How Korean cinema mastered the art of horror

There is a moment in the Jung brothers’ 2007 ghost film, Epitaph, when a young doctor in wartime Korea realises that the wife he adores does not have a shadow. He is entertaining her with a shadow puppet show in their home when he notices the aberration. ‘Walk to me,’ he says as he waves a naked light bulb in front of her. She had been a visiting medical student in Japan a year earlier and, unbeknownst to him, had died in an accident. It’s a moment that perfectly illustrates the psychological subtlety and brilliant scene-making of Korean film.

Epitaph is about a group of young doctors working in a hospital under the Japanese occupation. Linking different stories and the appearance of gwisin — wandering and vengeful ghosts — the gorgeous imagery and narrative complexity marked a turning point in the outside world’s perception of K-Horror, a genre which had hitherto produced its fair share of schlock. Pathos and terror combine, driven on by the emotional intensity of the characters’ realisation.

We are not in the world of Stephen King or Rob Zombie. We are in a very different one: that of the Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Ringu, with its ciphering of the supernatural through the instruments of modern technology. In a cursed videotape, shared among high-school students, the fact that the folkloric past is refracted through our technology only makes it more sinister.

Asian film culture is far closer to the ancestral lore of the supernatural than its western equivalent. This too has a long history. One need only think of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 masterpiece Kwaidan, based on traditional Japanese ghost stories. Asian directors use supernatural archetypes to explore deeper emotional disorders within contemporary culture.