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Although it has gone through a weaker phase recently, the Korean horror cinema tradition is so strong that a new heyday is bound to return anytime. This summer, two horror films have already been released: The Silenced (LEE Hae-young) and The Piper (KIM Gwang-tae). One interesting thing about them is that both films are based on old tales that already existed. The Silenced  draws on a strange tale taking place in a girls’ dormitory in Kyung Seong (which is an old name for Seoul) during the Japanese Occupation, and The Piper stems from The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a German folktale.

 

Of course both films add much more to the existing stories. For example, The Silenced borrows the image of a ghost from the Japanese horror cinema that once was in fashion, and adds a sense of the historic horror of colonial Joseon under Japanese Occupation. To be sure, quasi-homoerotic friendship is part of the narrative, too. The Piper retells the famous German folk tale in the setting of an isolated village in postwar Korea. It becomes a horror film as well as a fantasy by adding fantastic elements to a confined horrific atmosphere.

 

Then what are some of the Korean horror films shown at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) this year? Celebrating its 19th anniversary, this film festival has been an important venue to discover new trends of Korean horror cinema every year. This year as well, three noteworthy horror films are to be screened. They are The Chosen : Forbidden Cave by KIM Hwi, which is the closing film this year, Malice by KIM Yong-woon in the World Fantastic Cinema section, and 12 Deep Red Nights by OH In-chun in the special program section called Korean Independent Genre Strikes!

 

 

 

 

In The Chosen: Forbidden Cave, the main character, who is a psychiatrist as well as an exorcist, heals a woman with his assistant. However, since she is possessed by a very potent ghost, his exorcism does not go as planned. This film features Korean traditional shamanism and drives the audience to the horror arena. KIM Sung-kyun, the vicious killer in The Neighbors, plays the exorcist, and YOO Sun from Moss and Black House plays the possessed woman.

 

 

KIM Yong-woon’s Malice uses the so called Ripley syndrome to create a horrific world. One day, Ga-In (HONG Soo-ah) meets a high school friend, Eun-Jung (LIM Seong-eon) for the first time in 7 years. As it turns out, their situations are very much different. Eun-jung seems to have everything Ga-In ever wanted, for example a happy family, a stable job, and so on. Ga-In begins to believe that she, herself, is Eun-Jung, and tries to take everything from her friend. This film shows a horrible delusion which can happen when one confuses oneself with the other, and aims to take what belongs to them. 
 

OH In-Chun’s 12 Deep Red Nights is an omnibus film with the common theme of urban horror stories. It consists of four 20 minute long films, and they are Driver, PM 11:55, atmosFEAR, and The Secret Night. In Driver, a chauffeur serviceman encounters a weird female passenger in the middle of the night. In PM 11:55, a woman who lives by herself feels horrified because of a stranger at her doorway. atmosFEAR is about a sound engineer who was playing with phone-tapping and accidently runs into a dismal noise. Secret Night tells the story of a female staff who sneaked in the office in the middle of the night. So to speak, all the four films deal with the kind of fear that any urban dweller may run into.

 

The director explained that he was inspired by Shakespeare's The Twelfth Night, and that he wanted to complete this series with 12 episodes. He directed another horror film in 2014 called Mourning Grave.

 

As shown above, Bifan this year introduces to Korean cinema a variety of Korean horror films with distinctive colors, ranging from the fear caused by Korean traditional shamanism (The Chosen: Forbidden Cave), the fear caused by someone who wants to take away someone else’s happiness (Malice), and the fear caused by different stories set in different places (12 Deep Red Nights).