You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. There’s a giant fish mutant, but there’s also a message. Korean horror features many of the same motifs, themes, and imagery as Japanese horror. Yet, as they approach her figure, they soon realize that she is not wearing sunglasses…her eye sockets are gauged out and nothing but hollow dark pits. [6] Park Chan-wook director of The Vengeance Trilogy has said that his revenge motivated movies serve as a reaction to Korean culture's traditional value of peace making and Forgiveness. It centers on the theme of school girls and the mysterious "other side", but also offered criticism of the Korean school system. In the past women have been oppressed and ignored for so long that the horrific rage and vengeance we see in the films have been brought upon by the many years of repression. The movie is dark, bleak, and the way the detective moves through the rainy, gloomy city calls to mind a Se7en sensibility. Well, the laws around film censorship in Korea were dramatically altered, allowing filmmakers to create without fear of government meddling. Recent revenge films also tend to follow the characters seeking revenge rather than the protagonist being a victim of a vengeful ghost or person. It’s all just part of the demented adventure in Save the Green Planet! If you love hard-core revenge cinema, there is truly no country producing better films than South Korea — see the aforementioned Vengeance Trilogy — and director Kim Jee-woon makes his second appearance on this list with I Saw the Devil. Sorum (2001) Consider it your starter pack for the South Korean horror experience, and perhaps your introduction to some of the boldest voices in Asian film. In 1999, at a small rural university, seniors Kang Ji Hyun and Lee So Yeon died in their dorm rooms. *Sorry, there was a problem signing you up. Doors were being knocked and doorknobs were being turned from the outside…but no one was there. (If you want a little less horror and a little more action in your Korean crime stories, check out movies like The Man From Nowhere, New World, The Chaser, or The Merciless.). [4] Another belief is that when a female dies before she gets to enjoy the pleasures of marriage and having children, she will not be able to move on to the "other side". The Kristen Stewart-Mackenzie Davis Christmas rom-com is at its best when it acknowledges the cruelty underscoring its holiday hijinks. Flat out, Train to Busan is one of the best zombie movies ever made, and it was one of the best movies to be released in 2016. At the start of Two Sisters, a pair of sisters return home after a period of hospitalization to cope with the death of their mom. In Korea everyone knows about these terrifying stories, and you should too. Corridors tells the story of a highly regimented all-girls school that’s terrorized by the ghost of a dead student who returns every three years to wreak havoc on the staff. Director Bong, who has skewered the perversions of modern life with films like Snowpiercer and Okja, used the story to critique the cold bureaucracy of Korean government policies, environmental abuse, and the presence of American interests in his country. But amid the flesh-eating zombie madness, you feel the heartbreak of loss when good characters go down and the swelling rage when the selfish ones doom others to die. WEBTOON. A cop at heart, the man is unsatisfied with the way police handled the crime, and so takes it upon himself to investigate. Director Na Hong-jin’s slow, slow burn about a rural village plagued by mysterious murders is a great example of how adept Korean directors are at crafting immersive, long movies that avoid feeling bloated or navel-gazing. Choi Min-sik stars as Oh Dae-su, a man imprisoned in a dull hotel room for 15 years, and who spends the entire time plotting his future revenge. Be advised: Things get pretty brutal in here. A toast to the only show that gives us wild balloons and even wilder lip-syncs. The brutality of men is largely ignored by the women on the island, creating a festering patriarchy in the closed society. And when the woman snaps, even her old friend’s life might be in danger. Instead she becomes trapped between the two worlds and causes horrific phenomena. And if you’re a horror-movie fan, they’re the crop of directors par excellence when it comes to executing the genre-blending style that defines this modern wave of critically acclaimed art-house horror. From there, we go to flashbacks of Kang Min’s life and watch him deal with tragedy, self-medicate with booze, and eventually make his way to the haunted Spider Forest — a cursed place he may have his own mysterious connection to. In 1999, at a small rural university, seniors Kang Ji Hyun and Lee So Yeon died in their dorm rooms. Megan Thee Stallion’s Former BFF Kelsey Nicole Releases Diss Track ‘Bussin Back’, The song is a direct response to Megan’s track “Shots Fired” off her new album. If you don’t know any other names in South Korean cinema, you probably know Park Chan-wook. The daughter had gone mad from what had happened and was found trying to dislodge the sesame seeds from her skin with toothpicks. R-Point combines the horrors of both the supernatural and war when a group of soldiers sets out to find a missing patrol unit. Opt for stories that you already know and read them in Korean. Someone Behind You (2007) is an extremely violent supernatural thriller based on the 2005 comic novel by Kang-Kyung-Ok "Two Will Come".It focuses on an increasingly escalating unprecedented family murders or the issue of family annihilation and a young woman after witnessing the shocking killings around her area she too is followed by an unexplainable-yet brutal and bloody curse fearing that her family and friends are out to put her to death in their murderous hands. And while film policies did slowly become more liberal over the years, it took a political regime change in the late 1990s to finally shove censorship out the door for good. It combines slapstick comedy, psychological thriller and sci-fi horror.[9]. The woman's vengeance is a thing to be feared, thus becoming the object of horror. 21 is out! Horror anthologies might be everywhere these days, but the Korean entry Horror Stories raises the bar with four terrifying stories (and a nail-biting wraparound tale), each one chilling enough to be its own feature. In the feature debut of writer-director Jang Joon-hwan, an odd, amphetamine-powered bookkeeper named Byun-gu (whose girlfriend is a tightrope walker) kidnaps a powerful businessman after becoming convinced that he is part of an alien plot to destroy the world. However, as he checked back at the seemingly drunk girl, he learned something very frightening about her instead, she had the ghostly appearance of a corpse. Two Sisters was a massive hit both critically and commercially, and it cemented the rise of director Kim as one of South Korea’s top filmmaking talents. Oksu Station Ghost Due to her historic significance and bravery, many classrooms and school campuses have her portrait or statue – and thus, many legends surrounding them. Directed by Ji-Yeong Hong, Beom-sik Jeong, Gok Kim. skip content. But there’s a twist in I Saw the Devil. A strange menacing student warns her not to trust her family,friends,even not herself. The two reported that there was a strange man on campus harrassing them. One of the best aspects of modern horror is the freedom with which filmmakers are blending genres, and South Korean directors stand out for their willingness to make romantic, violent, and meticulously art-directed horror pictures.