Contemporary K-Horror as critique of ecstatic consumption: 'The Housemaid' and other wired narratives

This paper discusses selected films of South Korean gothic horror, of which there has been a resurgence since the late nineties. Prior to this, the most notable period for Korean fantastic cinema was during the period of accelerated modernity alongside economic boom and prosperity in the fifties and sixties, with notable maverick talents such as Kim Ki-Young. Under conditions of military dictatorship, and the carrying forward of the colonial project of modernization, initiated by the Japanese and picked up under the stewardship of the American presence, pre-modern traditions and value-systems (shamanism, for example) constituted an obstacle to be repressed. South Korean horror and fantasy cinema can be understood as a virtual space in which these repressed materials are given license to reappear. These genres have generated a tradition which has responded to the nation’s traumatic, haunted experience of the other within: ‘the fantastic mode of cinema in its powerful conjuration of the obstinate past...provides a rich platform on which to think about non-synchronous synchronicity and the working of the premodern in modernity’ (Berry and Young, 2000: 53). We show how these concerns reappear in this troubled, liminal space once again but their appearance is transformed under contemporary conditions of forced liberalization and a revolution in consumption.