowledge of
human anatomy (as shown in the deadpan humour and grossness with which
Sang-hyun explains to Tae-joo about the best way to drain her victim’s blood)
and material–technological means of maintaining the ‘vampiric lifestyle’ (Tae-
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joo’s house is covered with tinfoil to shut out the sunlight and set up with a
surveillance camera to monitor visitors) play more significant roles than, say,
the authenticity of religious faith, philosophical reflections on the meaning
of evil or other such issues that are usually engaged in highbrow commercial
horror films.

t he d i s e ase t h a t ki l l s a nd g iv es l ife
We know that twentieth-century horror fiction and cinema have expanded
on the notion of vampirism as a semi-medical condition, already present in
nascent form in the original Dracula, as the languages of epidemic (‘plague’)
and infection used by the characters show. Both syphilis and AIDS have been
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 204 k y u hyun k im

drawn upon as real-life sources of the metaphor of vampirism. The uncredited

German adaptation of Dracula, Nosferatu – both the silent original (Nosferatu,
eine Symphonie des Grauens, F. W. Murnau, 1922) and Werner Herzog’s
remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, Germany,
1979) – suggests a strong association between vampire and plague-carrying
vermin, to the extent that the former may be seen as a symbolic representation
of the Black Death. Nicola Nixon (1997) argues that the Reagan administra-
tion’s choice in the 1980s not to address the lack of public awareness of AIDS
dovetails with the emergence of Hollywood vampire films such as Near Dark
(Kathryn Bigelow, US, 1987) and The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, US,
1987), which treat vampirism as a communicable disease. Near Dark even
introduces an innovation to vampire lore, to the effect that vampirism can be
‘cured’ through the replacement of a subject’s blood via a transfusion from a
healthy human. This allows the film’s protagonist to rehabilitate his love inter-
est, a female vampire who had initiated him into the blood-drinking way of
life, and restore her to the status of a ‘normal’ human. In these works, Nixon
points out, ‘[vampirism], like AIDS, consequently becomes a “lifestyle”
choice, where the vampire, like the homosexual, is potentially curable, and if
not curable, then surely deserving of death’ (1997: 127). Vampirism as (viral)
disease is also a metaphor in Brian Aldiss’s Dracula Unbound (1991) and Dan
Simmons’s Children of the Night (1992), two contemporary horror novels that
reimagine Dracula as a corporeal being with biological reasons for his seeming
immortality and dependence on blood. The latter, especially, attempts to bring
together the gothic grandiloquence of the classic Dracula, the rather conserva-
tive (as in being critical of ‘liberal’ cultural ecumenicalism) understanding
of the Ceausescu regime and other twentieth-century dictatorships, and the
rational, ‘scientific’ explanation of vampirism as a genetic condition that none
the less brings near-supernatural powers to those born with such a condition
(Auerbach 1995: 175–85).
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In Thirst, Park draws upon this parallel between vampirism and AIDS or
other diseases transmitted through bodily contact. Sang-hyun contracts the
somewhat pretentiously named Emmanuel virus, which only affects males
who have refrained from sustained sexual contact with females. His intention
to transcend his corporeality and attain spiritual enlightenment is outlined in
his prayer seeking the devastation of his body so that his spirit will be free from
temptation by corporeal sins. He is then frustrated by this blessing / curse,
which endows him not only with superhuman strengths, speed and recupera-
tive power, but also with heightened senses. In a disgusting / fantastic fashion
typical of Park, Sang-hyun is able to see microscopic mites crawling on his
skin and literally sense the blood rhythmically pumping through a woman’s
naked shoulder, whose skin grows transparent, exposing dark veins branching
off from her jugular. Of course, this notion of vampirism giving its ‘victim’
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 b o d y, gu il t a n d e x s a n g u i n a t i o n 205

the heightened senses that resemble sexual awakening is already present in the
original Dracula, as we can see in the following recollection by Mina Murray:

I remember, though I suppose I was asleep, passing through the streets

and over the bridge. A fish leaped as I went by, and I leaned over to
look at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling – the whole town seemed
as if it must be full of dogs all howling at once . . . Then I have a vague
memory of something long and dark with red eyes, just as we saw in the
sunset, and something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once.
(Stoker 2006 [1897]: 94)

Whereas this is presented in Stoker as the hallucinatory residue of Dracula’s

‘spell’, however, the transformation in Thirst is illustrated as an aggressively
physical one, reinvigorating the body to the point that some lay Catholics
begin to assume that both Sang-hyun’s survival of the Emmanuel virus and
his physical condition are a sign of his being touched by God. Park is clearly
interested in this dual aspect of vampirism as a simultaneously diseased and
enhanced condition. Sang-hyun remains an ‘embodied’ presence, who must
work out his moral dilemmas and spiritual problems in the physical realm.
What the onlookers assume to be a ‘miracle’ is, in fact, merely a symptom of
disease, and yet it is this disease that promises health, enhanced sexuality and
engagement with life in the fullest sense. Sang-hyun must renounce the bifur-
cation of his pre-vampiric life into the spiritual and the corporeal, and confront
the paradox of his condition on the material plane. His condition is simultane-
ously abject and exhilarating, oppressive and liberating. Park deconstructs the
‘binary opposition’ inscribed in many works of the horror genre, beginning
with the division between good and evil, by pushing the tendencies already
present in modern horror cinema toward realisation of the monstrous and the
divine in the same body.
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Consequently, the way in which Park juxtaposes the Catholic (Christian)

religious order and the conventions of the vampire film genre differs con-
siderably from how the Hammer Dracula series, for instance, recruits the
former to neutralise the potentially subversive physicality and sexuality of
the vampires. The Korean director problematises the moral certainties of
the Christian worldview by constructing subtly distorted mirror reflections
between Catholic and vampiric behaviours, practices and rituals. He takes
potent Catholic signifiers, such as Peter’s drinking of wine that turns into
blood in his mouth in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, US,
1988), and turns them inside out, giving the ‘signified’ a literal presentation.
Sang-hyun has to take blood, not wine, to sustain his miraculous recovery, and
later refuses to exchange the blood with his erstwhile mentor friar, killing the
latter with a corkscrew, an ironic reference to wine turning into blood and vice
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 206 k y u hyun k im

