So, 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 London Korean Film Festival is putting on a special strand devoted to contemporary Korean horror. This includes Kang Dong-hun’s twisted haunted house/family saga Contorted (2021), in which a new rental home becomes an arena for a dysfunctional clan’s toxic dissolution. Then there is Sim Deok-geon’s Guimoon: The Lightless Door (2021), set in a single space (a cursed community centre) over multiple, intersecting timelines, as different characters drawn to the abandoned building in different years keep crossing paths in their desperate attempts to escape a doom that may already have happened.

Meanwhile Park Kang’s Seire (2021) is an adult film about a newborn ritual, as a father ignores his wife and mother-in-law’s superstitions surrounding postpartum care and exposes himself to ill-omened encounters (a funeral, an encounter with the identical twin of his late ex-girlfriend) and then finds his home life unravelling. And last but not least is Park Sye-young’s messy mattress horror The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra (2021), in which the intensity and impermanence of human relations are shown from the peculiar perspective of a mutating, spine-eating fungus, with unexpectedly moving results. Given its relatively brief duration (60 minutes), this will be accompanied by Park’s (non-horror) short film about Korean barter culture and real values, Cashbag.

Another obvious inclusion might have been Jeong Ji-yeon’s mesmerically disorienting feature debut The Anchor (2022) about several women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but that can instead be seen in this year’s Cinema Now strand. 

Anton Bitel

The post After Dark: K-Horror – Programmer’s Note appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Screening together with Cashbag (2019, 25 min)

With Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), Possession (1981) and A Ghost Story (2017) as its nearest analogues, Park Syeyoung’s experimental fungal slasher tracks a mattress, and the spores growing on it, as they pass through the hands of different owners and users, including lovers at different stages of their relationships and a terminally ill woman. As the fungus rapidly evolves and subtly apes the manners of its human hosts, it vampirically absorbs a vertebra from each to build itself into anthropomorphic form.

A melancholic, monstrous romantic horror with a very unusual take on time, this sets human dramas and dreams against a much broader, more irrational canvas of nature. Episodic and abstract, its utterly gonzo premise drifts to an ending of unexpected sadness and awe. Meanwhile Park’s (non-horror) short Cashbag, which follows a man in a series of nocturnal transactions, ends in a similar waterside location.

Anton Bitel

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Merging different spatiotemporal realities over a single, recurring night, and featuring a grudge-holding ghost whose dissociative identity disorder confounds the usual rules of possession and exorcism, this is a disorienting, increasingly frantic affair, as these disparate characters all race to survive their respective nights. Full of oppressively nightmarish atmosphere and irrational incident, this is a wild, bewildering ghost train, transgressing a door that should never be opened.

Anton Bitel

The post Guimoon: The Lightless Door appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Adapted from Jeon Gun-woo’s novel The Contorted House, but also drawing liberally (if dynamically) on both Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003), this horror feature from writer/director Kang Dong-hun (Pray, 2020) concerns a haunted house and a haunted family, where mental illness and domestic history merge into one. This hits the ground running, placing a child in harrowing peril, and its twisted narrative is sufficiently deft in recombining its borrowed tropes to wrong-foot even the most genre savvy.

Anton Bitel

The post Contorted appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Has the baby I-su come under a curse from the breath-hungry dead, or is Woo-jin working through his own conflicted feelings and deep-seated guilt about having become a father? Eschewing sensationalism or special effects, Park Kang’s intense, ambiguous feature is a subtle, serious, slow-burn exposé of one man’s inner psyche, both waking and dreaming.

Anton Bitel

The post Seire appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.