Abstract

The popular culture version of the zombie, developed over the latter half of the twentieth century, made only sporadic appearances in South Korean film, which may in part be attributed to the restrictions on the distribution of American and Japanese films before 1988. Thus the first zombie film Monstrous Corpse (Goeshi 1980, directed by Gang Beom-Gu), was a loose remake of the Spanish-Italian Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (1974). Monstrous Corpse was largely forgotten until given a screening by KBS in 2011. Zombies don’t appear again for a quarter of a century. This article examines four zombie films released between 2012 and 2018: “Ambulance”, the fourth film in Horror Stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; Train to Busan (2016) (directed by Yeon Sang-Ho), the first South Korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; Seoul Station (2016), an animation prequel to Train to Busan (also directed by Yeon Sang-Ho); and Rampant (2018, directed by Kim Seong-Hun ), a costume drama set in Korea’s Joseon era. Based on a cognitive studies approach, this article examines two conceptual metaphors which underlie these films: the very common metaphor, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, and the endemically Korean metaphor THE NATION IS A FAMILY.

Highlights

  • Korea’s traumatic history throughout most of the twentieth century — Japanese colonisation, the Korean War, and almost forty years of military dictatorship — has left deep psychological scars on the national psyche, and the recent emergence of zombie narrative genres has furnished another vehicle for expressing the social impact of that

  • The globalised popular culture version of the zombie, which was developed over the latter half of the twentieth century, had made only sporadic appearances in South Korean film before the twenty-first century, which may in part be attributed to the restrictions on the distribution of American and Japanese films before 1988

  • This article examines some zombie films produced in South Korea between 2012 and 2018: “Ambulance”, the fourth segment in Horror Stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; Train to Busan (2016), the first South Korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; Seoul Station (2016), an animation prequel to Train to Busan (2016, directed by Yeon Sang-Ho); and Rampant (2018, directed by Kim Seong-Hun ), a costume drama set in Korea’s premodern Joseon era

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Summary

Zombies and Symbolic Representation

This article examines some zombie films produced in South Korea between 2012 and 2018: “Ambulance”, the fourth segment in Horror Stories (2012), a popular horror portmanteau film; Train to Busan (2016) (directed by Yeon Sang-Ho), the first South Korean blockbuster film in the “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre; Seoul Station (2016), an animation prequel to Train to Busan (2016, directed by Yeon Sang-Ho); and Rampant (2018, directed by Kim Seong-Hun ), a costume drama set in Korea’s premodern Joseon era (a genre known as sageuk in Korean). As a microcosm of society, the ambulance should be a vehicle (literally and metaphorically) that supports people on life’s journey but instead embodies the helplessness and paranoia instilled in characters (and audiences) by the common conflict between self-preservation and moral behaviour which is prompted by a social division figured by the zombie outbreak. Viewers distinguish the uninfected from the infected, but Seoul Station is an emotionally disengaged film, as only characters in small roles elicit empathy from viewers: a middle-aged homeless man who helps Hye-Seon and is shot when he protests about the mistreatment of ordinary people; and a young man who embodies the altruist schema by saving Hye-Seon at the cost of his own life (01:13:50). The shadow plays across an expensive vanity table while the light falls brightly on a wall plaque which details the cost and provenance of the object (see Figure 1)

Affect and Closure in Train to Busan
Findings
Conclusion

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