For a long period of time, Korean horror movies have been transformed and evolved as a category of the minor genre. However, Korean horror films have been experiencing a crisis since 2010.
The purpose of this writing is to identify and analyze the crisis currently existing in Korean horror movies and to prospects the direction for the future horror films. To discuss the crisis, there are two possible approaches.
One is an analysis on industrial backgrounds of horror films and the other is an analysis on aesthetic and cinematic quality of the movies. This writing analyzes and studies the latter.
The reason why the latter was chosen as a study topic is because there have been active discussions and studies on Korean industrial backgrounds, while horror as an aesthetic film genre with its own cinematic quality has not been fully vocalized.
The aesthetic trait of the horror film can be found in genre. The genre is the method of classification based on the ‘story’ and ‘style’. While it is possible to classify all the movies into certain genres, horror movies can be more apparently defined into its genre. Therefore, this writing seeks for aesthetics and cinematic quality of horror movies by observing the historical transitions of the films. In order to achieve it, this research divided the history of Korean horror films into three periods based on the changes of Korea horror films, selected three movies which represent the each period, and articulated the process of how these three film has been evolved.
First, 〈A Public Cemetery Of Wolha〉, (1967, Kwon, Chil-Hwi) fashions an archetype of an Korean horror through the scary story of ‘taxi’ and the style of its main character Yeogw’ or a female ghost. Thus, from 1960’s to 1970’s, Korean horror movies conventionally depicted a revenge of Yeogwi, a female ghost, who faces ‘melancholy’ ‘Jealous’ and ‘conspiracy.’
Second, “Whispering Corridors,” (1998, Park Gi-Hyeong) evolved from traditional Korean horror movies, introduces a new ‘monster’ replacing traditional Yeogwi, a female ghost, illuminating the social pressure in ‘a highly competitive grade-oriented society’ stemming from a scary story of schools. Due to this evolution of 〈Whispering Corridors〉 Korean horror films in 21<SUP>st</SUP> century displayed a rapid development and growth.
Third, 〈White-dammed melody〉(2011, Kim, Gok and Kim, Sun) was not an exemption from the risk Korea horror films was experiencing. Despite of “idol girl group,” the new, fresh subject matter, it didn’t get enough support from both critics and audience. Through an analysis on <White-dammed melody> the root causes of the crisis on Korea horror movies could be possibly identified.