ANS 379: project by Naba D Sheikh

ZOMBIES IN KOREAN MEDIA

ANS 379: HISTORY & MEMORY IN JAPAN & KOREA

REPRESENTATIONS IN MEDIA: FILM EDITION Featuring Doomsday Book (2012) and #Alive (2020)

Q: What can we learn from fear?

A: What we value most and why.

From: Naba Sheikh

To: Dr. Oxenford

DECEMBER 2023

ISSUE #1

TABLE

CONTENTS

History of Zombies

Zombies in Korea

Doomsday Book (2012)

#Alive (2020)

Comparison / Course

As an 8-year-old child, I acted in a student-led short film as a zombie. I had the honor of being the first infected in an apocalypse, and dare I say my performance was nothing short of Oscar-worthy. Ever since then, I’ve had this strange — some might even say undying — love for zombies that has spanned through my various media phases, especially with video games such as The Last of Us and The Walking Dead. With that, though, I never stopped to consider the representational power of zombies.

If the figure of the ghost is about seeing what might not be immediately visible, I began to wonder what other manifestations of ‘haunting’ can represent. This then became the overarching analytical question that guided the creation of this magazine: what can fear tell us? Like grief, regret, guilt, rage, and other all-consuming and heart-wrenching feelings of the sort, I realized there’s a lot to learn from fear. What people fear and why they fear it. And, of course, what’s scarier than the undead?

On the other hand, our class opened my eyes to how the figure of the ghost not only brings the past into the present but also calls into question certain unseen problems — problems that may be related to trauma or rendered invisible by systems of power. Every time I want to describe ghosts and haunting further, I find myself deferring to other works because the words just click in my brain, and I’m not sure I can replicate that feeling with my writing just yet.

On top of that, zombies are ascribed many different origin stories and defining characteristics, from some that are seemingly mindless with empty gazes to others that are impulsively relentless with frenzied outbursts. Either way, they tend to be unnerving and surprisingly agile. This was my starting point for what would become plenty of late-night research rabbit holes.

For instance, I went to the College of Liberal Arts Book Fair this semester, and in passing, I read a few pages of Middle Eastern Gothics: Literature, Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past edited by Karen Grumberg, an excerpt of which stuck with me: “The sociologist Avery Gordon narrows the allencompassing lens of Derrida’s hauntology, arguing that haunting is ‘a story about what happens when we admit the ghost — that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present — into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world.’ Haunting is a story, and it also informs the way we tell stories. The ghost indicates the difference it makes to start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or, more commonly, with what we never even notice’ (Gordon, Ghostly Matters, pp. 24-5).”

Because I am indeed a fan of the Korean drama series Kingdom (2019-), I wanted to focus on Korean media and compare how zombies have been represented across works, time, and space. Hopefully, I still have my brains intact after all this media consumption about zombie consumption… consumption-ception, if you will… so I can present an at least half-decent analysis :’) — Note: Although I was originally going to analyze Kingdom (2019-) and Train to Busan (2016) for my two selected works, I ran into some problems that often plague me (no pun intended): comparison, perfectionism, and skewed expectations. I saw all the brilliant scholarship out there and hit a wall because I didn’t know how to analyze the works without parroting what I had read before. That’s why I decided to pivot and study other works that came up in my research.

