Korean Horror Cinema 9780748677658

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Korean Horror Cinema

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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 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4310 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4309 7 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7765 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7767 2 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 7766 5 (Amazon ebook) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword Julian Stringer Contributors Introduction Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin Part I:

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Classic Korean Horror

1. Family, Death and the wonhon in Four Films of the 1960s Hyangjin Lee 2. Creepy Liver-Eating Fox Ladies: The Thousand Year Old Fox and Korea’s Gumiho Alison Peirse and James Byrne 3. War Horror and Anti-Communism: From Piagol to Rainy Days Mark Morris 4. Mother’s Grudge and Woman’s Wail: The Monster-Mother and Korean Horror Film Eunha Oh Part II:

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Contemporary ‘Domestic’ Horror

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

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

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Contemporary ‘International’ Horror

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

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187 199

217 219 236

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Acknowledgements

Alison would like to thank Northumbria University for funding a semesterlong 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 supportive, 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 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 retrospective, ‘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 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 conflagration 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 termination of existence provides the horror film with its single greatest preoccupation and attraction. Movie marketeers in South Korea know this. (Consider Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, recognising that horror film spectators protectively mimic the reactions, the looks of fright and terror, performed by actors. What are such viewers acknowledging? 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 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 contradictory 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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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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 presently 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 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 journals 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 parliamentarian 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 intellectual history of modern Japan, the Korean colonial experience, and Korean cinema and popular culture. He is Academic Adviser and Contributing Editor to www.koreanfilm.org, 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 publications 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 historical memories and transnational Korean cinema. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 transnational East Asian cinemas and popular culture. She has published several articles 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). 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: http://www.japanfocus.org/home. 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 Adaptations of American Film and Television (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and editor of Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation (available at http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/ index.php, 2009). He has published articles in a range of international journals, 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., Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Routledge, 2007) and The Korean Cinema Book (co-ed., BFI, forthcoming, 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 specificity 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 addition, 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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– 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 kl o r e : t h e e m e r g en 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 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 folktale ‘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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 impervious 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 transformation 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 homogenous 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?

a hi s to r y o f ko r e a n h o r r or 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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made during this period often necessarily contained propagandist messages in support of the Japanese colonial government, and attempts at producing artistically 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 defining 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 theatrical 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 highschool 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 melodramatic 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 rampaging, 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 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 cheongchoon, 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 daeyeokseub, Choi Yeong-cheol and Paul Leder), an international co-production Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 Sangok, 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 exploitation 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 pressures, 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 m a st ud i e s a n d t h e h or r or fil m In 2005, two prominent edited book collections on Korean cinema were published: New Korean Cinema (Shin and Stringer) and South Korean Golden 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 transform, 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 criticisms 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) and the horror-orientated issue of Screen (1986) which published Pete Boss and Philip Brophy’s articles on contemporary body horror – the 1990s witnessed 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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d ar k ti me s, r e b i r t h a n d r ein 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 increasingly 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 apparently 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 production 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 unjustified nudity, and a (distinctly Korean) supernatural element in the form of a small shamanistic totem that grows to human size and goes on a murderous 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 retrospective of Korean horror from the 1980s, a rare opportunity to see many of these films. Due to their perceived inferior quality and problematic political Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 emulating the Hollywood pattern of franchising horror, and has produced four sequels to date. The contemporary cycle has seen the emergence of clear patterns 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), slapstick 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 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 demonstrate, the few Korean horror films released in the West are hardly representative 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 expectations 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 of world cinema). The controversial 2010 film discards supernatural elements 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 internationalising 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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korean horror cinema a n d it s p l a c e in k or ea n c i ne m a st ud i e s As we write this introduction in 2012, it seems evident that scholarship on Korean cinema continues to build momentum. There have been four monographs dedicated to Korean cinema published in the last two years alone, covering 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 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 contributors 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 yeonghwasa] (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 material 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, including 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 contexts: 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 attempts not only to define and explore a canon but also to illuminate previously 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 analysing  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 collection 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 transnational 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 foundation 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, particularly as represented by the Japanese onryo- (vengeful spirit). In Chapter 2, Alison Peirse and James Byrne discuss an equally important but quite different tradition that emerged in the 1960s: the interplay of traditional Korean folktales and the horror film. Beginning in 1969 with The Thousand Year Old Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 (Daejwaeui 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-inlaw, 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 court dramas) as a form of ‘heritage horror’. Hye Seung Chung’s chapter contextualises 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 potential 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 physiognomy offers an embodied form of spectatorial participation and a way of thinking 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 bestknown Korean films, exploring how they are marketed, distributed and consumed 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 contemporary 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 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 examines 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 magisterial 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 gua ge In focusing entirely on non-English-language cinema, this volume has necessarily 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 transposing 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 1. The screening series is available from: http://www.kmdb.or.kr/eng/vod/ vod_enMain.asp; accessed 13 August 2012. 2. The original version of Yongary is still available on DVD, and is something 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!’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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) directors such as Mario Bava, Roman Polanski and Terence Fisher. For a collection 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. 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 yeonghwa], 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 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’ (Englishlanguage 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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— (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; http://www.kmdb.or.kr/eng/vod/eventPage_1008.asp; 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. 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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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ch 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 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 allegory 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 o e t i c j u s t i c e : the housemaid a n d the devil ’ s stairway The political repression and social unrest associated with the Park Chunghee 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 symbolically 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 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 flashbacks, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 narrative 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 disposes of her body in the pond in the hospital grounds, constructing a building 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, emphasising 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 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a v a m pi r e c a t a n d a f a i t hfu l gisaeng : a devilish homicide a n d a public cemetery under the moon A Devilish Homicide invokes localised interpretations of Confucianism, hypocritical 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 vampiric 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 relationship 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 conflicting 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-inlaw 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 examines 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 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 enveloped 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 specific 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 bloodsucking 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 indulgences associated with the colonial modernity introduced during the Japanese occupation (Kim 2000: 17). It uses the faithful gisaeng to create a horror story, 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 Choonsik 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 housemaid, 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-inlaw 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 to her old house; her plan is to return home and save Yeong-jin from Nanjoo. 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 Wolhyang. 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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

c o nc 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 masculinity. 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 subjectivity 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 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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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 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 master’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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 Sangok, 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 differing 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 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 reincarnate 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 Yeohwa, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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takes control of her body. The spirit remains vocalised but otherwise ethereal, 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 murderous, 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. 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 Yongmin, 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 plotting 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 aesthetics 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 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 w o l f ’ s c l o t h i n g : 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 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 importantly 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 originality. 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 to the period. It goes against the grain of male werewolf films, which Chantal Bourgault Du Courdray points out find ‘expression primarily in the murderous 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 audience 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 adversary. 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, ultimately 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 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 comments 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ci r c u s t r i c ks : 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) twentysomething 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 throughout 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 performances, 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 following 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 exertions 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 daughter 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 abandoning 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 fox form living in the back garden of their Western-style house. This communicates 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(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 goosebumps 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 concerned 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 complete. 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; http://www.youtube. 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. 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; http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2011/ 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; http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/ 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.