versa. Again, as Scorsese does in The Last Temptation, Park explicitly brings
to the fore the ‘messy’ and disturbing physicality of the Catholic faith (we are
literally drinking Christ’s blood!) by using vampirism as its ‘dark mirror’. This
by no means suggests a negation of spirituality, or even good Catholic faith,
but it definitely is not a sign of subordination to the authority of the church or
the ‘rational order’ imposed on his characters through collaboration with the
religious and secular (scientific) authorities; Van Helsing’s ‘quasi-scientific’
modality of fighting Dracula, with his instrumentalist view of Christian reli-
gious symbols in the Hammer Dracula films, is an excellent example of this
type of collaboration.
Park’s choices, as recounted above, have the effect of pushing his protago-
nist away from transcendental romanticism. The last half-century’s cinematic
depiction of vampires has included numerous attempts to bring back the
Byronic model of vampire, sometimes in the form of a ‘Romantic’ Dracula.
The most notable examples include John Badham’s adaptation of the stage
play Dracula starring Frank Langella (US, 1979) and Francis Ford Coppola’s
filming of James V. Hart’s screenplay (US, 1992). This tendency has cul-
minated in the commercial hit scored by the Twilight series, young-adult
novels by Stephanie Meyer written between 2005 and 2008, as well as their
adaptation for the screen, ranging from Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, US,
2008) to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (Bill Condon, US, 2011).
Coppola’s Dracula, for instance, emphasises the dream-like hyper-reality of
the vampiric activities and is suffused with the high-pitched eroticism that
seldom resolves itself into actual sexual intercourse (typified by scenes such as
Mina and Lucy kissing each other passionately after frolicking in a garden in
their nightdresses), but the depiction of seduction, ingestion of blood and the
vampires’ superhuman feats in Thirst is diametrically opposed to this in terms
of what these acts signify and illustrate. They are no less fantastic with regard
to special effects, but their connection to the body is much more immediate,
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unglamorous and ‘dirty’.

va m pi r i sm, l ib e r a t i ng a nd op p r essiv e . . . l ik e
f ai t h i n g o d
Having abandoned romanticism and the attendant rhetoric of ‘(eternal) true
love’ for his protagonists, Park is able to present directly both liberating and
oppressive features of the vampiric condition in a strikingly immanent fashion.
He does include in his film some visually exhilarating displays of the priest’s
newfound physical prowess. In these scenes, the director is clearly meaning to
indicate the liberating potential of vampirism, just as Tae-joo takes a childlike
delight in Sang-hyun’s superpower. At the same time, Park undercuts this by
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 b o d y, gu il t a n d e x s a n g u i n a t i o n 207

reinforcing the latter’s guilt. The director subtly sets up the reverse-mirroring
between the passion and resurrection narratives of Jesus in the New Testament
and Sang-hyun’s own attempt to deal with his condition. The episode of
‘doubting Thomas’ is replayed between the troubled priest and his mentor,
except that it is Sang-hyun rather than Thomas who insists that the latter put a
finger into his (rapidly self-healing) wound. Likewise, Tae-joo ‘tempts’ Sang-
hyun with a proposal to jump off the top of a building, just as Satan does in the
New Testament; Sang-hyun, unlike Jesus, promptly accepts, bouncing on and
off rooftops, to the giggling delight of the young woman cradled in his arms.3
One might consider this simultaneous inculcation of exhilaration and guilt
as another manifestation of Park’s Catholic sensibility. Like selected works of
Alfred Hitchcock, Park’s films sometimes use vertigo and a ‘fall’ from a height
as cinematic devices to illustrate the psychological and spiritual states of their
protagonists, who, even in the most rigorously generic situations, struggle with
their (forbidden or repressed) desires and the guilt occasioned by them. The
climactic, frisson-inducing fall to their death and the precarious cliff-hanging
positions in which the heroes and heroines find themselves in Saboteur (US,
1942), Spellbound (US, 1945) and North by Northwest (US, 1959), as well as
the hero’s inability to save his love object due to his acrophobia in Vertigo (US,
1958), are echoed in Park’s JSA: Joint Security Area (Gongdong gyeongbi guyeok
JSA, 2000) and Oldboy, perhaps his most Vertigo-influenced film. The ‘fall’ in
Park’s films highlights a character who is subject to psychic trauma, but that
trauma is often linked to the repression of forbidden sexuality. The suicide of
Woo-jin’s sister in Oldboy, in the form of a fatal fall, is a partial consequence of
her incestuous relationship with her younger brother, while in JSA a suicide
attempt on the part of Private Nam is motivated by guilt at having caused the
death of his North Korean counterpart, Jeong Woo-jin, between whom there
are indications of homoerotic attraction.
Yet, the ethical implications of such falls, along with those of the ‘God’s
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gaze’ overhead shots often employed by Park, are not as straightforward as

some critics or viewers might think. They do not simply confirm the ‘deviant’
nature of the spiritual / sexual desires on the part of the (fallen or earthbound)
‘sinners’. They also destabilise the (socially imposed) moral values involved in
designating them as such. Sang-hyun’s ‘jump’ from the rooftop of the build-
ing, goaded by Tae-joo, signifies his ‘fall from grace’, but at the same time
graphically displays his sense of liberation from the guilt and repression he had
to grapple with as a priest. An interesting contrast is made in a unique scene
(well known due to its startling nature and its use in the film trailer) that shows
the priest’s superhuman leap toward the bathroom window of Tae-joo’s apart-
ment, filmed at an upside-down angle that makes it appear as if Sang-hyun is
falling down from the sky, and in another scene in which the priest escapes the
adoring crowd of Catholics by flying across the yard. In each case, Sang-hyun’s
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 208 k y u hyun k im

position appears rather awkward or poorly balanced, and the way in which
these scenes are filmed resists the construing of them as purely emancipatory
or strictly condemnatory.