FROM THE EDITOR

HISTORY OF ZOMBIES 03

The Representation of the Zombie in Korean Films: Medieval Zombie vs Modern Zombie By: Rachad Chafik Eldrissi “The zombie is a paradoxical concept, ‘It is at once familiar and alien, alive and dead, human and non-human’ (Dendle 2011: 175). The zombie is persistently closing in, irrepressible and intractable. At a time when the average person doesn’t know what to fear most, terrorism, global warming, pandemic diseases, economic collapse, or nuclear weapons, zombies are the trendy monstrous creature, that encompasses all such anxieties; zombies carry a powerful and devilish virus that metastasizes at a giddy speed making them the most redoubtable metaphorical monster of human fears. Originating from Haiti and Northern Africa (Boon 2007; Carroll 1990), the zombie myth was introduced to the Western cinema through Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), and in the late 1930s and in the 1940s a number of zombie films were produced such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943) giving birth to the first generation of celluloid zombies known as the ‘zombie drone’. Given the socio-political context of America in those times (unemployment, poverty, and segregation) the zombie of that period, carried a signification of racism, colonialism, and offered a critique of both slavery and exploitation of the worker under the capitalist system. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, the surge of zombie films subsided, but those that were produced carried a signification tied to nuclear war and fascism. At that time, the zombie had served to enunciate the prevailing socio-political turbulences which were greatly embodied in World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until George A. Romero’s seminal film Night of the Living Dead (1968), that the zombie went through a radical transformation wherein we note ‘the fusion of the zombie of Haitian folklore with the ghoul [middle eastern origins], which introduced flesh-eating into the zombie myth’ (Boon, 2007: 35). However, given the historical context of Korea as a territory that has been perpetually invaded and occupied, it has unavoidably been influenced by various foreign cinema trends. In the 1960s, the American horror movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s became popular and were widely consumed by the Koreans from cinemagoers to filmmakers alike. Accordingly, we note the birth of what will become known as the ‘Gothic thriller’ with the ghost myth dominating as the symbolic representation of the Koreans’ deepest fears (Peirse 2011). In opposition to the popularity of the ghost myth in the Korean horror cinema, there was hardly any films related to what may be considered in the west as a ‘zombie’ film. Even after [a] first attempt, the zombie remained a genre resistant to integration into Korean cinema; theoretically, this resistance can be regarded as a form of rejection of the Western culture, which was already excessively present and unwillingly encroaching into the Korean society.”

By: Lee Si-jin “Korean zombies made their screen debut in the horror film ‘A Monstrous Corpse’ (1981), born from the malfunctioning of a low frequency transmitter. The public broadcaster KBS featured zombies in an episode of ‘Hometown Legends’ (1983), a classic drama series of various ghost stories. The zombie‘s well-known characteristics — devoid of will, speechless reanimated dead — were largely ignored here, the undead terrifying the viewers by screaming its famous line ‘Give me back my leg!’ Various horror and thriller works — ‘Dark Forest’ (2006), ‘GP506’ (2008), ‘The Neighborhood Zombie’ (2010), ‘Horror Stories’ (2012) and ‘Zombie School’ (2014) and more — featured scary zombies, but they were little different from monsters with a grotesque appearance and violent actions. ‘Train to Busan’ wrote a new history in Korean cinema by becoming the first zombie film to record more than 10 million tickets sold, which is considered a huge box-office success in the country with a population of about 52 million. ‘The zombie gestures were created after carefully studying the movements of animals with rabies and the humanoids’ gestures in the Japanese cyberpunk film ‘Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’ (2004),’ movement director and choreographer Jeon Young, who brought the undead to life in ‘Train to Busan.’ One of the stunning characteristics of the ‘Train to Busan’ zombies is that their eyes and faces are fixed at their target, even when they crash into structures and obstacles. This feature referenced the undead in the action role-playing game ‘Dark Soul,’” Jeon said. According to Jeon, zombies evolved as he worked on various projects — ‘Kingdom’ series, ‘Peninsula,’ ‘The Cursed: Dead Man’s Prey’ (2020) and tvN’s drama ‘Happiness’ (2021), after ‘Train to Busan,’ developing [their] actions after studying various elements, including the rabies, sleepwalking, robots and dehydration. ‘The horror, the bizarre and the speed aside, the series tried to focus on presenting the sadness and sorrow of watching their beloved classmates turning into zombies,’ Gook Joong-yi, choreographer of Netflix’s upcoming zombie thriller ‘All of Us Are Dead,’ said in a press release. While many Western zombie projects heavily focus on the lead characters’ survival and war against the undead, Korean zombie works focus on the story of the birth of zombies, mostly caused by mankind‘s sins, including excessive desires, greed, pollution, tech omnipotence and more. The story centers around how humanity reacts to the zombies and seeks to reveal the true nature of humans in an apocalyptic world, painting a portrait of survival that is more hideous than bloodstained zombies.”

ZOMBIES IN KOREA

What Do You Know About Korean Zombies? All the Way From Joseon Era to Train to Busan, Korean Zombies Now Appear in High School

DOOMSDAY BOOK “We’ve received reports that the virus symptoms have mutated. Uncontrollable libido, appetite, and depression… patients have suffered from symptoms related to such human vices. They may appear to be living human beings, but experts call them ‘dead bodies in suspended animation.’” Right after this harrowing sentiment is expressed in one of the film’s many newscasts, there’s a scene depicting a museum’s evolution installation, except a dazed virus patient stands at the end — evolution’s next step then being the culmination of human vices, and more specifically, consumption. It all started with an ordinary nerd fumbling a date with a beautiful woman. Man, who knew turning into a zombie mid-date would be such a turn off? Not Seokwoo, apparently, research scientist by day and negligent son by night, at least according to his family. When his parents leave to go on vacation, they tell Seokwoo to keep the house tidy and hand him a list of chores.