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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.

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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 framework 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 conjunction between horror and war that is less obvious, less shaped by genre expectations, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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

t he i c o n o gr a p h y o f w a r -h or 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 globalised 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, gambling, 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 contexts, but the fit was not always easy to make. For American filmmakers, like American audiences, the Second World War had happened elsewhere: on farflung 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, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 Kangcheon, 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, belittling 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 weakminded 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 finally be questioned, he betrays his relative, but not before another villager has already confessed. The soldiers and auxiliaries round up six village notables 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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– 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-ofwar, 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 violence set loose by these 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’.

bangong a n t i - c o m mun i s m ‘Let’s have a go at making a real bangong film!’ director Lee Man-hee supposedly 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 information 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Sang-ho’s DMZ (Bimoojang jidae, 1965) is one such example of the depiction of Northern soldiers and spies as cruelly treacherous. In this documentarystyle 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) 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 youngest 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(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 suspense, 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 wellworn 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 different 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 n o m e n o l o gy o f ko r ea 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 relationships are perverted: brother turns against brother, son against father. On the existential level, the human body is assaulted and rent by the violent irruption 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 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 commonplace in body-focused horror cinema: ‘the obsession with the . . . destruction 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 antiCommunism may make its ‘viscerality’ quite literal. However, the ideological Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 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 positions 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 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 episodes 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-Communist era, just with computer-generated imagery (CGI) and new special effects. Here the DPRK soldiers are automata, perhaps too comic-book to be believably 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 heavyhanded 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 bayoneting 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 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.

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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’; http://www.kmdb.or.kr/movie/md_basic. asp?nation=K&p_dataid=01656&keyword=Daejwa-eui adeul; accessed 1 December 2011. KMDb (n.d.), ‘Jangma’; http://www.kmdb.or.kr/movie/md_basic.asp?nat 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.

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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 motherhood 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 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 representations 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 psychoanalytic 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 determines 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 representation of female relationships and motherhood in Korean horror cinema is 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 sinister, 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 gh t 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 ancestors). 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 possible 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) 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 nineteenth 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 Soonim’s death, Gwidong moves in with his father and Suh treats the boy terribly, causing Soon-im’s wonhon to abandon the afterlife and return to rescue Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 counterpart. 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 motherhood. 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 privileged 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 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 Bongsam 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 different dimensions of a single mother, each taking turns to experience an array of emotions, including love, obsession, dread, fear, guilt, rage and responsibility. 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 illustrates 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 naturalised. 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 accommodated 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 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 removing 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; Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, allencompassing – 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 succeeds 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.

t he m o ns t r o us mo t h e r - i n - 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 Kyeongjin’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 Myeongkyu’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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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-inlaw. 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 husband’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 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) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 perspectives 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-inlaw 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 pregnancy, 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 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 characteristics 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 leadership 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 motherin-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 menacing, 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, vampiric 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. 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 scripture 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 authority 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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c o nc 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 (http://www.mcst.go.kr/web/notifyCourt/press/mctPressVie w.jsp?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 guıˇ -bàoqiú 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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: Ssiaseul 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. 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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ch 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 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 prescriptive 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 disappeared 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 tradition. While the latter has been the dominant opinion to date, this question calls Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 both classical and modern horror, Baek Moon-im distinguishes modern examples, 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) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 inevitable 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 n d h e r i t 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 partially 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 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). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 controlled 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 curiously 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, 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 featuring 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(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 striking 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 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), traditional ghost film The Evil Twin (Jeonseol-ui gohyang, Kim Ji-hwan, 2007) and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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retro medical horror Epitaph. The cross-fertilisation of ‘horror’ and ‘historical’ 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 i o 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 ‘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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 motherin-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 (Wolhaeui 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 ambitious femmes fatales of past historical dramas and period horrors, who manifested explicit desires to ascend the political ladder. In other words, the ghost Wollyeong is at once familiar and new, evoking memories of earlier representations 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 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 technology 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 showcased satisfying spectacle, thanks to the introduction of colour and cinemascope 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 highangle 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 murdering the lowly eunuchs and palace women who may be aware of the royal deaths. The figuring of space – layered windows, sliding doors, secret passages 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 provision of an heir to the family, or are subjected to inhumane edicts concerning 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 Jinseong, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 conception 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 brimming with jealousy, conspiracy and lust for power; even its spatial arrangement 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 poses to the royal court. In such a way, Shadows in the Palace evokes the similarly 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 established 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 narrative 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 powerful 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 investigatorcum-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 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 monarchy. 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 symbolically recuperates the oppressed women’s history as the obliterated records of the anonymous palace women similarly resurface through the horror narrative. 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 o nc 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 timeframe’, 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 imagination, 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 theatres and regional cinemas has furthered the marginalisation of the genre (see Lee et al. 2004: 128). 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 (www.kofic.or.kr.). 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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8. 9.

10.

