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The new wave of Korean cinema has presented a series of distinct genre productions, which are influenced by contemporary Japanese horror cinema and traditions of the Gothic. Ahn Byeong-ki is one of Korea‘s most notable horror film directors, having made four Gothic horrors between 2000 and 2006. These transnational horrors, tales of possession and avenging forces, have repeatedly been drawn to issues of modernity, loneliness, identity, gender, and suicide. Focusing on the figure of the ghostly woman, and the horrors of modern city life in Korea, this essay considers the style of filmmaking employed by Ahn Byeong-ki in depicting, in particular, the Gothic revelation.
though, but the thin, white-faced, dark-haired and sinister female ghost figure endemic to Japanese and South Korean horror film. While the game's aesthetic and basic plot clearly draws on previous European and Japanese film by making the gamer move a small, brave and resourceful child through a hostile and notably Gothic environment, the game surprises by complicating the child's seeming innocence. The gamer is likely to grow attached to the beautifully animated Six in her yellow raincoat, and the abject nature and appearance of the creatures that
-scale discrimination and abandonment of Korean GI-babies in the wake of the Korean War – i.e., children of American fathers and Korean mothers. The internationalization of adoption was inspired by religion rather than science, more specifically by Christian Americanism, a culture religion that fused a selection of vaguely outlined Christian principles with specifically American values, most notably a paternal sense of
. The free development and articulation of the individual could only be realised by the free development and articulation of all, as Wilde had proposed. We could continue with other examples of transculturation between the Victorians and other modernising cultures. During Korea’s colonial period under the Japanese, the Theatre Arts Research Association (TARA 1931–39) leaders Yu Ch’ijin and Ham Sedŏk drew on the Irish Renaissance/Celtic Twilight ‘to establish a New Drama in Korea’ (Hwang, 2012 ). Between 1910
of memories which both men need to appropriate for their purpose, in particular those related to the 1860 uprising led by their great-grandfather’s younger brother and the events of 1945 which saw their brother, S., beaten to death in retaliation for the earlier attack of the Japanese villagers on a Korean settlement in the valley. Hoping to recreate the 1860 rebellion, Takashi instigates the looting of the supermarket that belongs to the Korean ‘Emperor of Supermarkets’, who now wields economic power over the area, but the victory is short-lived, as the villagers
the film, and we realise that the earlier scenes served to visually foreshadow her death. In a related strategy, the 2004 South Korean horror film R-Point uses a green night-vision-inspired lens whenever the camera adopts the perspective of a ghost watching the main characters. It is as if the dead see the world with built-in night vision, in a specifically cinematic coding of difference, not
), ‘ Necropolitics ’, trans. Libby Meintjes , Public Culture , 15 : 1 , 11 – 40 . Ota , Kendall , ‘ Queer Heterotopias in “straight(ish)” Spaces: The Case of Korean Spas ’, Sexualities , 14 : 9 ( 2020 ), 1049 – 63
continuing rationing, recession and unemployment resulted in mass lay-offs of workers in Lancashire; in the summer of 1952, 33 per cent of spinning operatives and 22 per cent of weaving operatives were either unemployed or on short time. 95 The ‘textiles crisis’, as it became known, prompted Sir Raymond Streat, chairman of the Cotton Board, to call an international conference at Buxton in September which concluded that the low demand was caused by a combination of ‘not just increasing Japanese competition, but also Korean War stockpiling, import controls in Australia and
thinking about the gothic in an age of globalisation and cosmopolitanism: one which is best expressed by the term globalgothic. The films discussed in this chapter are the award-winning portmanteau Kwaidan ( Kaidan , Masaki Kobayashi, Japan: 1964 ) and A Tale of Two Sisters ( Janghwa Hongryeon , Kim Jee-woon, South Korea: 2003 ), two films that exemplify the merging of the global with the
economically privileged Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan or South Korea, three countries identified as major beneficiaries in the films. Last but not least, the chapter offers a reading of the potentially gothic figures of vengeance appearing in the films (ghosts, resurrected neo-humans, victims-turned-abusers) in terms of a narrative strategy of resistance devised to empower the