At the top of that list is trash disposal, and naturally, Seokwoo waits until the last minute to do so. Even he’s afraid of the stench of it all, which includes a rotting apple that catches his eye, the first nod to a Biblical reference in the film. There are a few lingering questions as this sequence comes to a close: why does Seokwoo’s own family seem to distrust and despise him? Why is there so much trash? If the apple alludes to the story of Adam and Eve, as the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, why is it rotting? Either way, though, Seokwoo disposes of it in a food waste recycling bin, stared at by a group of foreboding cats. He quickly rids himself of the last reminder of his parents’ complaints and expectations, the trash perhaps a physical manifestation of the souring of their relationship and its accompanying unchanneled resentment. But, in an unexpected turn of events, the food waste from the bin — the rotting apple — is ultimately fed to cows at the end of the supply chain.

“UNCONTROLLABLE LIBIDO, APPETITE, AND DEPRESSION… PATIENTS HAVE SUFFERED FROM SYMPTOMS RELATED TO SUCH HUMAN VICES.”

The timing is damning: Seokwoo and his date, Yoomin, are devouring plates of beef, a sexual tension behind each bite. After all, their act of consumption is laced with a hunger for each other. So, when the waitress offers a fresh new cut of meat, Seokwoo all but squirms in excitement. He and Yoomin continue their date on playground swings, where she compliments his “kind and loyal puppy dog” eyes. It’s too bad that, less than a few minutes later, his eyes are completely glazed over as a zombie with heightened aggressive behavior upon picking a fight with some students nearby. In a way, Seokwoo replicates the condescending nagging of his parents with these students, which marks the start of his zombie transformation. Yoomin simply witnesses the whole spectacle and manages to get away unscathed, but it’s too late: other individuals from the restaurant are also beginning to turn. The other first infected include the ‘new rights alliance,’ an English teacher, and a designer. Why them specifically? In their own transformations, those attributes are shown at their worst, most violent, most animalistic. The designer, for instance, attempts to rip the dress off a woman in a club and gets pulled away aroused. There’s this link between hedonistic sexuality and zombies in the film as a “human vice.” However, the core critique of the film is centered around government and media incompetence. Why was food waste fed to cows in the first place? Why do newscasts fearmonger and entertain conspiracies in times of crisis? One newscast presents a debate between a handful of esteemed guests, from politicians to journalists to advocates, including a cameo by none other than Bong Joonho. “For the nation’s peace, we need nationwide sacrifice,” says a far-right politician. As the guests go back and forth, their nonsensical debate ends in an eerily absurd manner: someone starts singing in Russian, randomly referencing Leon Trotsky, and the others follow suit with instrumentation.

The other newscasts are no better, but they do reveal the wide range of responses to the outbreak. Another far-right politician “applied for asylum in Japan, but it was denied again.” Protesters hold banners saying “stop North Korea’s biological warfare” citing the “talk of the withdrawal of U.S. forces” as the cause. My favorite, and perhaps the most on the nose, was a newscaster holding a chunk of meat in one hand, and the Bible in the other: “These two things represent food for the body and the soul, but when conflict arises between these two provisions…” Soon after, he admits that “experts are working nonstop to find the cause of this phenomenon, but even cutting-edge science cannot explain these events.” The sobering limitations of human knowledge, and the grotesque dangers of consumption. Seeing a zombie wreak havoc, one character comments “all that meat just went to his head,” and I feel that is a very apt summary of how zombies are represented in this film. Moreover, what to fear is not just the zombies themselves but also reactions to them, the way systems of power fail us. In this sense, this story in the film’s anthology endorses its namesake, the novel “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. Even as Seokwoo’s father is on the verge of death, ravaged by his own son, he only cares about his exquisite collection. There’s this sense that we’ve somehow lost sight of what really matters. The film’s ending speaks to this sentiment the most: Seokwoo and Yoomin, for the first time, truly see themselves in each other as zombies. Their recognition of each other bleeds into recognition of themselves, too, as the film closes with Seokwoo’s bite of the now-rotten apple. The last scene of the film is a fitting quote: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17).