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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. 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. See Kim’s study of the figuration of Nok-su in Shin’s Prince Yeonsan (1999: 129–38). ‘Arang’ tells of a magistrate’s daughter, pure and virtuous, who is murdered 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 successors until a new magistrate arrives who is brave enough to confront the ghost, learn the truth and punish her murderer, thus restoring justice. 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. 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 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; http://www.cine21. com/do/movie/detail/synopsis?movie_id=21260; accessed 10 July 2010. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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; http://www.hani.co.kr/cine21/K_C981H135/C981H135_064. 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. 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 three high-profile horror films released that year: Acacia, A Tale of Two Sisters and Uninvited. Each film focuses on individuals living in seemingly comfortable, 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 foregrounds the process and effects of adoption, Uninvited uses the theme as an understated subplot that is belatedly introduced as part of a surprise revelation Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 threatening 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 i n e s s : ko 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 developed nations, South Korea began expatriating its children for overseas adoption 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 (domestic) to 6,532 (overseas) (Hwang 2007). In order to shed its reputation as the world’s leading ‘baby exporter’, the South Korean government began implementing 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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active state involvement and multi-pronged promotion, the number of domestic 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 country’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 adoption; 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 prospective 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 generations. 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 1,770 children adopted domestically in 2000, only 200 cases were ‘open adoptions’ (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 children. 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 (adoptive, 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 e e , f a m i l y: a m b 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 cultures, 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 family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them’ (ibid.: 78–9). What makes the horror genre especially compelling 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 adaptations) (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 panAsian 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 apartment and occupy the modern dinner table, a wedding gift from his fiancée. The sinister, intruding presence of the child ghosts gradually destroys everything 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 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 universitysponsored children’s drawing contest / exhibition and is drawn to Jin-seong’s dark, abstract portrait of an agonised, faceless figure set against a tree, reminiscent 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 egalitarian 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 meditation 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 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) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 breathing 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 intentions, 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’ (highbrow) 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 antagonistic 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 pictures, or riding a bicycle (a material reward he had received after calling Do-il Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘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 particular, 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 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 orientations. The former is a morally ambiguous psychological thriller replete with horror film trappings, and critical of bourgeois hypocrisy and discriminatory 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: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 buildup 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 biological 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 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 adoptive 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 dramatically and the once-happy couple becomes increasingly antagonistic and violent towards one another. The barren acacia tree in the garden mysteriously blossoms 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 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 implicate 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 responsible 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 recurring nightmares of delivering a bloody, still-born child are symptoms of his 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 o nc 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 highschool 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) responsible 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 relationship 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 Jinseong’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 murders committed by the parents of the victim. Korean audiences belatedly viewing Acacia on DVD may recall the notorious February 2011 case involving 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 routinely 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 technologically advanced country where the antiquated notion of blood familialism still suffocates orphans and other children, figuratively, if not literally, burying them alive. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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-fiveyear-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; http://www.joongdo.co.kr/jsp/article/article_view.jsp?pq=200705090002; 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; http://news.chosun. com/site/data/html_dir/2011/02/08/2011020802173.html; accessed 30 July 2011. Byeon, Seong-chan (2003), ‘Acacia and Korean Family Horror Films’ [‘Akasia wa hanguk gajok horeo yeonghwadeul’], Cine 21, 23 October; http://www. cine21.com/do/article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=21534; accessed 30 July 2011. Elley, Derek (2003), ‘Acacia’, Variety, 1–7 December; http://www.variety. 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; http://www.cine21. 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; http://weekly.chosun.com; accessed 30 July 2011. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Hwang, Yoon-eok (2006), ‘Institutionalization of Adoption Day’ [‘Ipyang ui nal jaejeong’], Kid Chosun Daily [Sonyeon Joseon Ilbo], 12 May; http://kid. chosun.com; accessed 30 July 2011. Jang, Hyo-ju (2002), ‘Our Baby Is Adopted’ [‘Uri agi ipyang haeteoyo’], Chosun  Daily [Joseon Ilbo], 11 November; http://news.chosun.com; accessed 30 July 2011. Kim, Min-yeong (2003), ‘Closing Film Acacia Press Screening’ [‘Pyemakjak Akasia gijasisahoe yeolryeo’], PIFF News, 2–10 October; http://www. koreafilm.co.kr/festival/piff2003/news_10-8.htm; 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; http://news.chosun.com; 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; http://www.kookje.co.kr; accessed 30 July 2011.

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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 building. 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) all effectively integrate apartment spaces into the development of their narratives. 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 predominantly set in a single apartment building whose space is used to engender horror. Apartments have recently become central to academic discussions of cinematic 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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embodies homosexuality through spatial characteristics and cinematic conventions. 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 characterisation. 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, spontaneity, 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 middleclass 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 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 material 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 / i s 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 experience. 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 international 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. 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 obscurity, my contention is that – in terms of cinematic space as well as narrative – in Sorum the apartment building itself materially and cinematically embodies 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 apartment. Yong-hyun becomes involved with a young woman, Sun-young (Seonyeong), who lives on the same floor. In the mean time, the police investigate Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 building 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 Yonghyun’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 Yonghyun 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 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 apartment 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, Yonghyun 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 Yonghyun’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 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 atmosphere, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 conclusion 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 embodies 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 terrifying end. The real location of the apartment used in Sorum is the Geumhwa City Council Apartment complex in central Seoul. Geumhwa Apartments is 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 ambitious contemporary urban redevelopment plan. However, most of the buildings 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 conversation between Yong-hyun and the novelist, the latter states that the apartment is scheduled for imminent redevelopment. Later scenes include tall new apartment blocks framed in a blurred background and built close to Yong-hyun’s Migeum Apartment. The existence of Geumhwa Apartments poses just such Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 industrialisation. 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 i gi o us p r a c t i c es 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 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 disbelievers 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 parttime 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 apartment space where people of different social backgrounds live in close proximity, 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 represents 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 drinking 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 characters 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 character 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 interpretation 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 contemporary, 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, 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 apartment and the apartment building engender horror. These spaces are intertwined with narrative developments and used to create a sense of horror. The Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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two Korean films discussed above, Sorum and Possessed, demonstrate how the lived experience in real-life apartments can return as a cinematic experience 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 interspaces (the walls, windows, doors, veranda and corridors), while developing a distinctive apartment spatial plot. However, despite such different orientations, 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 narrative 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 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 gonggan-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 Yongjoo gamdok inteobyu’], Cine 21, 8 August; http://www.cine21.com/do/ 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. NicholsonSmith, 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 NineteenthCentury Paris and London, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mitchell, Timothy (ed.) (2000), Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nam, Dong-chul (2003), ‘Uninvited and Korean Horror Films’ [‘4inyong siktak-ae geurigo hanguk gongpo yeonghwa’], Cine 21, 8 August; http://www. cine21.com/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 jeohang-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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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[‘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; http://census.go.kr/hcensus/ui/html/data/data_020_010_ Detail.jsp?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 Jongchan gamdok-i malhaneun Sorum’], Cine 21, 10 August; http://www. cine21.com/do/article/article/typeDispatcher?mag_id=3595&page=1&m enu=&keyword=&sdate=&edate=&reporter=; accessed 13 July 2011.

