[ From The Host to Kingdom, Korean filmmakers have used the horror
genre as a vehicle for political critique and reached a huge global
audience. They’re building on a long international tradition of
socially conscious scare stories.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

KOREA IS SHOWING THE WORLD HOW TO MAKE POLITICAL HORROR MOVIES  
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MICHAEL G. VANN
October 28, 2023
Jacobin
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_ From The Host to Kingdom, Korean filmmakers have used the horror
genre as a vehicle for political critique and reached a huge global
audience. They’re building on a long international tradition of
socially conscious scare stories. _

A still from the 2006 film The Host. , (Shudder / Showbox via
YouTube)

 

In the past two decades, South Korean television and cinema have
achieved global commercial and critical success
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While they may be glossy and stylized, K-wave films and television
series have also revealed Korea’s dark side in their social
criticism
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The South Korean film industry produces scores of horror flicks, and
creative directors have used the genre to explore social issues. Bong
Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning 2019 movie _Parasite_
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suspenseful horror with a social criticism. With its portrayal of
South Korean class polarization, the film asks the audience who really
is the parasite.

Previously, in his 2006 film _The Host
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movie to recall memories of anti-fascist activism from the 1980s
— memories that were suppressed
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the turn of the century by an alienating neoliberal social consensus.
As the inspiration for _The Host_ came from an incident where
American army officers ordered a Korean mortician to dump formaldehyde
in the Han River, there are knowing references
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anti-American sentiments.

In 2021, Netflix scored a global hit
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Game [[link removed]]_. The show, which has
since been renewed for a second season, borrowed a premise from the
2000 Japanese film _Battle Royale_, where troublesome teenagers are
forced to murder each other. In the South Korean series, victims of
capitalism kill each other to pay off insurmountable debts. Rather
than just titillating gore, _Squid Game_ offers a searing critique
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the soullessness of South Korea’s alleged economic miracle.

Horrific Metaphors

There is a long global history of using horror as a political
metaphor. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels famously wrote
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a “specter haunting Europe.” Zombies in particular have proven to
be a useful foil for social criticism.

There is a long global history of using horror as a political
metaphor.

In progressive narratives, those who make and control zombies can
symbolize the assault of an authoritarian state on personal autonomy
or the dehumanizing power of capitalism. In gothic Marxism, Western
industrial capitalism turns the proletariat into a compliant and
disposable zombie.

Conversely, for reactionaries, the figure of the zombie has stood in
for a racial or class enemy. Such gothic racism is replete with white
fantasies of bloodthirsty ghoulish hordes from a decolonizing Global
South rejoicing in orgies of irrational rape and murder. We need look
no further than the reaction to revolutions of national liberation,
from Haiti to Algeria to Palestine, to find the source of such lurid
concoctions.

In the twentieth century, artists around the world experimented with a
new technology to use horrific images in their social critiques. In
Germany’s post–World War I chaos, Weimar directors
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the horror film. Robert Wiene’s 1920 expressionist film _The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_
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F. W. Murnau’s _Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
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inflicted by the senseless slaughter of ten million young men in
pointless trench warfare. Fritz Lang’s _Metropolis
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horror to evoke Germany’s social conflicts.

Half a century later, American film makers wrested with the horrors of
the war in Vietnam. John Boorman’s _Deliverance
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Hooper’s _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
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audiences anxious about their complicity in imperialist violence,
scared of a social order thrown into chaos after the sociopolitical
upheavals of the 1960s, and worried about terrors yet to come
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Zombies as sociopolitical metaphor return to the screen again and
again.

Taking an example from the Global South, strict censorship during
General Suharto’s New Order (1966–98) pushed Indonesian
filmmakers
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horror as a politically safe yet cathartic form of expression after
the arrest, incarceration, torture, and slaughter of millions of
alleged communists, union members, feminists, artists, and others.
Even the government used images of witches and supernatural violence
in its anti-communist propaganda
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Zombies as sociopolitical metaphor return to the screen again and
again. American zombie films often convey reactionary themes, fear of
a vengeful Other, and imperial anxieties. Drawing on white fears of
Pan-African mysticism, Victor Halperin’s 1932 classic _White Zombie
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Supernatural terror is inseparable from a terrifying blackness.
Halperin’s utterly forgettable sequel _Revolt of the Zombies
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white racial paranoia of rebellious subalterns in French-ruled
Cambodia.

