• Busan: A horror location for all seasons

  • 07.24.2013
  • Busan: A horror location for all seasons
     
    Welcome to Korea's one-stop city of horror
     
    So what's all the fuss about?
     
     

    Just 10 years ago, Busan was effectively a desert in the world of film. Today, however, it is used as the location of so many Korean feature films that some have dubbed it Korea's top film city. This is thanks not only to its citizens' love of film, but also to its wide selection of locations that represent a range of different eras and genres. The city is capable of providing a variety of backgrounds for any cinematographer, from the sophisticated and futurist cityscape of Haeundae's Centum area to neighborhoods that offer quite the opposite: a convincing feel of Korea in the 1970s and 80s. Its beautiful natural scenery, moreover, a combination of mountains, rivers and sea, is a topographical blessing hard to find in any other city in Korea.
     
    Thanks to this huge variety of locations, a stream of films of all genres – action, melodrama, drama and more – has been shot in Busan over the last 10 years. Not only that: even horror films, a regular summer presence in cinemas worldwide, have used Busan as a location. A total of eight have been shot there so far: <Phone> (2002), <The Wig> (2005), <One Missed Call: Final> (2006), <APT> (2006), <The Cut> (2007), <Epitaph> (2007), <Death Bell> (2008) and <A Blood Pledge> (2009). A look at the locations used in these films reveals that most famous horror film are set in schools! <One Missed Call: Final> features Baehwa School, <The Cut> was shot at Silla University, Kyungsung University and Pukyong National University, <Epitaph> at Dong-Eui University, <Death Bell> at former Haesa High School, which was closed at the time and has now been demolished, and <A Blood Pledge> at Dongcheon High School. Most of us will have heard a few ghost stories during our school years. Many in Korean elementary schools are about famous historical figures such as Yi Sun-sin or Yu Gwan-sun; at high school, they often involve the dreaded national university entrance test. Horror stories about the top students in school, in particular, are sometimes developed into entire series, providing light relief for students stressed out during long summers of exam preparation. But why are schools used so often as the locations for horror films? Could it be because horror is a good genre for expressing the oppressed circumstances, exam stress and uncertainty about the future felt by students? In any case, it's somewhat unsettling that schools, our temples of education, appear so regularly in our horror films.
     
    Here, we break away from the tedious convention that the horror genre is synonymous with the school and recommend a few new locations that are more than capable of sending a shiver down the spine of cinemagoers. Most horror locations tend to be remote and largely deserted, such as cemeteries and isolated mountain temples, but Busan is also home to several places capable of delivering the horrible sense of fear required by the genre. Do you want to experience new kinds of horror beyond the school grounds? Are you planning a new horror film? We hope Busan will fill you with new and horrifying inspiration. If you don't have heart problems, try visiting these places around twilight. They're sure to have you break out in a cold sweat.
     
    1 Jinu-do – Busan's only desert island
     

     
    Nobody lives on Jinu-do. The largest of the banks of sand deposits at the mouth of the Nakdonggang River, this is Busan's only desert island. Even getting there requires arranging a lift on a fishing boat from Myeongji-dong in Saha-gu Ward. In a boat slicing its way through the waves, I was able to hear a brief account of the island's story from the captain. It was once home to Jinu-won, an orphanage built for children who had lost their parents in the Korean War. 40 children are said to have died there when Busan was hit by a violent typhoon. After that, the director of the orphanage took the children to live on the mainland; it was then that the island acquired the name Jinu-do, in memory of the former orphanage. After hearing the tragic story of the children who lost their lives there, I found it hard to step off the boat and onto the island. More than anything else, the thought that nobody now lived there gave the island a feeling of tension. Instinctively, I checked my phone for a signal. It was now my only means of communicating with the outside world...
     
     

    When the sandy path entered a forest, I began to see traces of human habitation. Rusting farm machinery, a dried-up well and the undisturbed remains of the orphanage itself, where the children must once have run around, playing. The strange calls of birds complemented the silence of the abandoned buildings, creating a mood of fear. When stood there quietly with my eyes closed, my head naturally filled with the unwritten screenplays of a dozen horror films. The longer I explored the island, the more scenes of rusting, crumbling desolation I found. For some reason, dead and desiccated trees made me sad. This was an island that conjured up death more than life. I want to get back to the mainland as fast as possible. I returned to the jetty before the agreed pickup time, worried at the thought of missing the boat back. As stared at the sandy beach and waited for the boat, I heard the distant sounds of children laughing and playing. The louder the sound grew, the more desperate I became to leave the island. Why wasn't the boat coming... ?
     