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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 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 everything. 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 director 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 oftignored 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 character’s eventual juxtaposing of grief and pained elation, puts forth contradictory 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), Daesu’s unusual act of first frowning and then smiling also anticipates the film’s 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 dilemmas 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). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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be t we e n p l e a s ur e a n d p a i n : ‘ 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 spectatorship, 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 reactions – the looks of fright and terror – performed by actors and photochemically 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, parteuphoric) (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 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 emotional polarities, situated at the far ends of an experiential continuum signified by Dae-su’s negatively charged and positively charged facial features, are the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 different 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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textual level. An iconographic convention of the Korean horror genre (contemporary 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 recognizes 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 protagonist 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 Woojin’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 illustrating 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 stylistically 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 affective 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 Mandae’s Cinderella [2006]). However, the sheer number of horror films produced in South Korea since the late 1990s (a period when increased liberalisation Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 n d t h e sp a c es in b e t 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 ‘faciality’, visagéité is closely related to Béla Balázs’s notion of physiognomic expression, 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 the latter’s conceptualisation hinges on the face ‘as a model displaying two different 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 movements 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 collapses 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 nevertheless ‘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 micromovements, 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 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 hermeneutic 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 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 Hyunsuk Seo states in his examination of the genre, ‘Most Korean horror films rely heavily on one dominant supernatural prototype: the virgin ghost, or cheonyeogwisin’ (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 Sanghoon’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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 fundamental 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 thingness 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, metaphorically 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 camera’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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, suspending 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 recognition 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 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 confrontational 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 expressive 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 associated 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 disproportionate number of shock-filled moments and generic clichés, including direct and indirect allusions to American horror films such as Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). However, as a miseen-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 impeccable 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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more clearly. My eyes have gotten better.’ Presented in this way, the two diametrically 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, witnessed 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 uproarious 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 seemingly 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 dissatisfaction 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 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 daughter, 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 expression 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 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 reallife 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 audiences, 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 Daesu’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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 supernatural occurrences interrupts his writing and wreaks havoc with his marriage. 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 oncemenacing, 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 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.

wo rk s c i t e d Belázs, Béla (1970 [1952]), Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, New York: Dover. Brophy, Philip (1986), ‘Horrality – The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, Screen, 27: 1, pp. 2–13. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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. Cantor, Joanne and Mary Beth Oliver (2004), ‘Developmental Differences in Responses to Horror’, in S. Prince (ed.), The Horror Film, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 224–41. Carroll, Noël (1999), ‘Film, Emotion, and Genre’, in C.  R. Plantinga and G. Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 21–47. Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ekman, Inger and Petri Lankoski (2009), ‘Hair-Raising Entertainment: Emotions, Sound, and Structure in Silent Hill 2 and Fatal Frame’, in B. Perron (ed.), Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 181–99. Ha, Seong-Kyu and Seong-Woo Lee (2001), ‘IMF and the Crisis of the Marginalized Urban Sector in Korea’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 31: 2, pp. 196–213. Hill, Derek [1983] (2000), ‘The Face of Horror’, in A.  Silver and J. Ursini (eds), The Horror Film Reader, Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight, pp. 51–62. Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun (2009), ‘Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy’, positions, 17: 3, pp. 713–40. Kim, Seung-Kyung and John Finch (2002), ‘Living with Rhetoric, Living Against Rhetoric: Korean Families and the IMF Economic Crisis’, Korean Studies, 26: 1, pp. 120–39. Lowenstein, Adam (2005), Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, New York: Columbia University Press. Meehan, Paul (2011), Horror Noir: Where Cinema’s Dark Sisters Meet, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Muir, John Kenneth (2007), Horror Films of the 1970s, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Pearce, Judge Joel (2006), ‘Review: The Red Shoes’, DVD Verdict; http:// www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/redshoes.php; accessed 1 November 2011. Plantinga, Carl (1999), ‘The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film’, in C. R. Plantinga and G. Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 239–56. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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— (2009), Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press. Powell, Anna (2005), Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rodowick, D. N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 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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ch 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 students, 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 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 commercial 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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

ni g ht m a r e s a n d a b j e 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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co-educational with male and female pupils. Some of the monsters are underground, 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 closeup 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 womanhood, their entry indicated by the onset of menstruation. Ina’s bleeding 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 experience) 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 Chiwon. Spooked by this, he looks around and sees the ghostly vision of Chi-won Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 white dress resembling traditional funeral costume (thus appropriate for the wonhon). As such, although her study of the monstrous-feminine is in relation 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 monstrous-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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(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 abominable 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 e v e ng e a n d o t h e r p l e a s ur es 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 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 teachers 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 revelatory 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 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 instalments 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 rankings: after all, the higher the ranking, the guiltier they are. Ina survives. Although she is not the only survivor, to all intents and purposes 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 momentarily 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 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 examtaking to a bloody and terrifying conclusion. In real life, a sickening competitiveness 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 fictional 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, widespread 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 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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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 boxoffice 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 respectively. 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; http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/ schooling/5925.html; accessed 18 July 2011. Box Office Mojo (2008), ‘South Korea Yearly Box Office (2007 and 2008)’; http://boxofficemojo.com/intl/korea/yearly/?yr=2007&p=.htm; accessed 13 February 2012. Choi, Jinhee (2009), ‘A Cinema of Girlhood: Sonyeo Sensibility and the 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:// www.cine21.com/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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geodeonaela’] http://www.cine21.com/news/view/mag_id/53425; accessed 5 November 2011. Kim, Kyu Hyun (2008), ‘Death Bell’ Korean Movie Reviews for 2008; http:// koreanfilm.org/kfilm08.html; accessed 16 December 2011. Kim, Rahn (2007), ‘63 Students School Admissions Cancelled’, Korea Times, 19 November; http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/include/print. 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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ch 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, including 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 barriers’ (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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 reception of his widely distributed 2002 film Phone (Pon). Finally, this chapter concludes 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 n g- ki a s h o 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 signifiers. 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 arguably intentional, in part, as Ahn readily admits to being influenced by numerous 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 shamanism 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. 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 emphasising 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 uncovers 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 conforming to, and subverting, the supposedly typical traits of Korean horror.