no tr i um p h f o r t he ‘ ma r t y r ed son ’
By stressing Park’s refusal to subordinate his characters in Thirst to the binary
oppositions of salvation and damnation, oppression and liberation, spirituality
and corporeality, not to mention good and evil, I am taking a different position
on the film from those of some Korean critics and scholars.4 Lee Taeg-gwang,
while acknowledging the soundness of the film’s psychoanalytical insights,
considers Thirst to be ultimately subordinate to the rational order: as he puts
it, the Lacanian Law of the Father (2009). In other words, he considers the
film’s ultimate objective to be the restoration of the integrity of modernistic
ethics. According to Lee, this is indicated by the film’s dénouement, in which
Sang-hyun commits double suicide with Tae-joo through a forced exposure to
sunlight. Lee’s analysis is erudite, but I am not persuaded that Thirst’s ending
should be read as a closed one: that is, confirmation of Sang-hyun’s (seeming)
subordination to Enlightenment values and modern subjectivity (and thus
accusing Park of being an unreconstructed ‘modernist’ – setting aside the
question of whether being an unreconstructed modernist is a bad thing at all).
And is it just me who fails to see Sang-hyun as a martyr–hero in the way
that some Korean critics apparently regard him? It appears that they refuse
to accept at face value the awkward, ambivalent and morose behaviour and
appearance of the priest, as portrayed in Thirst. For example, An Si-hwan
(2009) claims that Sang-hyun’s climactic suicide represents, among other
things, a ‘self-punishment cum suicide directed at himself who has collabo-
rated with evil, a reverential act of sacrifice and martyrdom to sever the link of
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wickedness, and the desire to face the morning sunray in the way allowed only
for human beings’. No matter how many times I watch Thirst, I cannot rec-
ognise any such triumphalist characterisation of Sang-hyun. Instead, Thirst’s
ending appears to me to be open and ambivalent, if not as challenging to
conventional morality as that of Oldboy, where it remains unresolved whether
Dae-su and his daughter Mi-do will continue to live together as a couple with
no memory or awareness of their incestuous relationship. Whereas Sang-hyun
seems to believe in the absolution of guilt, or conversely condemnation of their
souls to Hell, Tae-joo does not subscribe to this Manichean view and rejects
the idea that they will have any meaningful relationship after death. I believe
that this ending leaves open the possibility that Sang-hyun’s forced double
suicide may well be a Pyrrhic victory. Listen to the final dialogue uttered by
Sang-hyun and Tae-joo before they are incinerated by the light: Sang-hyun
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says, ‘I wanted to love you forever but . . . let’s meet again in Hell,’ to which
Tae-joo counters, ‘If we die, that’s the end. It’s been fun, Father.’5
Seen from another angle, Thirst replays the ending of Graham Greene’s
novel The Heart of the Matter (1948). Sang-hyun’s action is, in fact, designed
to further himself from God’s grace, as he sees himself as unworthy of it. I
certainly do not believe that his action is primarily intended to secure redemp-
tion from the state of being a vampire. Yet, just as the suicide of Scobie, the
protagonist in Greene’s novel, far from assures his damnation – in fact, there
are hints throughout the novel that he is really a modern saint – Sang-hyun’s
death remains morally and theologically ambiguous (and it is also telling that
the object of Scobie’s devotion / love, the widow Helen, immediately switches
to another lover after his death, driving the point home that, had his action
been born out of romantic attachment, it would have been utterly pointless).
Too many critics and scholars, whether they are Koreans, Europeans and
Americans, appear to assume that to take religious belief seriously in a film
must mean subscribing to the institutionally codified credos of the absolutist
Father God. While, as far as I know, this perspective does not seem to dimin-
ish the critical reputation of, say, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Martin Scorsese or
even Abel Ferrara; Yu Hyun-mok or Park Chan-wook, being Koreans, are not
so lucky.

d i d t he femme fatale k il l t h e v a mp ir e?
Still, I concede that some forms of feminist criticism of Park’s work are worth
considering. A comparison of Marcel Carné’s adaptation of Thérèse Raquin
(France, 1953) with Thirst illuminates both the progressive and retrogressive
nature of Park’s own version with regard to gender dynamics. In the 1953
film version, a character who is poised to inform the police of the murder of
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Thérèse’s husband dies in an accident (perhaps a karmic retribution for his

own moral hypocrisy?), leaving her legally beyond punishment. In contrast,
Park’s adaptation harks back to the original ending of Émile Zola’s novel of
the same name (1867) and does not let Tae-joo / Thérèse survive. Does this
suggest that Park is ultimately voting in favour of the patriarchal restoration
of rational order against the dangerous and irrational sexuality of the female?
French literature scholar Kim Kil-hoon (2011) suggests that, while in the
Carné version, Thérèse’s sexual desire is oppressed by the social (patriarchal)
structure, Tae-joo’s desire in Thirst is much more privatised, and based on
her individual initiative. I am not sure I agree with this view; Kim seems to
over-emphasise Tae-joo as an individualised self, standing as a counterpoint
to Sang-hyun’s spiritual quest for the grand narrative of salvation and human-
ism, and trivialising the manner in which Tae-joo’s resurrection as a vampire
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 210 k y u hyun k im

displays the liberating potential of a woman faithful to her personal desire,

sexual or otherwise. And the fact that the oppression of Tae-joo’s female
subjectivity by the Korean socio-political order is not spelled out in forms
familiar to the ‘art-house’ audience does not mean that it is not there. Indeed,
Thirst could be interpreted as the story of a self-deluding male authority figure,
enraptured by the idea of transcendental romanticism, who is trying to enforce
his vision on the modern female subject and failing miserably.
In this context, what is interesting is that Tae-joo takes on the characteris-
tics of a femme fatale in a film noir. As we know, the femme fatale represents the
negative image of independent and sexualised women that followed the radical
change in the socio-economic position of American women during and after
the Second World War (Hirsch 2001: 19–21). In fact, as Abbott reminds us,
the femme fatale who ‘embraces vampirism as an acceptable price for immortal-
ity’ makes an appearance as early as 1943 in the Universal film Son of Dracula
(2007: 68). The character in question, Kay, who voluntarily chooses to become
a vampire, is certainly a villainous figure but is unmistakably a signifier of
(American) modernity. Like her, Tae-joo is proactive, manipulative and fully
committed to life (she does not believe in the afterlife). It is interesting to note
in this regard that Sang-hyun’s decision to destroy himself and Tae-joo is occa-
sioned by her callous plan to slaughter the Filipino wife of her family friend, a
character who is subject to the status of double minority, being a non-Korean
woman. Had Tae-joo indicated any sign of solidarity with other members of
minority groups, women and / or the racially / economically persecuted, could
she have evaded the last-minute attempt by the priest to destroy her?6
Had he perhaps not been concerned with fidelity to Zola’s source material,
or with the question of guilt personified in Sang-hyun’s character, Park might
have made another version of Thirst (this time with a different Korean title
– Insatiable, for example) in which Tae-joo is the main protagonist and con-
tinues to destroy men to nourish herself beyond the ending of the film. Thirst
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