A girl in her school uniform calls out for her mother, reunites with her, and then, of course, proceeds to eat her. It’s a gruesome sight, to say the least. No matter how much Joonwoo wants to help, his efforts seem futile. It’s not that he doesn’t try — he does, specifically with a policewoman who attempts to singlehandedly shoot down the zombies. When the zombies get ahold of her, he curses at them from his balcony, desperately trying to ward them off. Except it’s too late, and her limp body and clouded gaze begin to haunt Joonwoo. He’s also haunted by hunger. One day, the newscast is interrupted by a Jin Ramen commercial. Impulsively, Joonwoo shoots up from his couch, opens his pantry, and eats his cup of Jin Ramen he labeled “the last supper,” savoring each bite like it’s his last. The consequences of messing up his daily rations catch up to him, and he truly loses all hope. Luckily, though, a neighbor across the complex sees him right in the nick of time, right as he almost gives up for good.

#ALIVE “What’s a doofus gamer to do when facing murderous opponents he can’t kill with a joystick?” (Vincentelli). The answer: reaffirm his will to live. Joonwoo, a video game streamer trapped in his apartment during the onset of a zombie apocalypse, spends his days simply trying to survive. Sure, the zombies are scary, but the film points out that loneliness can be even scarier. What’s the use of being alive if you’re alone? With these musings on what it means to be human, the film depicts a different approach to the zombie apocalypse: instead of constantly being on the run in action-packed sequences, the main character passively waits for the situation to improve at home. Almost the entirety of the film takes place in Joonwoo’s apartment, and he’s on the outside looking in. Or, more specifically, on the top looking below at all the carnage from his balcony. There are crowds of people screaming and being attacked by swarms of zombies, a war Joonwoo bears witness to.

The neighbor, Yoobin, becomes Joonwoo’s anchor. He finally has someone to share the pain with, and they send each other items across a haphazard zipline. As they comfort one another, Yoobin tells Joonwoo what she wants to hear. How would you act when life is stripped bare? How would you choose to keep living? The film is less about its zombies than it is about its humans: “Other than cannibalistic tendencies, the infected do not seem to possess a heightened sense of vision, hearing, and smell…” When Joonwoo and Yoobin venture out of their respective apartments and seek refuge in what seems to be a zombie-free building, they run into another survivor. At first, all is well, and they enjoy a meal — only for the poison to kick in. Who can you trust? The survivor has his infected wife locked in their unborn children’s room, and he wants her to be fed. A last act of love. Joonwoo manages to save Yoobin just in time before she’s devoured, and they rush to the building’s rooftop where they hope to be seen by helicopters in the area. Spoiler alert (there were not many already): they are saved, but the film leaves the most food for thought for the end. As Joonwoo, Yoobin, and the presumably government-affiliated saviors fly above the city, a newscast reports that “the metropolitan area was hit especially hard due to the contact spacing of rental units within various apartment complexes.” In this sense, the zombies are finally represented by more than reactions to them — victims of poorly designed infrastructure tied to struggles of class and inequality.

COMPARISON As an overarching comparison, both Doomsday Book (2012) and #Alive (2020) express the importance of connection between individuals. Seokwoo has Yoomin; Joonwoo has Yoobin (though this pairing is not necessarily romantic). It is a testament to the recognition of the self in someone else, and the profound comfort that can bring to an individual, especially given the chaotic and violent context of a zombie apocalypse. While Doomsday Book is a more pointed critique of how such an apocalypse could occur in the first place, #Alive focuses more on how the individual suffers regardless of culpability. Both, however, incorporate various newscasts to expose ineffective and insensitive responses from not only the media but also the government. And both aren’t afraid to do so in a comedic manner. Both reveal how the spectacle of politics and business, respectively, are more deranged than the zombies as their subject matter. The zombies themselves are also represented differently. Doomsday Book directly relates them to human vices such as “uncontrollable libido, appetite, and depression.” They are manifestations of these vices at their worst. On the other hand, #Alive portrays the zombies as more ruthless and completely detached from their humanity. They are almost opposite depictions, with Doomsday Book lending itself to plenty of further analysis regarding the representation of zombies.