d e f i ni n g ko 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 expectations 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 particularly 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 melodramatic 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 development is tied to one of the truly universal, fundamental qualities of contemporary 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 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 identical to the long-haired spirits of the most iconic Japanese horror – uses these Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘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 audience 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 violence 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, frequently 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Bunshinsaba is thus a familiar text in several ways: it conforms to conventions of both the restrained tradition and more explicit horror by slowly building 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 friendship, 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 whatever 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 examples 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 fact, the mother / daughter theme of Bunshinsaba ties it instantly to a transnationally 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 contemporary 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 videotape, 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 variations 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 momentary decline of the genre’s commercial viability. The following section examines the international circulation of Ahn’s films, especially Phone, in the context of simultaneously emerging, and often contradictory, canons.

the i nt e r n a t i o n a 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, capitalising 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 territories. Most significantly, Phone received nationwide theatrical distribution at multiplex cinemas in the UK in August 2004, distributed by Tartan Films. 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 marketing concept revolved around promoting Asian cinema as sexually explicit and transgressively violent: essentially, a thoroughly Orientalist presentation 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 presented 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 subsidiary 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 dependent on the context, and in this case, the intended audience. The Asia Extreme Roadshow at multiplex cinemas was intended to raise visibility and encourage 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 companies, 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 mainstream impact in the UK was limited, the inclusion of Ahn’s Phone in the Asia 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 visibility 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 visibility, 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 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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2. The four films in the series are February 29 (I-wol isipgu-il, Jeong Jonghoon, 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 tormented 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 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; http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2004/aug/29/ features.review17/print; accessed 20 October 2011. Han, Sunhee (2009), ‘Imprint Entertainment to Remake Phone’, Variety, 3 December; http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118012219?refCatId=13; 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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“J-horror neomgo sipda”’], Star News, 22 April; http://star.mt.co.kr/ view/stview.php?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; http://www.movieweek.co.kr/ article/article.html?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; http://www. cine21.com/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; http://www.cine21.com/do/ 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; http://news.maxmovie.com/movie_info/sha_news_view.asp?news 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 http://www.chinesefilms.cn/141 /2012/07/16/241s10714.htm; 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; http://www.empireonline.com/ reviews/ReviewComplete.asp?FID=10220; accessed 20 October 2011. Russell, Jamie (2004), ‘Phone (2004)’, BBC Films, 10 July; http://www.bbc. co.uk/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. WadaMarciano (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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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 classical 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.

br o k e n b l o s s o m s 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 pervasive 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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: subservient, 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 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 depicting 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 universal and unambiguous terms; its traditional, linear trajectory moves forward Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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

secrets and lies 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 succinct 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 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 photograph. 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 shuttered 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 introduced 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 necessarily 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 seemingly meaningless codes, much in the same way that the analyst records, rearranges 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 i n g The specific choice of wallpaper, John Henry Dearle’s ‘Blackthorn’, originally 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 intellectual 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 s o ul This web of intrigue opens, suitably enough, in a clinic, with a medium closeup 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 disturbance 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 washbasin 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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doctor and the washbasin form one half of the image, while the desk, windows and empty chairs form the other (unequal) half. The asymmetrical composition 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 personalities 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, 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, presumably 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 suggesting, 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 s t 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 observation. 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 the patient narrates while under the influence of psychotropic drugs, her narrative 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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position as protagonist, not by way of spoken language, and thus, no opportunities for halting or redirecting her narration interrupt the story’s unfolding. Indeed, the only other male figures (the individuals who, in Doane’s formulation, 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 appearance 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 significant, 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, activating 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 fetishistic 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 identities ([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 conclusion. 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 difference 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 validity 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 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 tracking 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 background 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 spoon angrily down on to the table and storms away, leaving a confusedlooking 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 Eunjoo’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 wardrobe 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 girlfriend, 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, selfinflicted 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 storyline, 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 resolution, 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 hysteric, 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.

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; Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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. 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. ‘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). 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 profound socio-economic privilege and the frequent setting for horror stories written during the Victorian era. See Lynch (2004) and Vidler (1994). 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. 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, 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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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 presented 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 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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 versions of an earlier film, it is a legitimate subject to focus on how an adaptation 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 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 daughters 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 circumstances (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 productive 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 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 importantly, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 threeday 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, contemporary 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 reservoir 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 wardrobe. 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 opportunity 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: 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 witnesses to Su-mi’s madness. At dinner after Su-mi’s return from the hospital, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 occurring 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 contemporaneous South Korean context. So this adaptation universalises the folk-story into a (mostly) psychological horror centring on Su-mi’s schizophrenic 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 emphasises 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 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 audiences 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 closeup 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 deliberately 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 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 portraying 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 conventions 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 subjected 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 contemporaneous 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 “historicizes” 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 s s i o 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 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 ‘stepmother’, 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 stay in the psychiatric ward, followed by a shorter epilogue which resolves the mystery. This resolution may be termed ‘delayed and concentrated exposition’; 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 unreliable 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 lovemaking 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 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 liberation 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 representation 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 punishment 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 deliberately 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 suffocating 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 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 oppressive 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 o nc 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 traumatic journey of the subject. Then the story is transposed to another generalised 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 concentrated exposition in the syuzhet, alongside the intrusion of the sexualised ‘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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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— (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; http://int.kateigaho.com/ win05/horror-lee.html; 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. 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 MonstrousFeminine 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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ch 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 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 Jaeyong, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 adaptation 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 n s 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 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 representative this film actually is of specifically Korean concerns. As Nikki J. Y. Lee has observed in her research on the movie, many Korean commentators Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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have argued that the success of Oldboy at Cannes was less to do with any particular Korean qualities and more to do with ‘its supposedly universal or familiar styles, themes and generic thriller elements’ (2008: 210). Furthermore, the fact that the film is an adaptation of a Japanese manga series that began publication 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 incarnations, 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 perspective 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. 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] cultural 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 n d t h e ‘ gl o b a l h or 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 transnational 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 momojiri 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 internet’ (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 reworkings’ (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 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 continued 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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, transformation 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 crosscultural 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 unprecedented 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 interrogate the ways in which these films ‘construct and articulate their shared identities 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 interrogate what this tells us both about their specific national contexts and about the broader globalisation of horror imagery. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 revelation 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 character 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 atonement 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 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 television 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 transgressive 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, characterisations, 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’ 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 production 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 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 dynamics 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 importance of the global / local dynamics in both Oldboy and Zinda, and by extension 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, 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 perspective 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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world stage through the ways in which it negotiates cultural transfers, reworking 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 announcement forms part of a recognised current trend for Hollywood to rework successful 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 Yoonhyeon, 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 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 unexplored 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 WingFai’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 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; http://www. whitefeatherfilms.in; 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; http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/NM5/ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Zinda-was-exhausting-Sanjay-Gupta/Article1-50498.aspx; 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 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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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 circuits 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 genre expectations. Therefore, many viewers, critics and scholars are sometimes 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 goodversus-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, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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depending on where you stand, confusing) ways, mixing and matching seemingly 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 aesthetics (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 examples 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 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 assessment 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 conventional art-house cinema (unfortunately, this phrase is not an oxymoron) and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 prestigious 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 cultural prejudice is the North American–European critic’s unquestioningly positive 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, practising 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 (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 n d e mb odied 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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with his faith, volunteers as a human guinea pig at an African research facility, working on the vaccine for a virulent strain of virus dubbed Emmanuel. The virus kills him, but he is miraculously resurrected by a blood transfusion. 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 conspires 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 bestknown 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 Glover (1996), for instance, characterises Dracula as a foe of the progressive liberalism of nineteenth-century England and Ireland that Stoker had supported, a monster who could ‘pass for’ an ordinary human being, his subsistence 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 quasimelodramatic 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 sacraments or holy water (nor of garlic, shamanistic rituals or Buddhist incantations, 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’ (Taejoo’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 a se t h a t ki l l s a n d 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 administration’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 interest, 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 conservative (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). 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 recuperative 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’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 bifurcation 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 simultaneously 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. Consequently, the way in which Park juxtaposes the Catholic (Christian) religious order and the conventions of the vampire film genre differs considerably 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 religious 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 protagonist 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 culminated 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, unglamorous and ‘dirty’.

