Shi-Gol: The rural palimpsest and historical trauma in the contemporary Korean horror film

Abstract

This thesis examines portrayals of rural landscapes and villages in contemporary Korean horror cinema, using them as a backdrop to explore deep-seated societal and cultural upheavals and historical scars. By employing the rural setting as a thematic lens, this thesis uncovers the unsettling horrors of the past that continue to shape Korean cinema’s horrific imagination. It further advances the concept of rurality as a spatiotemporal palimpsest, a layered amalgamation of collective and individual memory and subjective and objective history. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretic framework of memory and spatial studies to augment the Korean horror genre’s lack of substantive scholarship regarding space, my thesis analyzes three primary case studies from contemporary South Korean horror cinema to examine the countryside as a symbol of a neglected past, regression, and obsolescence, challenging the sensibilities of modern Korea and unearthing what's best left forgotten by time. Bedevilled (Kim Bok-Nam Salinsageonui Jeonmal, Jang Cheol-Soo, 2010), Moss (Iggi, Kang Woo-Suk, 2010), and Svaha: The Sixth Finger (Svaha, Chang Chae-Hyon, 2019) each feature rural environments that employ varied and evolving techniques to critique the malleability of historical and cultural narratives, exposing a contemporary unease with rurality as a conduit for a past layered within the permeable present. The argument put forth here is that the palimpsestic countryside, as a premodern Other, exposes modern Korea as a divided dystopia rather than a utopia of totality and constant progress. It highlights the coexistence of elements such as modernity and regression, pleasure and trauma, and materialism and spirituality, in each case inseparable and mirroring one another. In this regard, the thesis emphasizes the local and culturally specific dimensions of contemporary South Korean cinematic horrors as singularly important to the genre despite Korean cinema's growing internationalization.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Thomas Michael Humpal: orcid.org/0009-0002-5143-184X

ORCID for Louis Bayman: orcid.org/0000-0002-4780-2057

ORCID for Tim Bergfelder: orcid.org/0000-0001-6585-6123

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