Exhuming a Historical Myth

Minsoo Kang examines the persistence of Korean nationalism in the South Korean horror thriller “Exhuma,” directed by Jang Jae-hyun.

By Minsoo KangAugust 3, 2024

• Film

• SF

• Cultural Studies

IN SOUTH KOREA’S booming and now globally recognized film industry, the biggest domestic blockbuster of 2024 so far is Jang Jae-hyun’s horror thriller Exhuma (original title Pamyo), which packed the theaters for months and played well in other Asian countries. The film had a limited theatrical release in the United States and is now available on various streaming services, but it has received little attention despite the recent upsurge in interest in Korean cinema.

The film features a version of the slick, fast-paced, genre-mixing style that has defined many of the most internationally successful South Korean movies, including speculative works like Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016). Yet it is also replete with elements specific to Korean culture and historical memory to the extent that much of the narrative will likely be opaque to non-Korean viewers. These elements include the persistence of traditional forms of magic in Korean society and the historical trauma of the Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula (1910–45). They also include a particular myth concerning the Japanese attempt to destroy Korea through geomancy—a myth that I was in part responsible for spreading in the late 1990s.

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Exhuma intermingles the modern and the traditional in contemporary South Korea in telling ways. An ultrarich family involved in the late-capitalist economy looks to old magic to dispel its malaise. In the film’s opening scenes, young shaman Lee Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her assistant Yoon Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) travel to the United States to meet with Korean American real estate magnate Park Ji-yong (Kim Jae-cheol), who believes he is under a curse. His family has been subjected to a series of uncanny tragedies, and his infant son is now ill. Lee diagnoses a “calling from the grave” (“sanso tal”)—harm caused by the discontented spirit of an ancestor. In order to rectify the situation, Lee seeks the help of an aging geomancer named Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik), who agrees to examine the gravesite of Park’s grandfather in rural South Korea, near the border with North Korea.

The scenario brings together two distinct forms of traditional magic—geomancy (“pungsu” in Korean, from the Chinese “feng shui”) and shamanism (“musok”)—that remain culturally important in South Korea. In the West, feng shui is known mainly as a form of interior design, but it is actually an ancient discipline of environmental and geographical study as well as urban planning. One of its central ideas is the notion of “gi” (vital energy, from the Chinese “qi”) that flows through land, water, and wind. As shown in the film, the most common activity of geomancers today is to pick out resting places for the deceased or to advise construction companies on optimal building sites.

While geomancy was regarded as a legitimate intellectual discipline during the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), shamanism was a folk practice conducted by individual shamans (“mudang” or “mansin”) who would communicate with gods, spirits, and ghosts. The introduction of a broadly scientific worldview in the 20th century did not eradicate geomancy and shamanism. Estimates point to as many as 20,000 practicing geomancers and 300,000 shamans today (though both practices were banned in communist North Korea as superstitions from the feudal past). This persistence of traditional ways in South Korea is a symptom of the breakneck speed with which the country modernized over the course of the 20th century, resulting in the blending of the old and the new.

Following their inspection of the gravesite, Kim and Lee use their respective expertise to investigate the source of the family curse. As their search progresses, the story becomes a forensic procedural that blends seamlessly into horror as the duo fights against an evil spirit out to destroy Park’s entire family.

At the gravesite of Park’s grandfather, Kim finds many signs of ill fortune, including foxes, animals of malevolent spirit in East Asian mythology that are, presumably, the cause of the family’s tragedies. But Kim is wary of exhuming the body to bury it elsewhere (an act known as “pamyo,” the original Korean title of the film) because he senses powerful evil. Lee proposes that she and Kim combine their arts: Kim and his assistants will unearth the coffin, and she will perform a ritual of exorcism to dispel the evil.

The plan proceeds well, and the coffin is transported safely to a hospital morgue. But that night, a hospital employee motivated by rumors of hidden treasures opens it, releasing a ghost. When Lee confronts the spirit, it reveals its intent to take its descendants to the underworld. The geomancer and the shaman race to thwart its purpose, but the malevolent ghost murders Park and some of his family members, including his ailing father. Just as it is about to make its final kill, Park’s infant son, the team cremates the coffin and body, expelling the spirit and saving the child.