va m pi r i sm, l i b e r a t i n g a n d op p r essiv e . . . l ik e f ai t h i n go 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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’ Sanghyun 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 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 building, 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 apartment, 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 h e ‘ m a 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 collaborated with evil, a reverential act of sacrifice and martyrdom to sever the link of 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 recognise 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 redemption 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 diminish 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 ki l 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 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 humanism, and trivialising the manner in which Tae-joo’s resurrection as a vampire Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 characteristics 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 immortality’ 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 occasioned 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 continues to destroy men to nourish herself beyond the ending of the film. Thirst could easily have been the vampire film equivalent of some post-1970s neonoir 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. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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t he m e an i n g 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, presence 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 selfprofessed 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, culminating 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. 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, representative 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 rationality make her reject the view held by Sang-hyun, distinguishing her orientation 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 complicated 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 associated 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 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 parasitism 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 condition. 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 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: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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urgent reflection on the impossibility and unknowability of salvation, nonjudgemental 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 coursing 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 languages 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 Dongjin, 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 approximate 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 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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 interracial 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; http://www.cine21.com/do/article/ 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 jeongmal injeong mothagetta’]’, Cine 21, 26 May; http://www.cine21.com/ 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 maehogjeogin bulgyunjil ham-iyeo’], Cine 21, 21 May; http://www.cine21. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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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; http://www.pressian.com/article/article.asp?article_ 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.

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Glossary

ajumma bangong bukgwigun

Typically, a middle-aged married woman. Anti-Communism. 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 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 specifically 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). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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g los s a r y

han hanbok hon and baek Inmingun manhwa minjung sageuk shinpa

wonhon yangban

A sense of agonising grief and heartbreak at unfair misfortune and suffering. Traditional Korean clothing; typically brightly coloured. The sobok is the all-white version. When paired, these words refer to the spirit and the body, which are separated at death. The Korean People’s Army; the North Korean forces during the Korean War. Korean comic books; the equivalent of Japanese manga. Used to describe the ‘common people’ suffering under an exploitative government or class system. Historical or period drama. The wangjo sageuk refers to a royal court drama. An emphatically sad mode of melodrama, focusing on romance and female suffering. The word comes from a Japanese theatrical tradition. Female ghost, returning from the grave to avenge her wrongful death. The traditional ruling class in old Korean society.

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bibliog raphy

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Index

71: Into the Fire (2010), 56–8 Aatish: Feel the Fire (1994), 190 Acacia (2003), 14, 87–8, 90–9, 121 Ahn Byung-ki, 9, 15, 75, 87, 101, 110, 121, 123, 145–56 Amores Perros (2000), 190 Antarctic Diary (2004), 76 Apartment (2006), 75, 101, 110, 121, 145, 147, 149, 151–2, 154–5 Apartment, The (1960), 102 Ape (1976), 5, 16n2 Arang (2006), 121, 123 Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon (2011), 77 Asia Extreme brand, 10, 58, 117–18, 120, 152–4, 170n3, 191, 194, 197n3 Audition (1999), 154 Awarapan (2007), 187 Baek Moon-im, 11, 66, 74, 76, 81, 85n10 Bangkok Dangerous (1999), 194 Barefoot Youth, The (1964), 5 Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), 101 Battle Royale (2000), 132, 154 Beat Back (1956), 54 Bedevilled (2010), 77 Better Tomorrow, A (1986), 190 Bittersweet Life, A (2005), 76–7, 187 Bi Xian (2012), 145, 155 Black House (2007), 140n1 Blair Witch Project, The (1999), 152, 155 Blood and Chocolate (2007), 40

Blood Pledge, A (2009), 140n3 Blood Rain (2005), 77 Bloody Beach (2000), 87 Bloody Reunion (2006), 9 Blue Swallow (2005), 103 Body Heat (1981), 210 Bong Joon-ho, 10, 101, 126–7, 154, 201 Breaking the Wall (1949), 53 Buddhism, 24, 28–31, 65, 68, 82, 201, 203 Bunker, The (2001), 48 Bunshinsaba (2004), 15, 75, 123, 145–52, 154–6 Burning, The (1981), 122 Cadaver see Cut, The Cannes Film Festival, 10, 188–9, 199 Carrie (1976), 97–8, 124, 133, 179 Cat People (1942), 39 Cello (2005), 15, 121, 125 Chaplin, Charlie, 119–20 Chaser, The (2007), 77, 187 Choi In-kyu, 4 Choi Min-sik, 114–15 Christianity, 24, 107–8, 110, 201–11 Chun Doo-hwan government, 8, 57 Cinderella (2006), 118 City on Fire (1987), 190 Clover, Carol, 7, 12, 15, 67, 132–3, 136–7, 151, 175, 179, 183 colonial period, 3–5, 27, 31, 76, 121 Company of Wolves, The (1984), 40