could easily have been the vampire film equivalent of some post-1970s neo-
noir that featured female protagonists / antagonists who manage to evade the
police or the goddesses of fate and ‘get away with murder’; the lethal women
played by Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, US, 1981)
and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction (John Dahl, UK / US, 1994)
are notable examples. Whether this alternative vision of the female vampire
would be more ‘feminist’ than the existing one found in the Korean film is a
question that is too complicated to be tackled here. In any case, in Tae-joo,
there is a modern rejection of the lack of differentiation between the spirit and
the body, which leads, again, to the co-existence of autonomy (emancipation
from ‘family’, ‘obligations’ and the ‘will to be normal’) and unfettered desire
(to consume, to utilise and discard). If any character in Thirst represents
‘unreconstructed modernity’, it is Tae-joo, not Sang-hyun.
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 b o d y, gu il t a n d e x s a n g u i n a t i o n 211

t he m e ani ng o f b l o o d
Finally, there is the matter of blood. The film is distinguished from romantic
vampire films such as Twilight by the overwhelming, almost excessive, pres-
ence of blood. However, Park carefully cuts off any possibility of using blood
as a marker of lineage, nationality or ethnicity, orientations that have a strong,
everyday resonance in Korean culture (Glover 1996). Neither does this self-
professed left-wing director seem intent on using vampirism as a metaphor for
the way in which the ruling class exploits the working class or the economically
downtrodden. There are exorbitant amounts of red matter displayed in the
acts of both blood-drinking and blood-letting. Sang-hyun’s viral symptoms,
even prior to his being pronounced dead and then resurrected as a vampire,
require him to regurgitate a disturbing quantity of blood. Later, his ‘appetite’
for blood is sorely tempted during a scene showing the last rites being given to
a traffic accident victim, whose body keeps pumping out the scarlet life-fluid
like a pulsing geyser. Tae-joo dispatches her (male) victims in excessively
gory ways, as if she is slaughtering livestock, corollary to the graphic and
messy depiction of sex between her and Sang-hyun. At the same time, there
is also a strong emphasis in Thirst on the healing of damaged bodies through
vampirism, bringing to mind the fact that exsanguination was a pre-modern
means of healing the sick. This healing property is most strikingly displayed in
Tae-joo’s resurrection scene, during which the freely flowing blood is expelled
from and infused into the intertwined bodies with equal enthusiasm, culmi-
nating in the complete healing, not only of wounds and scars, but also of the
calluses on her feet, formed by her nightly ritual of running around barefoot
to release herself from the suffocating frustration of living with her husband.
And later in the film, Sang-hyun and Tae-joo engage in violent scuffles that
break their bones and tear their flesh; their bodies are distinguished from those
of normal human beings by their power to heal themselves instantly.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

The medieval notion of curing bodies through expulsion of ‘bad blood’ is

the flip side of the idea of blood as a life-sustaining agent, and, again, Thirst,
unlike most vampire films, explores this duality of blood-sucking/letting.
Park’s choices highlight certain medieval traits in Sang-hyun; his Catholic
beliefs help him retain the lack of differentiation between the symbolic, repre-
sentative meaning of blood and the material presence of blood itself. The act
of imbibing the sacramental wine during mass preserves some form of belief,
no matter how ‘unscientific’ it may be, that the wine is not merely a symbol
or a representation but has literally, materially turned into Christ’s blood. In
contrast, Tae-joo’s modernity and her propensity toward instrumental ration-
ality make her reject the view held by Sang-hyun, distinguishing her orienta-
tion to blood from the latter’s. It might even be said that the preponderance
of blood in the film seems not only an indication of Park’s intention to ground
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 212 k y u hyun k im

his film in the dirty and messy physical realm but also a metonymic reference
to the contradiction inherent in Sang-hyun’s desire both to heal / liberate and
to wound / bind Tae-joo at the same time. Here, too, introducing a gendered
perspective renders the interpretation of what we see in the film more compli-
cated and interesting. Peggy McCracken’s wonderful study (2003) shows that,
while medieval Western culture set female blood-letting, as in menstruation
and parturition, in the category of pollution but valorised male blood-letting as
heroic and sacrificial, the healing power of (female) blood was also recognised
in various forms of cultural expression, potentially subverting the religious
authorities’ efforts to confine women’s bodies within the domestic sphere.
Women are different from men in that they bleed from their bodies without
being wounded (for this reason, in some medieval texts, men of ‘effeminate’
races, such as Jews, were claimed to bleed regularly in a manner similar to
women).
Just as Park does not give Tae-joo a chance to identify with other women
characters in an acknowledgement of gender solidarity, he also makes her
paradoxically ‘masculine’ in her relationship to blood. She only bleeds as a
result of the violence perpetrated on her body by herself and others. Instead
of menstruating, she stabs her thigh with a scissor to create a bleeding wound,
one that she employs to win Sang-hyun’s sympathy by pretending that it was
made by Kang-woo, her weakling husband. She refuses to reciprocate the act
of healing via exsanguination. It is notable that, in Thirst, Tae-joo is not associ-
ated with the practice of mothering at all; she only takes blood and never lets it
out. In Stoker’s Dracula, there is a potent scene where the Count ‘nurses’ his
two female brides, feeding them his blood. This already complicates the notion
that Dracula is a representation of male aggression. In the same way, Tae-joo
is obviously not merely a representation of sexualised femininity. Given that
Park himself seems unsure as to whether the infusion of masculinity into a
character who is deceptively defined by her sexuality is a progressive gesture or
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

not, feminist criticism still has much to explore in Thirst and, by implication,
in the Korean filmmaker’s other works.

