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Horror films reflect the collective subconscious of an era. Furthermore, urban legends which convey social fear in the form of narrative have always been used as the perfect subject matter for horror films. Including this summer’s upcoming feature, The Mimic which is based on an urban legend, we introduce here a few urban legends popular during a specific period and films adapted from these tales, among which have yet to be proven true. Whether you believe them or not is totally up to you. 

In 2009, strange markings such as ‘α, X, β, J’ started appearing near doorbells around a number of apartments in Seoul. The residents, fearing they might have been made by criminals indicating their next target of crime or pseudo-religious groups, reported this to the police. Despite a police investigation, there was never trace of anyone found on surveillance cameras. 

Subsequently, mainstream broadcast channel, SBS investigated the matter and aired it on TV. Their conclusion was that the symbols were either made by newspaper and milk delivery people marking the doors for their replacements or people from religious groups to distinguish homes they had already visited. Around the time this strange story started to fade from people’s memories, in September of 2014, ‘$’ was marked next to the doorbell of a burglarized house in Daegu. 

Filmmaker HUH Jung’s Hide and Seek (2013) is based on this doorbell tale. The filmmaker incorporated the shocking true story from the West about a person sneaking into a house and staying there to live. Therefore, the markings on the doorbells in this film were translated as the number of family members residing in each home, to inform those intending to sneak into the house. The filmmaker’s devotion to urban legends continues in his upcoming feature. 

Filmmaker HUH Jung’s 2017 latest feature is based on the ‘tiger of Jangsan’ spotted in the Jangsan Mountain area in Busan. People have been calling it ‘tiger’, but various sightings describe this life form in many different ways. Some have claimed it walks with two legs, while others have stated that it has white fur on its chest. Such testimonies have been used for arguments that this creature is actually the Asiatic black bear inhabiting the Korean peninsula. 

Some have even declared that these creatures speak like humans. The premise for The Mimic whereby the female lead (YUM Jung-ah) discovers a strange creature that mimics her little daughter’s voice was inspired by this. 

The urban legend of the tiger of Jangsan all started in 1993 around Jangsan Mountain, Busan when the police were dispatched after receiving a report that a tiger had appeared in the area. But even with two investigative reports covering the event, SBS TV could not get to the bottom of it. Developments into the mystery of the ‘tiger’ of Mt. Jang were stalled by the military based in the area, whereby access restrictions and military secret control made it even more difficult to discern the nature of this creature.

HIDE-AND-NEVER SEEK (2016) which guises as an online broadcast in its fake documentary-like format picks up on the Japan-originated, mediumistic subject matter as known through films such as Bunshinsaba, Ouija Board (2004). Like the Ouija board concept of making a pencil held vertically by two people move by the command of the spirits, this film also tells the story of spirits which appear before, or possess the body of someone who plays hide-and-seek alone.

 

The method works like this. You remove all the stuffing in a rag doll, stuff it back with rice and your own nail clippings, tie it with red thread and then place it in the bathroom. When it reaches 3 in the morning, you count to ten before returning to the bathroom to search for the doll which is the tagger. You need to turn the TV on to a channel that has no broadcast on, while holding salt water in your mouth. 

This may look like a usual game that teenagers play, but certain claims that the lights in the room suddenly flicked on, or the TV channel switching to another for no good reason, and even the sound of people laughing or crying started pouring through the internet. Often such occurrences are presumed to be caused by late night fatigue, or excessive tension-induced visual or auditory hallucination. HIDE-AND-NEVER SEEK tells the story of a horror-based online channel VJ searching for a high school girl who disappeared while conducting this spirit-summoning ritual. This ghost story was also introduced through the Japanese film, Creepy Hide And Seek (2009).

The 2012 disaster film Deranged depicted the nationwide spread of parasites that enter the human body and confusing their brains into drowning themselves. Nevertheless, the subject of the urban legend this film was based on was not the parasitic hairworms, but another insect that served as the host of these hairworms, the camel cricket, which became popular enough to become the subject of electronic games and songs during the summer of 2010. 

The camel cricket, which looks just like a regular cricket, is often found in humid spaces such as house basements. Academics attributed the drastic increase of such specimen to the unusual weather the Korean peninsula was going through. There are two main reasons for these insects to be chosen among all house pests as the subject of an urban legend. The first being their resilience to pesticides, and the second being the fact that parasitic hairworms found in camel crickets are killed by pouring hot water over them. And thus these hairworms that have escaped dead camel crickets, infiltrating the human body, have become the main theme of the film Deranged.

However, unlike the urban legend itself, the camel cricket is not as harmful as other vermin. In fact, it prefers clear and clean watersides, and compared to the mantis and grasshopper, it has a lower rate of serving as the host for hairworms. Also contrary to the film, the hairworm cannot latch onto the human body, and when the host insect perishes, it immediately leaves it and dies.