After Dark: K-Horror

Over the last few decades, the haunted high-school hallways of the Whispering Corridors series (1998-2009, 2021-), the ghostly psychodrama of Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), the Carpenter-esque war-is-hell manœuvres of Kong Su-chang’s R-Point (2004), the Zola-adapting vampirism of Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009), the barrelling locomotive undead of Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016), the ambiguous smalltown devilry of Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016), and the found-footage freakery of Jung Bum-shik’s Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018) have all left their imprint on the international consciousness, while coming with a decidedly local flavour of fear.

Both in celebration of this “Horror Wave”, and also just because it has been a very good year for genre cinema in Korea, the LKFF is putting on a special strand devoted to contemporary Korean horror.