K-HORROR at the London Korean Film Festival.

The London Korean Film Festival, which runs from 3rd November - 17th November, will be featuring a number of horror films as part of their After Dark : K-Horror Strand.

SEIRE -  Fri 11 Nov, 9:00pm 

Park Kang’s intense, ambiguous feature SEIRE (the 3 week confinement period for mother and newborn). Recent father Jin Woo-jin (Seo Hyun-woo) ignores the superstitions of his wife Hae-mi (Sim Eun-woo) and breaks a taboo by attending the funeral of his ex-girlfriend Se-young (Ryu Abel), presided over by her identical twin Ye-young.

Has their baby come under a curse from the breath-hungry dead, or is Woo-jin working through his own conflicted feelings and deep-seated guilt about having become a father? Eschewing sensationalism or special effects, Park Kang’s intense, ambiguous feature is a subtle, serious, slow-burn exposé of one man’s inner psyche, both waking and dreaming.

View the Trailer on YouTube.

Tickets - https://www.koreanfilm.co.uk/events/lkff-2022-seire/


CONTORTED - Thu 10 Nov, 6:30pm

When Myung-hye (Seo Yeong-hee) moves into a remote, suspiciously cheap rental home with husband Hyun-min (Kim Min-jae) and children, her nightmares intensify and she repeatedly hears a strange noise coming from the locked shed. This is also heard by her adopted daughter Hee-woo (Kim Bomin), who has a special sensitivity to the other side. 

 

Adapted from Jeon Gun-woo’s novel The Contorted House, but also drawing liberally (if dynamically) on both Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003), this horror feature from writer/director Kang Dong-hun (Pray, 2020) concerns a haunted house and a haunted family, where mental illness and domestic history merge into one. This hits the ground running, placing a child in harrowing peril, and its twisted narrative is sufficiently deft in recombining its borrowed tropes to wrong-foot even the most genre savvy.

View the teaser trailer on YouTube.

Tickets - https://www.koreanfilm.co.uk/events/lkff-2022-contorted/


GUIMOON : THE LIGHTLESS DOOR - Fri 11 Nov, 11:30pm

Sim Deok-geun’s haunted building horror has shaman’s son Seo Do-jin (in 2002) and a trio of college students (in 1996) both entering an abandoned and cursed community centre where many murders and suicides have occurred, and both repeatedly crossing each other’s paths despite being there eight years apart.

Merging different spatiotemporal realities over a single, recurring night, and featuring a grudge-holding ghost whose dissociative identity disorder confounds the usual rules of possession and exorcism, this is a disorienting, increasingly frantic affair, as these disparate characters all race to survive their respective nights. Full of oppressively nightmarish atmosphere and irrational incident, this is a wild, bewildering ghost train, transgressing a door that should never be opened.

View the Trailer on YouTube.

Tickets - https://www.koreanfilm.co.uk/events/lkff-2022-guimoon-the-lightless-door/


THE FIFTH THORACIC VERTEBRA (+ Cashbag) - Thu 10 Nov, 8:50pm

Park Sye-young’s experimental fungal slasher tracks a mattress, and the spores growing on it, as they pass through the hands of different owners and users, including lovers at different stages of their relationships and a terminally ill woman. As the fungus rapidly evolves and subtly apes the manners of its human hosts, it vampirically absorbs a vertebra from each to build itself into anthropomorphic form.

A melancholic, monstrous romantic horror with a very unusual take on time, this sets human dramas and dreams against a much broader, more irrational canvas of nature. Episodic and abstract, its utterly gonzo premise drifts to an ending of unexpected sadness and awe. Meanwhile Park’s (non-horror) short Cashbag, which follows a man in a series of nocturnal transactions, ends in a similar waterside location.

View the Trailer on YouTube.

Tickets - https://www.koreanfilm.co.uk/events/lkff-2022-the-fifth-thoracic-vertebra-cashbag/

For more info on these and other films in the festival, visit https://www.koreanfilm.co.uk/.