In the 1973 James Bond vehicle _Live and Let Die
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“voodoo” represent the American empire’s fear of radical black
Third Worldism in a decolonizing world. On the other hand, George
Romero’s _Night of the Living Dead
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metaphor for American racism and white supremacist reaction in the
civil rights era.

Both Danny Boyle’s deadly serious _28 Days Later
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comedic _Shaun of the Dead
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anxiety about the fragility of the neoliberal world order during the
lobal “war on terror.” The runaway success of _The Walking Dead
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2010 to 2022, along with its various spin-offs, speaks to contemporary
American fears of a coming Dark Age of endless war.

Enter the K-Zombie

Korean directors have adopted the Western zombie film genre, and
audiences have jumped on the zombie bandwagon
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Notably offerings include Kim Jee-woon and Yim Pil-sung’s 2012
trilogy _Doomsday Book [[link removed]]_, Na
Hong-jin’s _The Wailing
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Cho’s _#Alive [[link removed]]_ (2020).

While they are horrific monsters, K-zombies are also frequently
victims of social inequalities.

While they are horrific monsters, K-zombies are also frequently
victims of social inequalities. In these films it is the poorest and
most vulnerable members of society who first fall victim to forces
against which they cannot possibly defend themselves. Like the doomed
players in the anti-capitalist _Squid Game_, they are trapped by
hegemonic social structures operating with a necropolitical logic.

Yeon Sang-ho’s _Train to Busan
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successful K-zombie films. In addition to being a well-crafted piece
of cinema, the film imagines a horrific collapse of South Korea’s
social order. Released two years after the Sewol ferry accident, when
official incompetence led to the death of 305 people including 250
schoolchildren, _Train to Busan_
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a corrupt and inefficient South Korean state abandoning its citizens.

In the sequel, _Peninsula
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zombies recalls the Korean War. Yeon Sang-ho also made an animated
prequel, _Seoul Station
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and socially marginalized are the first victims of the coming zombie
plague.

While the films want us to cheer for the heroes and fear the zombies,
they elicit a surprising empathy from us. We can see ourselves in the
zombie hordes and recognize them as the human collateral damage of
South Korea’s political economy. In this context, it is not
surprising that Jung Chan-sung, South Korea’s most popular mixed
martial artist [[link removed]],
fought in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) under the _nom de
guerre_ “The Korean Zombie.”

Zombie Feudalism

In 2017, Netflix announced what would be its first Korean
production, _Kingdom [[link removed]]_. Even
before it aired, screenwriter Kim Eun-hee was clear that she
was using zombies
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sociopolitical critique: “I wanted to write a story that reflects
the fears and anxiety of modern times but explored through the lens of
a romantic fascination of the historical Joseon period.” Although
zombies were terrifying creatures, she insisted that they deserved
empathy
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“I wanted to portray people who were mistreated by those in power
struggling with starvation and poverty through the monsters.”

_Kingdom_’s screenwriter Kim Eun-hee was clear that she was using
zombies for sociopolitical critique.

When _Kingdom_ premiered in January 2019, most critics commented
upon the successful merging of _sageuk_ (historical drama) with
Western zombie trappings. The costumes and sets are meticulous in
their historical detail. The combination of period drama, political
intrigue, and supernatural themes resonated with fans of series
like _Game of Thrones [[link removed]]_. Kim
confessed surprise that the scripts she had written for a domestic
audience proved to be a global success
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By chance, Netflix released the second season just two days after the
World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
Unsurprisingly, this streaming series
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a plague tearing society apart found a natural and captive audience as
the world entered various forms of social distancing and lockdown. Yet
the analogies to the current pandemic were accidental, as the series
was explicitly written as an exercise in political critique. Kim
Eun-hee has stated
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she wanted to “show more than a few aspects of politics” through
the zombie genre.

 

The American series _M*A*S*H_ (1972–83) was set in Korea as a
“safe” way to talk about the US war in Vietnam. In a similar
vein, _Kingdom_ deals with the late-sixteenth-century Japanese
invasion of Korea and is thus a “safe” way to process the
1910–45 Japanese colonial era, the 1950–53 war, and the series of
authoritarian governments that ruled South Korea from 1945 to 1987.

_Kingdom_ is set a few years after the two Japanese invasions of
Korea, commonly known as the Imjin War (1592–93 and 1597–98). This
was an era of historically verifiable horrors that are difficult to
fathom. Some three hundred thousand Japanese troops swept through the
peninsula, engaging in violence that Yale historian Ben Kiernan has
deemed genocidal
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The samurai-led invaders engaged in an ultimately futile
scorched-earth campaign, massacring and enslaving an unknown number of
Koreans. Prefiguring the necropolitical atrocities
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the Pacific War (1931–45), Japanese soldiers desecrated corpses and
maimed their captives.

