Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival's 30th anniversary spotlights a decade-spanning lineage of Korean women working in genre film

Still of ‘Ghost in the Cell’

In April 2022, Indonesian horror film KKN di Desa Penari (also released internationally as Curse of the Dancing Village) opened in theaters and went on to draw 9.2 million admissions within two months, becoming the highest-grossing film in the country's history. In the years since, horror has become the financial backbone of Indonesia's film industry, peaking in 2024 when 68 horror titles accounted for 66% of total admissions nationwide. As genre film increasingly emerges as a driving force across Asian film industries, Korea is pursuing a different kind of renewal. This year, marking its 30th anniversary, the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN) launched a special program on genre film and, alongside it, unveiled the first-ever list tracing the lineage of Korean women directors working in genre cinema — 11 films by 11 directors, spanning theatrical releases from 1997 to 2026.

Indonesia's horror boom rests on a narrative strategy that fuses local folklore with social critique. Director Joko Anwar's Ghost in the Cell exposes the structural violence of a prison system through its supernatural plot, while Edwin's Sleep No More channels the anxieties of factory labor into monstrous form. This momentum has drawn international attention and opened the door to cross-border collaboration: MD Pictures, the producer behind KKN di Desa Penari, acquired the rights to Korean horror film Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2017) to produce Ward No. 402, a project that folds a popular Korean IP into the framework of Indonesia's ghost-hunting podcast culture.

BIFAN organized its special program in partnership with Women in Film Korea. As the newly compiled list makes clear, few women directors worked in genre film in Korea during the 1990s, but their presence has grown steadily since the 2000s across both commercial and independent cinema. In a roundtable convened by Cine21 to mark the occasion, director Lee Kyoung-mi — whose credits include Crush and Blush (2008) and The Truth Beneath (2016) — described genre film as "still an unknown frontier" she has continued to pursue, citing her discomfort with how women have conventionally been portrayed in horror. Director Jang Yoo-jung, known for the Honest Candidate comedy franchise, recalled that casting a woman in the lead of a commercial comedy was not an easy decision at the time. Lee Hyun-jung, Head of Film Business Division at Showbox, pointed to recent genre releases including Exhuma (2024), Salmokji (2026), and Colony (Gun-Che, 2026) as evidence that leaving room for audiences to actively interpret and discuss a film — rather than delivering a tightly closed narrative — has become a winning strategy.

Significance and Outlook

Where Indonesia has built an industrial foundation for genre film on local mythology and social realism, Korea appears to be finding its own renewal in the expansion of directorial diversity. Lee Kyoung-mi noted that public attitudes toward female characters in Korean cinema shifted noticeably after the 2016 Gangnam Station murder, suggesting that changes in how women are represented on screen have tracked broader social shifts rather than resulting purely from decisions within the industry.

BIFAN's new list offers an alternative account of Korean genre film history, long narrated through a predominantly male lens. Against a backdrop of shrinking mid-budget productions and an industry increasingly reliant on star-driven commercial films, it remains to be seen what new projects will emerge from the genre experiments of Korea's women directors — and how their position evolves as OTT platforms continue to reshape genre conventions.

Sources

• Cine21, "Living Alongside Fear: How Horror Became a Driving Force of Indonesian Genre Cinema", 2026.07.02

• Cine21, "'Genre' as an Unknown Frontier: A Roundtable with Lee Kyoung-mi, Jang Yoo-jung, and Lee Hyun-jung on Women in Genre Film", 2026.07.02

• Cine21, "Adventure, Failure, and Quiet Pleasures: Reflections on Korean Genre Film History from the 1990s to Today", 2026.07.02

• Cine21, "The Return of the Masters, the Vitality of the New: The Japanese Genre Film Wave Witnessed at Bucheon", 2026.07.02