co nc l usi o n
Park’s unusual film is neither a gothic romance nor a horror film about para-
sitism and exploitation of humans by vampires. Thirst directly addresses our
inability to regulate the demands of our physical bodies, our complex emotions
and our need for moral certainty. Its vampire protagonists, Sang-hyun and
Tae-joo, are fully embodied beings who are unable to escape their physical
bodies. There are no direct divine solutions to their dilemma, nor are there any
social or traditional methods that can be deployed to reverse their vampirical
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 b o d y, gu il t a n d e x s a n g u i n a t i o n 213

state of being. In other words, their vampirism is not a metaphor; diegetically

it is as ‘real’ as contraction of HIV or a woman’s menstrual cycle. Sang-hyun
is an ambivalent figure, who is compelled to abandon both absolute religious
faith and scientific certainty in the course of adjusting to his new-found condi-
tion. His goal of transcending bodily limitations for union with the divinity
is subverted by the fact that he is endowed with vampirism, a gift that is also
a curse. He is like a devout medieval monk, recoiling from his own body in a
quasi-Gnostic yearning for transcendence but forced to accept its demands.
Tae-joo’s case is equally complex but in a different way; she passionately
embraces the enhanced physicality of being a vampire. Far from being a
swooning victim of a virile blood-drinker, she takes charge of her life and turns
herself into a masculine, predatory being. Tae-joo, supposedly an exemplary
femme fatale, complicates the gender dynamics between her and Sang-hyun to
such an extent that we cannot come away from Thirst with any confirmation of
the simplistic dichotomy between modernity and anti-modernity, or between
the embodied or monstrous female versus the spiritual or rational male.
Unlike some of the interpretations of Thirst discussed above, I do not see in
the film any capitulation to the principles of rationality or the Enlightenment
impulse (readers may or may not forgive me for remaining utterly indifferent
to the question of whether this makes the film ‘correctly postmodern’ or not).
Sang-hyun as a character might have tried to follow the dictates of his faith.
Perhaps God approves his efforts (à la Graham Greene). But the opening for
that knowledge is closed to viewers and, most likely, to Park himself. I certainly
do not see Park speaking with the voice of an omnipotent Creator, passing
judgement on his characters. Instead, he problematises the usual dichotomies
– a desire for closed resolution that restores ‘normality’, and subscription to
the supremacy of the transcendental over the immanent – that are found in
‘standard’ horror films (and probably in a great many so-called ‘artistic’ films:
Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (Denmark, 1996), anyone?). Some critics
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

and academics do not seem to be paying sufficient attention to the diverse

history of genre cinema and thereby fail to contextualise Thirst appropriately
among films with similar settings, characters and agendas. Why see this unique
motion picture as a pointlessly convoluted and weird horror film? Why not see
it for what (I believe) it really is: a multi-layered work of art that deals seriously
with the corporeal and spiritual realities of our lives, which we would rather
sweep under the carpet, expertly making use of the seemingly irreconcilable
vocabularies and idioms of more than one cinematic genre?
Despite its abundant displays of gruesome visuals, Thirst is ultimately not
interested in generating a frisson of fear, but rather focuses on the uncanny
awareness of our (human) desires and limitations, laced with the bittersweet
taste of existential melancholy. It gives full vent to Park’s pet themes without
ignoring or descending to the existing conventions of the vampire film genre:
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 214 k y u hyun k im

urgent reflection on the impossibility and unknowability of salvation, non-

judgemental exploration of the moral weight of sin and desire, and agonising
reflection on the mystery of God. Thirst is a spiritual film that is none the
less rigorously bound to the bodily world. This position is not a denial of the
spiritual realm per se, but rather a negation of the facile and easy connection
between the two. Vampires or not, we are all bodily creatures, hot blood cours-
ing through our veins, and fated to continue asking, ‘where do we go from
here? Is this all there is?’

no te s
1. Thirst scored 72 points out of 100, or a ‘generally positive’ assessment, at
Metacritic, and an 82 per cent ‘fresh tomato’ rating at Rottentomatoes.
com, internet sites for aggregating the media critics’ ‘scores’ for commercial
films.
2. In Park Chan-wook’s own words: ‘Thirst might appear to be . . . as far
removed from the “Korean” reality as possible, but in some ways it is more
realistic and locally grounded than many other Korean films . . . the Korea
I find more naturalistic is the closed but mixed society, like a household in
which statues of Buddha and Virgin Mary might be displayed side by side’
(Joo 2009).
3. I find it remarkable that, as far as I can find among the more than thirty
media reviews of Thirst that I have read (in both English and Korean lan-
guages and including extended blog entries), only Lee Dong-jin’s (2009)
review / critical analysis pays any serious attention to the mirroring of
the biblical narrative of Jesus and the depiction of Sang-hyun’s vampiric
abilities.
4. Korean critics, with the very vocal and notable exception of Lee Dong-
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

jin, were far less enthusiastic than those outside Korea about the merits
of Thirst. The film opened domestically on 30 April 2009 (unlike most
horror films, which are usually reserved for the summer season in Korea
and Japan), and was subject to a significant advertising push on the part
of CJ Entertainment. The box-office results were not spectacular but were
respectable, with a total of 2,223,429 tickets sold generating an approxi-
mate revenue of 14.84 billion won. It was a big enough hit to become one
of the ten most successful domestic films of the year. Partially financed by
US-based Universal Pictures and Focus Pictures, it received a limited,
so-called art-house pattern of release on 30 July 2009 in North American
cinemas, to generally favourable reviews and a modest box-office tally of
$318,574.
5. The dialogue has been directly translated by the author from the original
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 b o d y, gu il t a n d e x s a n g u i n a t i o n 215

Korean and is not identical to the official English subtitles found on various
import prints and DVD versions.
6. Park has indicated a keen interest in the issues of mixed-race and racial
‘passing’ in the context of the allegedly ethnically homogeneous South
Korea in his previous films. In a private conversation, Park also told me that
one of the film ideas he developed, only to be scrapped later, was an inter-
racial romance between a non-Korean, working-class woman and a popular
Korean politician, which eventually results in the ruining of the latter’s
career and standing (personal conversation with Park Chan-wook, August
2008).

wo r k s c i t e d
Abbott, Stacey (2007), Celluloid Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern
World, Austin: University of Texas Press.
An, Si-hwan (2009), ‘Powerful, But That’s All’ [‘Gangryeolhada, hajiman
geubbunida’], Cine 21, 21 May; [Link]
article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=56368; accessed 1 February 2012.
Auerbach, Nina (1995), Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Glover, David (1996), Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the
Politics of Popular Fiction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hirsch, Foster (2001), The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, London: Da
Capo.
Joo, Seong-cheol (2009), ‘A One-to-One Interview with Park Chan-Wook:
I Simply Cannot Admit That Thirst Is Difficult to Understand [‘Park
Chan-wook gamdok intobyu: Bakjwi ga nanhae hadaneun geon jeong-
mal injeong mothagetta’]’, Cine 21, 26 May; [Link]
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

do/article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=56386; accessed 1 February