But questions remain. Why was Park’s grandfather, who was rich and powerful, buried in such an inauspicious place? Why did his spirit become evil and seek to kill his descendants? And what is the meaning of the ghost’s last words: “The fox has severed the waist of the tiger”?

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Sensing a lingering evil, Kim takes his investigation into Korean history. He discovers that, during the Japanese colonial era, a Buddhist priest named Gisune designated the specific unusual location for Park’s grandfather’s gravesite. An interview with Park’s aunt reveals that the grandfather was a prominent collaborator during the period of Japanese occupation. The family’s wealth, in other words, was built on the exploitation of the Korean people. (Many who collaborated with the Japanese were never held to account but, on the contrary, thrived economically in the postliberation period.) The Park ancestor’s complicity with the Japanese is the source of the evil that has beset his descendants, it would seem. Their wealth is cursed, and the spirit of the ancestor who built it is now the instrument of the family’s destruction.

This theme, in which a hidden sin from the country’s tragic history resurfaces to haunt the present, is so familiar in Korean media that it verges on cliché. Moreover, the film has recourse to an equally overused and ultimately nationalistic trope: it conjures not just the evil ghost of the Korean collaborator but a nefarious Japanese sorcerer as well.

Following the historical revelations, Kim returns to the cursed gravesite, where he discovers another coffin that was buried vertically beneath that of Park’s grandfather. Its removal from the site leads to the emergence of a powerful demon. Kim finally understands the true nature of the evil they are facing. The mysterious Gisune was actually a Japanese sorcerer whose purpose was to bury a gi-disrupting iron stake at the grave, hiding it beneath the coffin of the collaborator. In addition, he placed a demon inside the second coffin to safeguard the object. This explains the ghost’s last pronouncement, that “the fox has severed the waist of the tiger.” In geomantic imagery, the tiger represents the Korean peninsula, and the name Gisune evokes “kitsune,” the Japanese word for fox. The fox sorcerer from Japan sought to sap the vitality of Korean land by burying an iron stake at the site (the “waist” of the tiger), near the border with North Korea, the implication being that the Japanese are responsible for the forced division of the peninsula following the colonial era.

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I was living in Korea 25 years ago when I first encountered the historical myth that is the basis for Exhuma’s fantastical story. I had become interested in debates about the demolition of a building in central Seoul that was the center of the Japanese colonial government before becoming, after liberation, the seat of the South Korean government and, finally, the National Museum. Some argued that the building ought to be preserved for its historical value, but the structure was brought down on August 15, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of foreign subjugation. The aspect of the controversy I found most fascinating was the invocation of geomancy by those arguing for the building’s removal. They claimed the Japanese erected the structure in front of Gyeongbokgung Palace, the residence of Korea’s defunct Joseon royalty, to cut off the flow of gi from Bugaksan, the mountain to its north, and thus sap the vital energy of the capital. Geomancers further claimed that the Japanese had done something similar all over the country, spiking crucial gi locations with iron stakes to destroy the health of the land.

I published an essay about the controversy in a literary journal in the United States but failed to do due diligence when investigating what has since become known as “iron stake conspiracy.” I did not overtly claim that the story was factual, but I implied it in my assertion that, of all the different ways the Japanese tried to destroy Korea during the colonial period, “the most bizarre was through the use of geomancy.” I also described watching geomancers on television hiking up to remote mountainous places where they unearthed and removed iron stakes, and I referenced the discovery of many such stakes at the demolition site of Gyeongbokgung Palace.

