nanoomi

Many people know of the ghosts, monsters and creatures that have skittered through Korean horror films over the past decade. The ghosts of Phone or A Tale of Two Sisters have left indelible images on the minds of viewers around the world.  Others maybe won’t prove as memorable, like the haunted tree in Acacia, the giant pig from Chaw, the demonic taxis from Ghost Taxi or the the werewolves of Ssunday Seoul but they are still fairly recent and won’t be dealt with here.

In these posts counting down to Halloween, I will be dealing with the obscure–my favorite topic. Monsters, ghosts, goblins and the like from before the year 2000; creatures from movies never released on DVD that are in danger of being forgotten in Korea and not known at all outside of the country.
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This summer, my interest was piqued by the horror film The Cat, and it inspired the post where I looked at some of the feline ghosts in Korean cinema’s past. Then I read some reviews about the film and decided to skip it in the theaters.

Yesterday, I saw that it was on Hana TV.  Hana TV has been doing an excellent job of getting films quickly after finishing their theatrical run and I can see them at half the price as I can in the theater.

Link and Beast were just released a month ago but Hana TV already has them available on demand! Anyway, this isn’t an ad for Hana TV… this is about The Cat.

My expectations going in were cautiously hopeful… maybe not as high as they were at the beginning of the summer, though.

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I looked up from work the other day and noticed that October was ending. That means that it must be Halloween.

Now, I had not celebrated in more than two decades.  It is not an holiday here, even a minor one though I am led to believe that some academies in Seoul have their kids dress up in costumes or carve pumpkins with them, it is not done here.  That’s fine with me.

The only thing I really used to like about Halloween was the fact that there would be a wide selection of horror movies on television at night. Checking with in with Hana-TV, my internet TV provider, I saw that that among the new movies listed for this week was the summer horror film Haunted House.

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Back in February, I was disappointed when the movie Neighbor Zombie failed to open in Jeonju. I had been looking forward to it. It is not often that Korean directors tackle the sub-genre of zombie films. The trailers of this movie made it look like a mixture of comedy and horror as Seoul dealt with a zombie plague. It sounded interesting to me even though this topic has been filmed frequently since the classic Night of the Living Dead. Trailers also showed the zombies as the modern, fast moving, shouting type ala 28 Days Later or the remakes of the Living Dead films. I was not really looking forward to that. I prefer my zombies slow moving and groaning. Maybe they are not as dangerous, but as a child watching those movies on tv, I was terrified by the inexorable doom inching closer and closer–and  I think a good horror movie is able to build slowly on the feeling in terror instead of relying on things suddenly jumping out at the viewer.  BUT as it turns out, I would be disappointed again.  Neighbor Zombie is not actually a horror movie at all.  Instead, it deals with social problems using zombies as metaphors.  Issues dealt with in the film include Alzheimers vs Filial Duty, Ex-Convicts re-entering society, agrophobia and so on for a total of 6 short stories contributed by 4 directors.

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