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i n de x Comrades (2010), 56–7 Confessions (2010), 151 Confucianism, 2, 8, 14, 24, 28, 33, 36, 40–1, 60–9, 89–90, 174–5 Contact, The (1997), 196 Court Lady, A (1972), 80–1 Creed, Barbara, 7, 12, 14, 30, 60–9, 79, 132, 134–5, 179 Crush on You (2008), 101 Cut, The (2007), 132, 140n1 Dark Forest (2006), 156n2 Dark Water (2004), 151, 176 Dead Friend see Ghost Death Bell (2008), 75, 131–40 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 14–15, 114, 119–20, 124, 126–7, 174 Devilish Homicide, A (1965), 3, 13, 23, 27–31, 38, 51, 62, 68, 82, 118 Devil’s Stairway, The (1964), 12–13, 23, 25–7, 29, 38, 51 Disbelief Hell see Possessed DMZ (1965), 53 Dog Soldiers (2002), 40 Dracula 1979 film, 206 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 film), 206 Horror of Dracula (1958), 203, 206 original novel, 202–5, 212 Son of Dracula (1943), 210 Epitaph (2007), 76 Eunuch (1968), 80–1, 83 Evil Twin, The (2007), 78–9, 131 Exorcist, The (1973), 94, 146 Eye, The (2002), 153, 194, 197n3 Eyes without a Face (1960), 118 Face (2004), 118 Face behind the Mask, The (1941), 118 February 29 (2006), 156n2 film noir, 41, 46, 81, 118, 190–1, 199, 210 flashback sequence, 30, 93, 96–7, 121, 135, 149–51, 164–6, 176–9 Flower of Evil, A (1961), 13 Forbidden Love (2004), 45 Fox Family, The (2006), 36, 42–4, 46 Fox With Nine Tails, The (1994), 12, 14, 36, 38–43, 45–6

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Frau2 sucht HappyEnd (2001), 196 Friday the 13th series, 122 General’s Son, The (1968), 50, 54 Ghost (2004), 125 Ghost House (2004), 75 Ghost Story of the Joseon Dynasty, A (1970), 3, 80 Ginger Snaps (2000), 40, 133 gisaeng, 28, 31–2 Godzilla (1954), 5 gongan soseol, 2, 23, 81, 175 Gong Soo-chang, 48, 76 Grand Bell Awards, 52, 80 Grudge, The (2004), 155 Grudge: Revolt of the Gumiho (2010), 45 Grudge Woman (1981), 13 Guard Post, The (2007), 9 gumiho, 3, 6, 12, 14, 35–46 Gupta, Sanjay, 190–1, 193–4 H (2002), 77 Halloween (1978), 40, 122, 137 hallyu, 11, 196 han, 1, 6, 13, 23, 38, 150 Han Hyeong-mo, 42, 44, 53 Happiness of the Katakuris, The (2001), 187 Happy End (1999), 101 Harpy (2000), 87 Haunted Wedding Dress, The (1981), 1 Hello Ghost (2010), 75 Hero Without a Serial Number, A (1966), 51–2 Hidden Floor (2006), 156n2 Hitchcock, Alfred, 30, 51, 101, 128, 147, 153, 207 Hole, The (1997), 62 Hometown Legends (2008–9), 44–5, 79 Honda Ishiro, 5 Horror Hospital (1973), 122 Housemaid, The (1960), 4–5, 8–10, 13, 23, 25–7, 38, 51, 83 Housemaid, The (2010), 10 Howling, The (1981), 40 Howling, The (2011), 9 huli jing, 35 Hurrah, For Freedom! (1946), 4

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I Am Happy (2008), 103 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), 146 I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), 200 Im Kwon-taek, 6 Im Sang-soo, 10 Insect Woman (1972), 101 Into the Mirror (2003), 87, 187 I Saw the Devil (2010), 58, 77 I Spit on Your Grave (1978), 40 Jewel in the Palace (2003–4), 78 Joseon period, 2, 14, 38, 40, 62–4, 73–85, 89, 158, 174, 180, 184 JSA: Joint Security Area (2000), 207 Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), 90–1, 98, 153 Kaante (2002), 190 kaibyo eiga, 3 Keaton, Buster, 119–20 Kim Ji-woon, 9, 15, 42, 58, 77, 87, 101, 148, 154, 158–71, 173, 176, 187, 201 Kim Kee-deok, 5 Kim Ki-duk, 49, 201 Kim Ki-young, vii, 1, 4, 25, 38, 51, 74, 83, 101 Kim Mi-jeong, 73, 75, 140n1 Kim, Soyoung, 11, 67, 74 Kim Yong-gyoon, 15, 120, 123–4 King and the Clown (2005), 75, 77 kitsune, 35 Korea Broadcasting System (KBS), 44–5, 56–7, 79 Korean Film Archive (KOFA), 1–2, 4, 8, 11, 69n3, 169n2 Korean Ghost Stories (1977–89), 44–5 Korean War, 4, 14, 48–58, 88 Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 145 Kwaidan (1964), 25, 118 Lady Jang (1961), 79 L’Appartement (1996), 102 Last House on the Left, The (1972), 136 Last Seduction, The (1994), 210 Last Temptation of Christ, The (1988), 205–6 Lee Beom-soo, 132 Lee Kang-cheon, 53–4 Lee Man-hee, 12–13, 23, 38, 49, 51–2 Lee Myung-bak government, 58 Lee Sae-eun, 150