2012.
Kim, Kil-hoon (2011), ‘The Female Desire as Manifested in the Films Thérèse
Raquin and Thirst [‘Yeonghwa Terezeu Rakaeng gwa Bakjwi e natanan
yeoseong eui yongmang’]’, Journal of French Studies in Korea [Hanguk
peurangseu-hak nonjip], 73, pp. 117–34.
Kim, Kyu Hyun (2005), ‘Horror as Criticism in Tell Me Something and
Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’, in C. Y. Shin and J. Stringer (eds), New
Korean Cinema, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, pp. 106–16.
Kim, Young-jin (2004), ‘Tightrope’, Film Comment, November / December,
40: 60, pp. 12–14.
Lee, Dong-jin (2009), ‘Behold, This Seductive Heterogeneity’ [‘Yi mae-
hogjeogin bulgyunjil ham-iyeo’], Cine 21, 21 May; [Link]
Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Korean Horror
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 216 k y u hyun k im

com/do/article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=56367; accessed 1
February 2012.
Lee, Taeg-gwang (2009), ‘A Vampire Who Could Not Overcome the Femme
Fatale: Thirst’ [‘Pam-meu pata-reul igiji mot-han baempaieo, Bakjwi’],
Pressian, 27 April; [Link]
num=60090425015418&Section=07; accessed 1 February 2012.
McCracken, Peggy (2003), The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood,
Gender and Medieval Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Nixon, Nicola (1997), ‘When Hollywood Sucks: or Hungry Girls, Lost Boys
and Vampirism in the Age of Reagan’, in J. Gordon and V. Hollinger
(eds), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 115–28.
Reed, Rex (2005), ‘Bobby Short, King of Pop’, New York Observer, 28 March,
p. 20.
Stoker, Bram (2006 [1897]), Dracula, Clayton: Prestwick House Literary
Touchstone Classics.
All translations from Korean to English of book / article / film titles are by
Kyu Hyun Kim, unless otherwise noted.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

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 Glossary

ajumma Typically, a middle-aged married woman.

bangong Anti-Communism.
bukgwigun Nickname given to the North Korean army, meaning
‘Army of Northern Demons’.
chaebol A family-owned business conglomerate, such as
Samsung.
Chungmuro An area in Seoul once a hub of film production, now
a byword for the South Korean film industry itself
(much like ‘Hollywood’ in reference to US filmmaking).
Daejongsang The Grand Bell Film Awards, held annually in South
Korea since 1962.
gajok Family; gajok juui refers to Korean neo-Confucian
familialism, and hyeolyeon juui refers to blood /
biological familialism.
gisaeng A high-class female entertainer (possibly prostitute) in
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

traditional Korean society.

gongan soseol Classical morality literature; stories in which the law is
upheld and justice prevails.
gongpo yeonghwa Horror film.
goongnyeo Female palace servant in traditional Korean society.
gumiho The mythical nine-tailed fox from Korean folklore,
with the ability to assume human form.
gwisin Ghost; pronounced ‘gweeshin’. The yeogwi is a spe-
cifically female ghost, and the cheonyeo gwisin is a
female virgin ghost.
hallyu (or hanryu) The modern ‘Korean Wave’ of popular culture
(including film, television and pop music).

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 218 g los s a ry

han A sense of agonising grief and heartbreak at unfair mis-

fortune and suffering.
hanbok Traditional Korean clothing; typically brightly
coloured. The sobok is the all-white version.
hon and baek When paired, these words refer to the spirit and the
body, which are separated at death.
Inmingun The Korean People’s Army; the North Korean forces
during the Korean War.
manhwa Korean comic books; the equivalent of Japanese manga.
minjung Used to describe the ‘common people’ suffering under
an exploitative government or class system.
sageuk Historical or period drama. The wangjo sageuk refers
to a royal court drama.
shinpa An emphatically sad mode of melodrama, focusing on
romance and female suffering. The word comes from a
Japanese theatrical tradition.
wonhon Female ghost, returning from the grave to avenge her
wrongful death.
yangban The traditional ruling class in old Korean society.
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

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 b ib liog raphy

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 Index

71: Into the Fire (2010), 56–8 Blood Pledge, A (2009), 140n3
Blood Rain (2005), 77
Aatish: Feel the Fire (1994), 190 Bloody Beach (2000), 87
Acacia (2003), 14, 87–8, 90–9, 121 Bloody Reunion (2006), 9
Ahn Byung-ki, 9, 15, 75, 87, 101, 110, 121, Blue Swallow (2005), 103
123, 145–56 Body Heat (1981), 210
Amores Perros (2000), 190 Bong Joon-ho, 10, 101, 126–7, 154, 201
Antarctic Diary (2004), 76 Breaking the Wall (1949), 53
Apartment (2006), 75, 101, 110, 121, 145, 147, Buddhism, 24, 28–31, 65, 68, 82, 201,
149, 151–2, 154–5 203
Apartment, The (1960), 102 Bunker, The (2001), 48
Ape (1976), 5, 16n2 Bunshinsaba (2004), 15, 75, 123, 145–52,
Arang (2006), 121, 123 154–6
Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon (2011), 77 Burning, The (1981), 122
Asia Extreme brand, 10, 58, 117–18, 120,
152–4, 170n3, 191, 194, 197n3 Cadaver see Cut, The
Audition (1999), 154 Cannes Film Festival, 10, 188–9, 199
Awarapan (2007), 187 Carrie (1976), 97–8, 124, 133, 179
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Cat People (1942), 39

Baek Moon-im, 11, 66, 74, 76, 81, 85n10 Cello (2005), 15, 121, 125
Bangkok Dangerous (1999), 194 Chaplin, Charlie, 119–20
Barefoot Youth, The (1964), 5 Chaser, The (2007), 77, 187
Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), 101 Choi In-kyu, 4
Battle Royale (2000), 132, 154 Choi Min-sik, 114–15
Beat Back (1956), 54 Christianity, 24, 107–8, 110, 201–11
Bedevilled (2010), 77 Chun Doo-hwan government, 8, 57
Better Tomorrow, A (1986), 190 Cinderella (2006), 118
Bittersweet Life, A (2005), 76–7, 187 City on Fire (1987), 190
Bi Xian (2012), 145, 155 Clover, Carol, 7, 12, 15, 67, 132–3, 136–7,
Black House (2007), 140n1 151, 175, 179, 183
Blair Witch Project, The (1999), 152, 155 colonial period, 3–5, 27, 31, 76, 121
Blood and Chocolate (2007), 40 Company of Wolves, The (1984), 40