     
    2 Samdeok – the abandoned village
     
     

     
    Broken windows, empty buildings smothered in creepers, the traces of haphazardly abandoned lives. Still, this place felt slightly too well-arranged to be a completely abandoned complex of ruins. I wanted to feel a human presence, but I couldn't. The village's only guardians were the cats that wandered its various corners. The only indication that somebody was living here came from the occasional sounds of sawing amid the silence. When I followed to sound to its source, half way up the hill, I found a timber workshop. Inside, the smell of glue made me dizzy.
     

     
    The workers stared hard at me, perhaps made feeling awkward at this unexpected visit. The look in their eyes suggested a wariness of strangers. I greeted them casually and started talking to them, despite the lame reception they had given me, about the village, but they just kept on staring at me as if I was a freak. The more I asked them, the more they played dumb and the clearer they made their disapproval. Though I wasn't entirely surprised, I failed to get the answers I was looking for. My curiosity simply grew. I tried asking an old lady walking by but was met with another frosty response. What on earth had happened here? Why had people left the village? I ended up leaving with all my questions unanswered. Samdeok Village left me with lasting impressions of grey buildings, the iron gratings inside them and the stench of the wood glue. It must have been a peaceful village at some point. Now it's the cats who claim ownership of the empty houses. As I drove home, why couldn't I get the faces of the workers in the factory out of my head?
     
     
    3 Chungmu Facility – underground bunker of horror
     
     

     
    The Chungmu Facility is an underground bunker built for use as a wartime shelter. It is a restricted area, off limits to the general public. Advance permission must be obtained to film there. The huge steel doors that guard the entrance form a clear boundary, severing the interior from the outside world. The moment they opened, a gust of air cold rushed out as if it had been poised in wait, sending a wave of goose pimples over my body. It wasn't just cool: it was icy. Rather than cool pleasure, it enveloped my body in an unpleasant chill. When I looked into this artificial cave, the exquisite harmony of mist and darkness created a truly frightening atmosphere. When I turned on the generator and the lights, I saw a huge cave, stretching so far into the distance that the other end was out of sight. It felt like a long tunnel. As I walked carefully in, I found that the long, square tunnel was lined with more than 20 small rooms on each side. Presumably they would have been used by various administrative army units in a war. The time-worn signs outside each one gave clues to their historical context. Among the many rooms - “Division Commander,” “Construction and Transportation,” “Communications HQ” – it was “Medical Relief Assistance Team” that caught my eye. The thought that this room would have been used to treat those injured in the war and, occasionally, to process dead bodies, filled me momentarily with terror. I found myself wondering how corpses could actually be processed in a sealed interior space like this. Further inside was a nurse's office; still further on was another sealed room. This last space brought to mind a place for keeping the deceased at a funeral. I wanted to find the courage to open the door, but I ended up turning around, thinking this would probably not be much good for my emotional state. I returned to the corridor and began slowly tracing my way back out again. The sound of my footsteps was particularly loud as it echoed through the empty bunker. I could hear water dripping somewhere, too. The more I walked, the more I found myself overcome by an inexplicable shroud of cold air.
     
    I found out about two more places, too: the Catholic church at Geumjeongsanseong Fortress and an abandoned zoo where the animals had once died en masse from an unexplained illness. I went to their locations to cover them for this article, but no trace of them remained. I asked around here and there in their neighborhoods, trying to find out why they had disappeared, but without success. All I came away with was multiple rumours that the calls and cries of the animals that once lived in the abandoned zoo can still be heard today. The summer feature TV program season has arrived again. Every year, as the hot and humid summer grinds on, cinemas begin to fill with horror films and TV channels start broadcasting special feature programs. This summer, instead of watching a screen in a cinema or your living room, how about going to cool off with a dose of first-hand horror at one of these locations? If you take a tent and spend the night on Jinu-do, you should really be able to unwind...
     
     
    Source: <Film Busan> the newsletter of Busan Film Commission. Issue no. 38