Although I would consider myself a huge fan of Korean cinema, the breadth of my taste is not very broad. There are a handful of directors I admire, but I do not really see, let alone appreciate, much of mainstream Korean film. The major Korean blockbuster films, from SHIRI back in 1999 to last year’s megahit THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, usually leave me uninterested, and I simply end up avoiding most of the popular genre work. One exception to this is melodrama (THE HOUSEMAID, SECRET SUNSHINE); the other is horror, of which there have been a recent few I have admired, such of 2009′s POSSESSED and last year’s controversial I SAW THE DEVIL. But the best of these is Jang Cheol-soo’s BEDEVILLED, released in theatres here last September and just recently on DVD. I first heard of this film through some festival screenings in the US, such as the Fantastic Film Festival in Austin, where it was very well received. Part of what makes it such an effective horror thriller is that, for over the first hour of its running time, it really isn’t one. The full slasher genre trope does not really kick in until the later half. In this way, it is something of a throwback, recalling the golden age of 70s horror in the US, and matching many of the best in the genre in its social critique and progressive politics. (SPOILERS AHEAD)

The film begins in Seoul, with the character of Hae-won, a single woman in her 30s who works at a bank. She had been the witness to an assault, but out of fear does not testify. The stress of this leads to a troubling incident in which she assaults her co-worker, and she is forced to take a leave and travels south to visit her grandfather’s hometown, a small, isolated island. She reunites with her childhood friend, Bok-nam, who lives with her abusive husband Man-jong and her daughter, Yeon-hee. It is clear that Bok-nam wants to escape the island as Hae-won has done, although the depth of the relationship between the two is only gradually revealed. There are also clear homosexual desires on the part of Bok-nam. Eventually, after suffering many abuses and learning that her daughter is now a potential sexual victim of her husband, Bok-nam decides to leave, after being refused help by Hae-won. However, the husband finds out before she can take the boat off the island, and in the resulting struggle Yeon-hee is killed. In the aftermath, the crime is covered up by the small community, including the female elders, who take the husband’s side because they “need a man around.” Hae-won also claims to have been sleeping at the time and again refuses to testify.

The intense torture inflicted on Bok-nam by this patriarchal society is so overwhelming that when she finally does break and turn into a horror film stalker, the audience’s identification is completely with her. In this way, it is one of the best examples of what Robin Wood has identified as the “progressive” horror film. In his influential essay, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” first written in 1979 as part of a program on horror at the Toronto International Film Festival, Wood puts forth a basic formula for the horror film: “Normality is threatened by the Monster.” Wood uses normality here is not in an evaluative sense, but simply to mean conformity to dominant social norms. The key is the relationship between normality and the monster. If normality is presented as purely good and the monster as purely evil, chances are the film is both very simplistic as well as essentially reactionary. The monster is simply a threat that needs to be removed. However, if normality is seen problematic, and if the monster is given sympathetic traits, then the film is more progressive. Related to this thesis is the Freudian notion of the monster as the “return of the repressed,” as representing the “Other”, all that has been excluded from the dominant social order. For Wood, given our current norm of patriarchal heterosexual capitalism, this would include women, other cultures, ethnic minorities, the proletariat, gays and lesbians, alternative ideologies, and children. If this monstrous repressed is only seen as evil, the film’s politics are clearly in line with conservative ideology and the reaffirming of the status quo. On the other hand, if this repressed of normality is not purely evil, but is instead sympathetic, normality itself can be challenged, which is at the heart of progressive politics.

Using Wood’s approach, BEDEVILLED is one of the great progressive horror films, partly because we are witness to the repression that explicitly creates the monster of the film’s final section. Bok-nam is not only a woman in this intensely patriarchal world, but she is an ethnic minority (lacking the (artificial) “whiteness” of Hae-won), proletariat (a maker of honey who is economically exploited by her husband), and lesbian. She endures this, and it is only with the repression of her child that she takes action. After her daughter’s death, she is finally driven to action. Because of this, the gruesome violence, something I normally do not revel in, is profoundly enjoyable, some of the most satisfying blood-letting in all of my film-going experiences. In fact, it is almost too one-sided, with the audience fully behind Bok-nam in her rampage against the evil old women of the island and then against her husband. The only real ambiguity, both for us and for her, is with Hae-won. Unlike the other characters, she is not actively barbaric in her actions and has been seen somewhat sympathetically. But she is also a deeply flawed character without the moral courage to stand up for her friend, a cowardice that extends back to their childhood, when she fled while Bok-nam was gang-raped. In this way, she bears a strong resemblance to the Allison Lohman character in another great recent horror film, Sam Raimi’s DRAG ME TO HELL. The final blood-soaked confrontation between the Bok-nam and Hae-won ends not just with a battle, but with a rather touching embrace.

Overall, this is Korean pop cinema at its finest. After watching the film, I learned director Jang Cheol-soo was an assistant to Kim Ki-Duk. And indeed, there are some similarities here, but there are more importantly clear divisions. If one ever wondered what a Kim Ki-duk film would look like without the pretension and the misogyny, well, here’s the answer.

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