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 i n de x 237

Comrades (2010), 56–7 Frau2 sucht HappyEnd (2001), 196

Confessions (2010), 151 Friday the 13th series, 122
Confucianism, 2, 8, 14, 24, 28, 33, 36, 40–1,
60–9, 89–90, 174–5 General’s Son, The (1968), 50, 54
Contact, The (1997), 196 Ghost (2004), 125
Court Lady, A (1972), 80–1 Ghost House (2004), 75
Creed, Barbara, 7, 12, 14, 30, 60–9, 79, 132, Ghost Story of the Joseon Dynasty, A (1970),
134–5, 179 3, 80
Crush on You (2008), 101 Ginger Snaps (2000), 40, 133
Cut, The (2007), 132, 140n1 gisaeng, 28, 31–2
Godzilla (1954), 5
Dark Forest (2006), 156n2 gongan soseol, 2, 23, 81, 175
Dark Water (2004), 151, 176 Gong Soo-chang, 48, 76
Dead Friend see Ghost Grand Bell Awards, 52, 80
Death Bell (2008), 75, 131–40 Grudge, The (2004), 155
Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 14–15, 114, 119–20, 124, Grudge: Revolt of the Gumiho (2010), 45
126–7, 174 Grudge Woman (1981), 13
Devilish Homicide, A (1965), 3, 13, 23, 27–31, Guard Post, The (2007), 9
38, 51, 62, 68, 82, 118 gumiho, 3, 6, 12, 14, 35–46
Devil’s Stairway, The (1964), 12–13, 23, Gupta, Sanjay, 190–1, 193–4
25–7, 29, 38, 51
Disbelief Hell see Possessed H (2002), 77
DMZ (1965), 53 Halloween (1978), 40, 122, 137
Dog Soldiers (2002), 40 hallyu, 11, 196
Dracula han, 1, 6, 13, 23, 38, 150
1979 film, 206 Han Hyeong-mo, 42, 44, 53
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 film), 206 Happiness of the Katakuris, The (2001),
Horror of Dracula (1958), 203, 206 187
original novel, 202–5, 212 Happy End (1999), 101
Son of Dracula (1943), 210 Harpy (2000), 87
Haunted Wedding Dress, The (1981), 1
Epitaph (2007), 76 Hello Ghost (2010), 75
Eunuch (1968), 80–1, 83 Hero Without a Serial Number, A (1966),
Evil Twin, The (2007), 78–9, 131 51–2
Exorcist, The (1973), 94, 146 Hidden Floor (2006), 156n2
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Eye, The (2002), 153, 194, 197n3 Hitchcock, Alfred, 30, 51, 101, 128, 147,
Eyes without a Face (1960), 118 153, 207
Hole, The (1997), 62
Face (2004), 118 Hometown Legends (2008–9), 44–5,
Face behind the Mask, The (1941), 118 79
February 29 (2006), 156n2 Honda Ishiro, 5
film noir, 41, 46, 81, 118, 190–1, 199, 210 Horror Hospital (1973), 122
flashback sequence, 30, 93, 96–7, 121, 135, Housemaid, The (1960), 4–5, 8–10, 13, 23,
149–51, 164–6, 176–9 25–7, 38, 51, 83
Flower of Evil, A (1961), 13 Housemaid, The (2010), 10
Forbidden Love (2004), 45 Howling, The (1981), 40
Fox Family, The (2006), 36, 42–4, 46 Howling, The (2011), 9
Fox With Nine Tails, The (1994), 12, 14, 36, huli jing, 35
38–43, 45–6 Hurrah, For Freedom! (1946), 4

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 238 in d e x

I Am Happy (2008), 103 Lee Yong-joo, 107–8

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Lee Yong-min, 51
146 Lee Yoo-seop, 13
I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), 200 Legend of the Evil Lake, The (2003), 85n7
Im Kwon-taek, 6 Letter, The (1997), 196
Im Sang-soo, 10 Letter, The (2004), 196
Insect Woman (1972), 101 Lewton, Val, 39
Into the Mirror (2003), 87, 187 Little Pond, A (2010), 56
I Saw the Devil (2010), 58, 77 Lost Boys, The (1987), 204
I Spit on Your Grave (1978), 40
Madame Freedom (1956), 44
Jewel in the Palace (2003–4), 78 Madam White Snake (1960), 2
Joseon period, 2, 14, 38, 40, 62–4, 73–85, 89, Man From Nowhere, The (2010), 58
158, 174, 180, 184 manhwa, 147
JSA: Joint Security Area (2000), 207 Masquerade (2012), 77
Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), 90–1, 98, 153 melodrama, 1, 4–6, 9, 15, 23, 37–8, 41–2, 66,
74, 80, 102, 116, 158, 165–71, 176
Kaante (2002), 190 Memento Mori (1999), 7, 148
kaibyo eiga, 3 Memories (2002), 101
Keaton, Buster, 119–20 Memories of Murder (2003), 126–7
Kim Ji-woon, 9, 15, 42, 58, 77, 87, 101, 148, Mirrors (2008), 187
154, 158–71, 173, 176, 187, 201 Mother’s Grudge (1970), 12, 60–5, 68
Kim Kee-deok, 5 Mulvey, Laura, 7, 183
Kim Ki-duk, 49, 201 Muoi: Legend of a Portrait (2007), 9, 75,
Kim Ki-young, vii, 1, 4, 25, 38, 51, 74, 83, 101 131–2
Kim Mi-jeong, 73, 75, 140n1 Murder 2 (2011), 187
Kim, Soyoung, 11, 67, 74 My Girlfriend is a Gumiho (2010), 45
Kim Yong-gyoon, 15, 120, 123–4 My Girlfriend is an Agent (2009), 196
King and the Clown (2005), 75, 77 My Sassy Girl (2001), 187, 196
kitsune, 35 My Sassy Girl 2 (2010), 196
Korea Broadcasting System (KBS), 44–5,
56–7, 79 Nakata Hideo, 23, 90, 118, 145–7, 151, 155
Korean Film Archive (KOFA), 1–2, 4, 8, 11, Near Dark (1987), 204
69n3, 169n2 Neighbour Zombie, The (2010), 9
Korean Ghost Stories (1977–89), 44–5 Nightmare (2000), 75, 87, 145–6, 148–9, 151,
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Korean War, 4, 14, 48–58, 88 155, 173, 176, 189

Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 145 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984), 147
Kwaidan (1964), 25, 118 North by Northwest (1959), 207
North Korean cinema, 6, 11, 13
Lady Jang (1961), 79 Nosferatu (1922), 204
L’Appartement (1996), 102 Nosferatu (1979), 204
Last House on the Left, The (1972), 136 Nowhere to Hide (1999), 190
Last Seduction, The (1994), 210
Last Temptation of Christ, The (1988), 205–6 Oldboy (2003), 10–12, 15, 77, 114–18, 124,
Lee Beom-soo, 132 127, 187–97, 199–200, 207–8
Lee Kang-cheon, 53–4 Omen, The (1976), 94–5, 97
Lee Man-hee, 12–13, 23, 38, 49, 51–2 On Air (2008), 132
Lee Myung-bak government, 58 onryo, 13
Lee Sae-eun, 150 Others, The (2001), 107

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 i n de x 239

Pagoda of Shadows (1957), 38 Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl (1998),
Park Chan-wook, 7, 9–10, 15, 77, 114–15, 190
129, 154, 188, 192, 199–215 Shimizu Takashi, 145
Park Chung-hee government, 25, 31, 51–2, Shining, The (1980), 94, 124, 127n1, 128n3
150 shinpa, 5, 66
Park Ki-hyung, 9, 14, 87, 92–4, 98, 121, 136, Shin Sang-ok, 1–3, 38, 51, 79–80, 83
147 Sino-Japanese War and Queen Min the
Park Yoon-kyo, 13 Heroine, The (1965), 79
Phone (2002), 9, 12, 15, 75, 121, 145–55 Sixth Sense, The (1999), 107
Piagol (1955), 53 Someone Behind You (2007), 132, 140n1
Polanski, Roman, 101, 123 Song Gang-ho, 126–7
Possessed (1947), 164, 166 Song of the Dead (1980), 2
Possessed (2009), 60, 75, 101, 107–11 Sorum (2001), 14, 60, 101–8, 110–11
Pot, The (2008), 101 Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967), 5
Prince Yeonsan (1961), 38, 80–1, 83 Spellbound (1945), 207
Psycho (1961), 30, 128n3 Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and
Public Cemetery under the Moon, A (1967), Spring (2003), 201
12–13, 23, 31–3, 51, 63, 79, 118 Stella Dallas (1937), 116
Pulgasari (1985), 6 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 90
Pulse (2001), 153 Suddenly a Dark Night (1981), 8, 10
Surrogate Mother (1986), 83
Queen Dowager Inmok (1962), 79 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), 199
Quiet Family, The (1998), 187
Taegukgi (2004), 56
Rainy Days (1979), 12, 48, 50, 54 Tale of Two Sisters, A
Rear Window (1954), 101 2003 film, 9, 12–13, 15, 87, 97, 148,
Record (2000), 87 158–71, 173–84
Red Shoes, The (2005), 120–5 Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon folk tale, 81–2,
Repulsion (1965), 101, 123, 128n3 158–9, 161, 164, 173
Reservoir Dogs (1992), 190 Jang-Hwa and Hong-Ryeon: A Story of
Ring (1998), 23, 90, 107, 118, 146, 152–5, Two Sisters (1972), 13, 159–60
173, 189 Story of Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon, The
Ring, The (2002), 173 (1924), 3, 60, 169n2
Ring Virus, The (1999), 48, 75, 154 Teenage Hooker Became a Killing Machine
Road Number One (2010), 56 (2000), 9
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Roommates (2006), 156n2 Tenant, The (1976), 101

Rosemary’s Baby (1968), 94, 101, 105 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974), 44,
R-Point (2004), 48, 76 122
Ryoo Seung-wan, 201 Thirst (2009), 9, 15, 199–215
Thousand Year Old Fox, The (1969), 3, 13,
Saboteur (1942), 207 36–9, 42–3, 45–6, 51, 80, 85n7
Saw (2004), 132 To Catch a Virgin Ghost (2004), 9, 75
Scorsese, Martin, 10, 200, 209 Tourner, Jacques, 39
Secret Tears (2000), 98 Tower of Evil (1972), 122
Seven Female Prisoners (1965), 51 Twilight (2008), 206, 211
Shadows in the Palace (2007), 12, 73–85, Tyrant Yeonsan (1962), 80–1
140n1
shamanism, 8, 24, 30, 88, 108–10, 146–7, Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), 24
151, 159, 203 Ugli Aur Pagli (2008), 187

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Korean Horror
PEIRSE Cinema,239
[Link] edited by Alison Peirse, and Daniel Martin, Edinburgh University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, 08/02/2013 12:03
[Link]
Created from open on 2025-08-13 [Link].
 240 in d e x

Uninvited (2003), 14, 75, 87–8, 91, 99n1, 101, Wolfman, The (2010), 39
110 Woman’s Wail (1986), 12, 60–1, 65–8, 82
Uninvited, The (2009), 12, 173–5, 180–4 wonhon, 2, 6, 13, 23–33, 37, 44, 61–9, 134,
Untold Scandal (2003), 77 138–9, 148
Usual Suspects, The (1995), 190 Wood, Robin, 7, 17n3, 90, 139, 181–2

Vampire Cop Ricky (2006), 9 yangban, 27–8, 31, 55

Vertigo (1958), 207 Yobi, the Five-Tailed Fox (2007), 45
Virgin Spring, The (1959), 136 Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967), 5,
16n2
Werewolf of London (1935), 39 Yoon Heung-gil, 54–5
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), 30 Yoon Jong-chang, 103
Whispering Corridors (1998), 9, 15, 74–6, 98, Yoon Sam-yook, 54
136–8, 147, 151 You Become a Star Too (1975), 1
Wig, The (2005), 9, 121 Youth, The (1995), 38
Williams, Linda, 7, 11 Yu Hyun-mok, 54, 209
Wishing Stairs (2003), 136–7
Witch Board see Bunshinsaba Zinda (2006), 12, 15, 187–97
Copyright © 2013. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved.

Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Korean Horror
PEIRSE Cinema,240
[Link] edited by Alison Peirse, and Daniel Martin, Edinburgh University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, 08/02/2013 12:03
[Link]
Created from open on 2025-08-13 [Link].