Tracing Tradition in Korean Horror Film

What makes a Korean horror film Korean? Relatively little has been published to date in English on this topic, and what has been discussed frequently concentrates on Korean horror film’s renaissance at the millennial fin-de-siècle. This paper considers the inception of the horror genre in 1960s’ Korean cinema through a detailed case study of A Devilish Murder (Salinma 1965, dir. Lee Yong-min). By returning to the 1960s, a specific strand of Korean horror cinema can be traced, one created through associations between modernity, changing ideas of domestic space, and gendered relationships on one hand, and cinematic techniques predicated upon melodrama and flashbacks on the other.