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- Come on, Ghost, You Wanna Fight?
- by KIM Hyun-jung / Aug 30, 2016
- Ghosts in Korean Cinema
The horror season is now pretty much over. This summer, Korean horror films did not do so well. However, traditionally, several ghosts invade Korean theaters in the summertime. Who are they and what do they want?The most famous ghosts in Korean cinema are highschool girls. The Whispering Corridors series, which took off in 1998, is the most successful Korean horror film franchise, yet they have only one common feature: they all introduce ghosts that are high school girls. In the first of the series, the ghosts never leave school and attend school every day. They, along with their friends in later series, turned girls’ high schools into a haunted house and thus terrified the audience. And more recently, their legacy has been passed onto films like Mourning Grave (2014), still featuring teenager ghosts.However, the quintessential monster of Korean horror cinema is definitely a young female ghost with pale skin and long hair. While they all look pretty much the same, they terrify the audience with their own distinctive stories, in films like A.P.T (2006), which was adapted from KANG Full’s original webtoon, The Phone (2002) featuring HA Ji-won, who was once called the horror queen, and R – Point (2004) introducing a ghost girl that travelled all the way from Vietnam. With similar looks, yet different stories, they all horrified the viewers.Sometimes Korean cinema features a trendy ghost. White (2011) introduces, for the first time in Korean horror cinema, girl group ghosts. As most candidates in Produce 101, a survival audition TV show, have long straight hair, perhaps girl groups fit to be ghosts in Korean horror cinema as much as high school girls.Then which would be the least scary ghost? If you want to look unscary, the best way is to appear as a normal human being. For example, the ghost in A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003) is never scary until you find out the whole truth, because she looks exactly the same as a normal human being. It is a pity we can’t spoil who it is.
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