Lee Yong-joo, 107–8 Lee Yong-min, 51 Lee Yoo-seop, 13 Legend of the Evil Lake, The (2003), 85n7 Letter, The (1997), 196 Letter, The (2004), 196 Lewton, Val, 39 Little Pond, A (2010), 56 Lost Boys, The (1987), 204 Madame Freedom (1956), 44 Madam White Snake (1960), 2 Man From Nowhere, The (2010), 58 manhwa, 147 Masquerade (2012), 77 melodrama, 1, 4–6, 9, 15, 23, 37–8, 41–2, 66, 74, 80, 102, 116, 158, 165–71, 176 Memento Mori (1999), 7, 148 Memories (2002), 101 Memories of Murder (2003), 126–7 Mirrors (2008), 187 Mother’s Grudge (1970), 12, 60–5, 68 Mulvey, Laura, 7, 183 Muoi: Legend of a Portrait (2007), 9, 75, 131–2 Murder 2 (2011), 187 My Girlfriend is a Gumiho (2010), 45 My Girlfriend is an Agent (2009), 196 My Sassy Girl (2001), 187, 196 My Sassy Girl 2 (2010), 196 Nakata Hideo, 23, 90, 118, 145–7, 151, 155 Near Dark (1987), 204 Neighbour Zombie, The (2010), 9 Nightmare (2000), 75, 87, 145–6, 148–9, 151, 155, 173, 176, 189 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984), 147 North by Northwest (1959), 207 North Korean cinema, 6, 11, 13 Nosferatu (1922), 204 Nosferatu (1979), 204 Nowhere to Hide (1999), 190 Oldboy (2003), 10–12, 15, 77, 114–18, 124, 127, 187–97, 199–200, 207–8 Omen, The (1976), 94–5, 97 On Air (2008), 132 onryo, 13 Others, The (2001), 107

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i n de x Pagoda of Shadows (1957), 38 Park Chan-wook, 7, 9–10, 15, 77, 114–15, 129, 154, 188, 192, 199–215 Park Chung-hee government, 25, 31, 51–2, 150 Park Ki-hyung, 9, 14, 87, 92–4, 98, 121, 136, 147 Park Yoon-kyo, 13 Phone (2002), 9, 12, 15, 75, 121, 145–55 Piagol (1955), 53 Polanski, Roman, 101, 123 Possessed (1947), 164, 166 Possessed (2009), 60, 75, 101, 107–11 Pot, The (2008), 101 Prince Yeonsan (1961), 38, 80–1, 83 Psycho (1961), 30, 128n3 Public Cemetery under the Moon, A (1967), 12–13, 23, 31–3, 51, 63, 79, 118 Pulgasari (1985), 6 Pulse (2001), 153 Queen Dowager Inmok (1962), 79 Quiet Family, The (1998), 187 Rainy Days (1979), 12, 48, 50, 54 Rear Window (1954), 101 Record (2000), 87 Red Shoes, The (2005), 120–5 Repulsion (1965), 101, 123, 128n3 Reservoir Dogs (1992), 190 Ring (1998), 23, 90, 107, 118, 146, 152–5, 173, 189 Ring, The (2002), 173 Ring Virus, The (1999), 48, 75, 154 Road Number One (2010), 56 Roommates (2006), 156n2 Rosemary’s Baby (1968), 94, 101, 105 R-Point (2004), 48, 76 Ryoo Seung-wan, 201 Saboteur (1942), 207 Saw (2004), 132 Scorsese, Martin, 10, 200, 209 Secret Tears (2000), 98 Seven Female Prisoners (1965), 51 Shadows in the Palace (2007), 12, 73–85, 140n1 shamanism, 8, 24, 30, 88, 108–10, 146–7, 151, 159, 203

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Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl (1998), 190 Shimizu Takashi, 145 Shining, The (1980), 94, 124, 127n1, 128n3 shinpa, 5, 66 Shin Sang-ok, 1–3, 38, 51, 79–80, 83 Sino-Japanese War and Queen Min the Heroine, The (1965), 79 Sixth Sense, The (1999), 107 Someone Behind You (2007), 132, 140n1 Song Gang-ho, 126–7 Song of the Dead (1980), 2 Sorum (2001), 14, 60, 101–8, 110–11 Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967), 5 Spellbound (1945), 207 Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring (2003), 201 Stella Dallas (1937), 116 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 90 Suddenly a Dark Night (1981), 8, 10 Surrogate Mother (1986), 83 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), 199 Taegukgi (2004), 56 Tale of Two Sisters, A 2003 film, 9, 12–13, 15, 87, 97, 148, 158–71, 173–84 Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon folk tale, 81–2, 158–9, 161, 164, 173 Jang-Hwa and Hong-Ryeon: A Story of Two Sisters (1972), 13, 159–60 Story of Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon, The (1924), 3, 60, 169n2 Teenage Hooker Became a Killing Machine (2000), 9 Tenant, The (1976), 101 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974), 44, 122 Thirst (2009), 9, 15, 199–215 Thousand Year Old Fox, The (1969), 3, 13, 36–9, 42–3, 45–6, 51, 80, 85n7 To Catch a Virgin Ghost (2004), 9, 75 Tourner, Jacques, 39 Tower of Evil (1972), 122 Twilight (2008), 206, 211 Tyrant Yeonsan (1962), 80–1 Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), 24 Ugli Aur Pagli (2008), 187

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Uninvited (2003), 14, 75, 87–8, 91, 99n1, 101, 110 Uninvited, The (2009), 12, 173–5, 180–4 Untold Scandal (2003), 77 Usual Suspects, The (1995), 190

Wolfman, The (2010), 39 Woman’s Wail (1986), 12, 60–1, 65–8, 82 wonhon, 2, 6, 13, 23–33, 37, 44, 61–9, 134, 138–9, 148 Wood, Robin, 7, 17n3, 90, 139, 181–2

Vampire Cop Ricky (2006), 9 Vertigo (1958), 207 Virgin Spring, The (1959), 136

yangban, 27–8, 31, 55 Yobi, the Five-Tailed Fox (2007), 45 Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967), 5, 16n2 Yoon Heung-gil, 54–5 Yoon Jong-chang, 103 Yoon Sam-yook, 54 You Become a Star Too (1975), 1 Youth, The (1995), 38 Yu Hyun-mok, 54, 209

Werewolf of London (1935), 39 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), 30 Whispering Corridors (1998), 9, 15, 74–6, 98, 136–8, 147, 151 Wig, The (2005), 9, 121 Williams, Linda, 7, 11 Wishing Stairs (2003), 136–7 Witch Board see Bunshinsaba

Zinda (2006), 12, 15, 187–97

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