Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema
A volume in the “TransAsia: Screen Cultures” series edited by Koichi Iwabuchi and Chris Berry, Horror to the Extreme assembles eleven essays on the horror cinema of East Asia, which the contributors tackle from a variety of angles. Reflecting the interests of this volume’s editors, Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Horror to the Extreme seeks to not only address the issues of marketing, industrial production, and consumer behavior (in connection to textual analyses of specific films), but also observe the “mutual transformation of screen culture” taking place among Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, and other Asian cinema (p. 3). Among the essays Korean cinema receives the lion’s share of the analyses, with five essays by Jinhee Choi, Chi-Yun Shin, Robert L. Cagle, Hyunsuk Seo, and Kyung Hyun Kim. For the purpose of this review, I will focus on the essays specifically concerning Korean cinema.
While the contributions by these five authors demonstrate very different approaches, there are unexpected commonalities among them. For instance, they take up Euro-American reception and marketing of Korean cinema as a starting point or subject of inquiry. I found it fascinating that both Robert Cagle and Kyung Hyun Kim not only chose Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) as a case study in a collection about horror films, but they also cite the negative reviews of the film as a prime example of why many American/Western viewers find Korean cinema so challenging and, in some cases, disgusting. Chi-Yun Shin in her chapter, “The Art of Branding,” explores the home video distribution company Tartan’s marketing of certain Asian genre films with their “Extreme Asia” label. Having interviewed Tartan employees and traced their marketing campaigns, Shin appraises with admirable straightforwardness and without any hint of scholarly condescension how Tartan disseminated a constructed imaginary about Asian films that has had a much wider influence than is usually recognized. Her analysis is highly suggestive. I hope that Shin eventually expands her study to examine interactions among marketing strategies, consumer reception, and the changing orientations of filmmakers themselves that have resulted in the celebrity status for some Korean films/filmmakers but not others. For instance, she opens and closes her essay with references to two Kim Ki-duk films from very different stages of his career. It would have been fascinating had she traced the shifting reception of Kim’s works by Euro-American critics and consumers from the maker of “gross-out . . . horror and sex show[s]” in “art-house clothing” to an exemplary Asian—indeed, “Oriental”—auteur (p. 94).
Jinhee Choi’s chapter, “A Cinema of Girlhood: Sonyeo Sensibility and the Decorative Impulse in Korean Horror Cinema,” examines the Whispering Corridors series (Yŏgo koedam, 1998–2009) and A Tale of Two Sisters (Changhwa, hongnyŏn, 2003) by adroitly combining an awareness of the structural dynamics [End Page 317] of the Korean film industry and historically well-informed analyses of these cinematic texts. Choi describes the appeal these films have for Korean teenage female viewers, as they “[provide] symbolic solutions to teen problems and thus vicarious pleasure to teenage audiences” (p. 44). Her analysis of Two Sisters’s highly stylized yet compulsively attractive mise-en-scène and twisted narrative structure, focusing on the main character’s internal conflicts, is also effective, although the concept Choi emphasizes, “decorative impulse,” does not really make a full-fledged entrance.
Robert Cagle’s chapter, “The Good, the Bad, and the South Korean: Violence, Morality, and the South Korean Extreme Film,” is impressive and somewhat problematic. It displays considerable theoretical sophistication and analytic skill, as we can see, for instance, in his careful reading of the climatic scenes from Oldboy. However, his core argument—that Korean “extreme” cinema “undercut the basic belief system at work in the Hollywood film” and “reject the moralistic distinctions between individuals or groups that structure the Hollywood picture . . . ” (p. 142)—is undermined by his invocation of that hoary term, han (which he compares to conversion hysteria), as well as his propping up “Hollywood” films as a straw man. Frankly, great works of American horror cinema since The Exorcist (1973) have focused on problematizing precisely the kind of rigid schemata or demonization of the Other he criticizes. (Here, one might think of Dawn of the Dead [1979], Silence of the Lambs [1991], Seven [1995], and so on). I also wonder if his chapter ends up rehabilitating an essentialistic notion of “extreme” Korean cinema that Chi-Yun Shin so painstakingly deconstructed in her chapter.
Hyun-suk Seo’s chapter, “That Unobscure Object of Desire and Horror: On Some Uncanny Things in Recent Korean Horror Films,” takes on the material objects—such as a pair of shoes in Red Shoes (Punhongsin, 2005) or a cell phone in Phone (P’on, 2002)—in select Korean horror films and how fetishistic desires for these objects generate the situations of horror, especially in relation to family dynamics. Unfortunately, I ultimately could not navigate through the theoretical maze of Lacanian psychoanalysis in her essay. I followed her arguments up to the discussion of the absent father figure in Korean cinema but got lost amid Seo’s analysis of Acacia (Ak’asia, 2003).
Kyung Hyun Kim’s chapter, “ ‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumplings’: Reading Park Chan-wook’s ‘Unknowable’ Oldboy,” employs the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment to tease out stimulating nuggets of insight, although his arguments engage in some odd generalizations. I would not, for example, call workers self-immolating or “patriots” cutting off their fingers in political protest “ubiquitous” acts in recent Korean history (p. 191), or call the Chinese-inspired dish chajangmyŏn “the only ethnic cuisine to which the general Korean populace had access during the 1960s and 1970s . . .” (p. 192). It is striking that Kim ends his essay with an observation that Park Chan-wook’s films are “relentlessly superficial,” indicating ambivalence as to their “meaningfulness.” This reads like a variation on the criticism often leveled at Park by [End Page 318] Korean scholars and critics wherein the “Korean-ness” (or lack thereof) of Park’s films is brought to bear as a witness to their relative cinematic merits. Would the “Frenchness” of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Chinoise (1967) matter in quite this way?
Overall, I found the relative lack of engagement with the horror genre among the essays on Korean cinema rather disappointing. Korean filmmakers are fully conscious of the canonized classics of world horror cinema as well as the conventions and trends of the genre, but the essays do not really reflect this complex global-local interaction. I wish the collection included at least one essay on Korean manifestations of horror cinema sharing Emille Yueh-yu Yeh’s and Neda Hei-tung Ng’s approach, which draws upon the Sinophone tradition of ghost films, non-culture-specific conventions of supernatural horror, and symbolic representations of the political realities to present a cogent, jargon-free interpretation of the “Chinese demons” in Hong Kong cinema. Despite these caveats, I found the essays on Korean films insightful and provocative. Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema is a worthy addition to any library on contemporary East Asian or Korean cinema. [End Page 319]
