Wired horrors: Korean fantastic cinema in the sost-IMF crisis context

The films upon which we focus in this paper (The Red Shoes (Kim Yong-Gyun, 2005); Into the Mirror (Kim Sung-Ho, 2004); Spider Forest (Song Il-Gon, 2004); Hansel and Gretel (Yim Phil-Sung, 2007)) stand as examples of South Korean fantastic cinema which maintain a local narrative voice but also require examination in terms of the less clear thresholds experienced under novel conditions of neo-liberalization. The collective term 'IMF Noir' has been used to categorize films such as Oldboy and The Host as dramatizing the effects of neo-liberalism and globalism upon a nation subject to the fluctuating and jarring dictations of an unreliable system of international capital. Our argument here concerns the significance of a new cycle of fantastic cinema prompted to a rapid coming of age by the impact of both local and global conditions. The IMF episode has panned out into an extended period of severe uncertainty in which the possibility of clear exits for South Korea appears to have narrowed considerably, and the films we discuss reflect this.