To my ultimate dismay, my discussion of the iron stake conspiracy was referenced in both scholarly articles and popular media. But as it happens, there was no such conspiracy. No iron stakes were discovered at the site of Gyeongbokgung Palace, and the stakes that geomancers extracted in the mountains turned out to be nothing more than surveying equipment. Scholars who looked into the matter found no documentary evidence of any such Japanese plan. And I would personally discover that folk stories of foreign enemies attempting to debilitate the country through geomantic means predate the colonial period. For instance, the 18th-century king Jeongjo speculated that the paucity of talented men in the kingdom was due to iron stakes inserted in a mountain by a Chinese sage. And just such an act of sabotage is described in the late Joseon novel Imjin nok (Record of the Black Dragon Year).

In short, I had perpetuated a baseless rumor, and I have lived with guilt about this for the last two-plus decades.

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Exhuma makes a show of acknowledging the baselessness of the rumors on which it trades. Kim Sang-deok and his compatriots discuss whether to risk their lives attempting to kill the Japanese demon and remove the stake. His friend, a mortician named Ko Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), objects to the idea, saying that in school he learned that 99 percent of the claims about the stakes turned out to be false. Kim responds: “But what about the one percent?” What if there was just one real attempt to harm the land? Ko then questions why they should endanger themselves: “We have lived well, whether there were stakes buried in the earth or not.”

Ko seems in this moment to be speaking of the South Korean population as a whole. Even if the conspiracy did exist, why, when it apparently did not work, should the people of a prosperous country care? Kim counters: “Because this is about our land! Land my grandson will live on, where all our descendants will live!” Regardless of whether the geomantic magic of invading imperial forces proved effective, the team must risk its lives as a matter of national pride and dignity.

The protagonists use their geomantic knowledge and shamanistic powers to battle the Japanese demon. In the midst of the fight, they are subjected to visions that reveal the identity of the malevolent creature as a giant samurai warrior. This was a general who participated in the invasion of Joseon Korea (1592–98), known in Korea as the Imjin War, a premodern source of historical trauma. Over 400 years after the warmongering general’s death, Gisune exhumed his corpse and turned it into a powerful demon, inserting a sword into its body to act as a gi-disrupting stake. In the course of the film, then, the geomancer and shamans fight against no fewer than three evil beings associated with Japan: the ghost of the Korean collaborator, the Japanese sorcerer with a fox’s soul, and the demon of an invader from the remote past.

It is unclear how much a role, if any, the anti-Japanese theme contributed to the film’s massive box office success in South Korea. It is possible that the audience responded to other qualities. It is interesting, however, that the film proved to be so popular at a time when a number of recent articles have pointed to improved regard for the Japanese among Koreans, especially the young who were born half a century after the end of the colonial era.

Beyond its familiar nationalist tropes, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is its depiction of magic in the context of late-capitalist global modernity. In the decades following the colonial period, during South Korea’s rapid modernization, literary and cinematic representations of old magic practitioners portrayed them as upholders of tradition who set themselves against the progress of modernity. Shamans, for instance, were commonly depicted as older women living in rural areas and leading backward lives. In contrast, Exhuma breaks new ground by casting young and attractive actors as its two shamanistic protagonists, who take spinning classes when not exorcizing ghosts and demons, and who fly first-class when traveling to the United States. The geomancer Kim Sang-deok, meanwhile, advises the construction crew at the site of a corporate building. He complains that his daughter is marrying a German man and might have a grandchild with blue eyes who may or may not be raised in Korea. But by the film’s end, he has fully accepted the union—this after he nearly lost his life battling demonic foreign invaders from the past. The client of the geomancer and the shamans, Park Ji-yong, is also a transnational, the wealth he inherited from his collaborator grandfather invested in property in both Korea and the US.

What results is an interesting intermingling of anti-Japanese nationalism and an embrace of global capitalism. Geomancy and shamanism are thriving in the film’s South Korea not as a traditionalist alternative to secularism but as an accommodation to a capitalist modernity. Exhuma’s geomancers and shamans are corporate advisers and consultants, problem solvers for wealthy individuals and families who have ridden the economy to new heights. And its demon, however Japanese, travels the globe more quickly even than the shamans—almost as if it were capital itself.

All of which is to say that Exhuma is a rather apt depiction of the fascinating, beguiling, and uncanny society that developed in South Korea since the end of the colonial era.