Human body parts were packed in brine and sent to Kyoto as war
trophies. To this day, one can visit a shrine called Mimizuka, a dirt
mound holding at least thirty-eight thousand ears and noses cut from
Korean and Chinese prisoners
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Korea’s Joseon dynasty teetered on the edge of collapse, but it
managed to survive the onslaught and expel the bloodthirsty invaders.

At one point in _Kingdom_, the main characters enter a village
inhabited by peasants with bandages on their faces. Their wounds are
not explained, and the scene may well be a mystery to foreigners, but
Korean viewers will catch the reference. The undiscussed disfigured
faces symbolize the unprocessed trauma of successive waves of
historical violence.

Can the Subaltern Spook?

American may know few words in Korean, but thanks to _The West Wing
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at least be familiar. _Han_ can be understood as deep-seated
resentment from a wound that can neither be healed or avenged
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Kim said
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she “tried to talk about the sentiment of _han_ in hope of having
people of a wider social class, or those who were dominated” occupy
a central place in her story.

The cowardice of the feudal elites in _Kingdom _is an obvious
reference to the indifference of contemporary South Korean elites to
the suffering of the poor.

Both the zombies condemned to their fate and the peasants disfigured
by departed Japanese invaders personify _han_. To flirt with some
vulgar Gramscian theorizing, we might view _han_ as the frustrations
of political impotence in the face of hegemonic power. As Kim puts it:
“The lowest class is the biggest victim of wrong politics. I thought
I could show their pain and through that pain more vividly convey the
meaning of what politics is.”

Without giving away too much of the plot, in the first season, the
zombie plague tears through the Joseon kingdom. The _yangban_,
Confucian feudal lords, fail to protect the commoners. Many seal
themselves off in fortresses or simply flee, abandoning their vassals.

Societal collapse is the fault of the _yangban_ not fulfilling their
obligations. The cowardice of the feudal elites is an obvious
reference to the indifference of contemporary South Korean elites to
the suffering of the poor, as seen in _Parasite_’s critique of the
isolation and alienation of the neoliberal social order.

Of course, a few heroes try to fight the zombies. During the second
season, they discover a conspiracy at the highest levels of power,
with members of the royal family kidnapping pregnant women to steal
their children at birth, while the mothers are deemed disposable and
killed. What may seem like typical titillating _Game of
Thrones_–style intrigue is a powerful refence in contemporary Korea.

Adoption Through Abduction

From the 1960s to the 1980s, America and European families adopted two
hundred thousand South Korean children. Adoption agencies claimed that
the children were orphans. However, recent investigations discovered a
wide range of malfeasance, including taking infants from impoverished
women, unwed mothers, and sex workers without their consent. Some
women were falsely told their babies died at birth. There was also a
concerted effort to send mixed-race children born near American
military bases out of the country.

By the 1980s, there was a cottage industry
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for-profit adoption agencies engaging in a wide range of unsavory
practices, with government officials implicated in various schemes.
This long-running practice of selling children considered undesirable
aligned with the government’s eugenicist policies that punished the
poor and those who were said to be insufficiently Korean. As this dark
history has come to light only in recent years, the theme of elites
stealing the children of the poor has a particular resonance for
Korean viewers.

_Kingdom: Ashin of the North
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the origins of the zombie plague. We learn that in the face of the
seemingly unstoppable Japanese invasion, the royal court used a newly
discovered plant to zombify Korean peasants. After the zombie army
defeated the foreigners, court officials systematically destroyed the
zombies. However, the process was imperfect, and the zombie plague
returned.

We can read this as a metaphor for the human rights violations
committed under the South Korean dictatorship. Syngman Rhee, Park
Chung-hee, and their massive apparatus of white terror were willing to
brutally sacrifice their own citizens in the name of
an anti-communist crusade
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While apologists might point to the South Korean economic
“miracle” as justification, _Kingdom_ warns us that we should be
wary of what lurks in the shadows.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Michael G. Vann is a professor of history at Sacramento State
University and the author, with Liz Clarke, of The Great Hanoi Rat
Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam.

* anti-capitalism
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* anti-colonialism
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* Horror genre
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* Korean War
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