Review Rodeo: The Ghost/Dead Friend
I mentioned previously my anime and K-horror watching and manga reading has fallen off recently. Over the weekend, however, I did get a chance to finish watching one K-horror movie called…
The Ghost
~=Insert scary sounds=~
Here’s the trailer
As you can tell it hits many K-horror (or asian horror) notes, water, ghost initially coming back as a woman’s hair, music box music, etc. I should say that I didn’t watch this in a normal sense, in terms of finishing it in one sitting or dedicating my complete attention to it. The netflix streaming remembers where you stopped the movie, seemingly forever. I believe I had checked out some of this movie last year. I guess it was because I was watching a pro starcraft tournament I thought of this movie and continued where I had left off. However, I did watch most of the movie without sound as I was practicing some alternate picking but I had to read subtitles anyway obviously.
I don’t want to get too in depth. But, man, this movie doesn’t fuck around when it comes to the title, The Ghost. Obviously it takes balls to call a K-horror movie the ghost as every K-horror is about a ghost. I was thinking they were almost trying to stake a claim in the classic monster movie realm (mummy, frankenstein, dracula) due to the absence of a ghost.
What I love about this movie, and why I wanted to bring it to y’all’s attention is that it definitely has that second twist I was talking about in an earlier K-horror post. The basic plot is that a group of high school girls took a weekend trip to the country. It’s basically 5 girls, a group of friends and an outcast who they sort of bully and make carry their bags and take pictures. Anyway, they happen on a lake and, just to be cruel the main girl pushes the outcast, Su-in, into the water which leads to her drowning. That’s the backstory, or what is revealed in what I think of as the first twist. The movie takes place years later, the main girl has developed amnesia and her and her friends from the outing are being haunted. Make a long story short, the main girl remembers and then the second twist is set up. I didn’t really get it, but it’s basically something like the ghost of Su-in possessed the main girl’s body while the main girl possessed her mother’s body. So that’s two twists sort of.
February 1st, 2010 at 11:43 am
did you watch Thirst yet? or do you only like asian horror about ghosts? XD
February 1st, 2010 at 11:49 am
ross, thanks for me reminding me about thirst. I just moved it to the top of the queue. I’ll be honest I definitely like more ghost centric K-horror and can’t imagine what they would do with vampires.
February 1st, 2010 at 1:41 pm
so…did you like it? or was your experience of the movie on kind of a different axis than a simple like/dislike? kind of interesting the translational differences like in the trailer the website is for “dead friend” which sort of but not quite captures the same sense as “ghost.”
anyway i wonder what the impact is of asian horror on the japanese or korean (or chinese) youth cultures? maybe this is just my perception, but it seems that our teenage years at least were spent in a sort of horror vacuum. i can’t really think of any real horror movies that came out when we were in high school. species, maybe, but that’s sort of the opposite of horrifying.
February 1st, 2010 at 2:10 pm
zach, I think it was definitely serviceable in that it didn’t stray very far from genre conventions and the production was pretty good. as a lot of K-horror does I think, the plot became a little “spongy” (as in if your brakes were spongy), sort of a lack of focus and not enough drive. but it is a little different than the like/dislike kind of thing because I usually think of the genre altogether.
I imagine “dead friend” is probably a literal translation of the title. but it’s very matter of fact and doesn’t necessarily convey anything horror.
but you raise an interesting point about asian horror and youth culture. I’m not sure how popular these movies are with kids overseas but I imagine it’ll become part of their cultural reference. I’d agree that there weren’t any horror movies that made a splash up until scream and the blair witch project really, blair witch was definitely after high school for us, and that whole scream genre took a while to get started.
February 1st, 2010 at 5:38 pm
I think the movies themselves are super popular, especially among teen girls. I saw a bunch of poster ads for j-horror movies when I was in china, and I remember Andrey regaling me with tales of going to see some horror movie with a bunch of japanese undergrads or something like that. I think their popularity is also shown in just how many of these things the asian movie industries churn out each year.
February 1st, 2010 at 9:34 pm
trying to think what came out when we were in high school… the 90s weren’t a great decade for horror as far i can remember, except both Alien 3 and Candyman in 1992 but that was 6th grade not high school. i saw Hellraiser 4 in the theater in high school but that didn’t quite make a splash like you’re talking about. Scream is probably the best example. From Dusk Till Dawn? oh, Blade, but that’s more action that just happens to be about vampires.
there were some good ones but ones i don’t remember seeing until later or seeing on video, like Dead Alive (92) and Cemetery Man (94). but again both of those are early 90s, still can’t think of shit in late 90s/high school. Alien Resurrection in 97. barf.
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:04 am
a lot of those movies like the alien series, blade and dusk til dawn I don’t really consider horror but I guess you could argue they are. at the time I thought alien resurrection was pretty good. but yeah, not anything like it was in the 80s which is probably how people will look back on K-horror
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Dead Alive! What a gem. It’s interesting that the ostensible 90s horror movies listed here all sort of approximate the genre without being straight-up horror movies, like you (Mark, Ross) have said: Alien 3 takes place in a space prison, the Blade movies have action, Dead Alive is hilarious, and Scream has a kind of insistent meta quality.