COURSE

Doomsday Book (2012) and #Alive (2020) relate to concepts of history and memory in Korea through their characters and their motivations. In the first, Seokwoo notices Yoomin taking pictures during their date over barbeque, where she expresses her desire to “leave a record of very moment” — because, to her, “whether it’s good or bad, all you have left are your memories.” While this is a very direct reference to memory and its importance, I was interested in what she asked next: “Is that weird?” Why does Yoomin seek validation from Seokwoo here? Is this supposed to represent a gendered aspect of memory, or does it just matter to her character? After all, when Seokwoo fully turns into a zombie, Yoomin snaps a picture that he urges her to delete. Except she never does, staring at it on her bus ride home, tears welling up in her eyes. She cries reflecting on the memory and what it means to her. At the end of the film, when Seokwoo takes a bite of the rotten apple, Yoomin snaps a picture yet again. Her memory seems to highlight the film’s key transitions and themes. Like Yoomin, Joonwoo’s relationship with memory is also pretty straightforward: he reminisces on the time he spent with his family in the apartment, and it’s what keeps him going throughout the film. His memory is triggered by messages and music, sensory components that are accentuated in the film sequences. But such sensory components ultimately fall short of his family’s real, physical presence, and at a certain point, memory is no longer enough for Joonwoo. He receives a voicemail from his father that goes from a loving reminder to keep surviving to a graphic account of his own demise, the snarls of the zombies rendering his screams inaudible. This is, quite understandably, Joonwoo’s breaking point, and he seeks to put an end to his thinking, his memories. Joonwoo’s memory is thus intertwined with his mental well-being, especially since he is stuck in his apartment. This connects to the ongoing history of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the way the spatial and the temporal work together to warp perceptions of time. The days blur, and time ceases to feel real, or at least even linear. The ability to make new memories — ones not plagued by death, decay, and destruction — is taken away from the characters during the zombie apocalypse.

HOW DO THE FILMS RELATE TO HISTORY & MEMORY IN KOREA?

Literature in the Ashes of History By: Cathy Caruth “What causes trauma, then, is an encounter that is not directly perceived as a threat to the life of the organism but that occurs, rather, as a break in the mind’s experience of time…” (5) “The repetition of trauma, therefore, is not only an attempt or an imperative to know what cannot be grasped that is repeated unconsciously in the survivor’s life; it is also an imperative to live that still remains not fully understood” (6). “‘human being as a perpetual survivor’” (7). “In what way is the experience of trauma also the experience of an imperative to live? What is the nature of a life that continues beyond trauma?” (7). “What is the language of the life drive?” (10). “It is a language of departure, that is, that does not repeat the unconscious origin of life as death, but creates a history by precisely departing toward survival” (9).

Multidirectional Memory By: Michael Rothberg “Memory is the past made present” (3). “The notion of a ‘making present’ has two important corollaries: first, that memory is a contemporary phenomenon, something that, while concerned with the past, happens in the present; and second, that memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or action” (4). “‘Memory [is] a symbolic representation of the past embedded in social action’; it is ‘a set of practices and interventions’” (4). “Memory’s anachronistic quality — its bringing together of now and then, here and there — is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones” (5). “Memory is, as Freud recognized, primarily an associative process that works through displacement and substitution; it is fundamentally and structurally multidirectional, even though powerful forces are always trying to shape it according to more or less rigid psychic or ideological parameters” (12).

Translating Time By: Bliss Cua Lim “The haunting repetition of a traumatic past comes to be experienced with the ‘singularity’ of a ‘first time,’ renewing our sense of responsibility and solidarity toward the injustices endured by those long dead” (151). “As Jameson puts it, ‘spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us’” (152) “Against our habit of abstracting space as a static container for movement, Bergson beautifully intuits an experiential notion of space as a kaleidoscopic whole, a moving continuity that fills our gaze without interruption the moment we open our eyes” (154). “‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’” (157-8).

QUOTES

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READINGS

REFERENCES & WORKS CITED #Alive. Directed by Cho Il-hyung, Lotte Entertainment and Netflix, 2020. Bliss Cua Lim. Translating Time. Duke University Press, 2009. Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Doomsday Book. Directed by Kim Jee-woon and Yim Pil-sung, Lotte Entertainment, 2012. Eldrissi, Rachad Chafik. “The Representation of the Zombie in Korean Films: Medieval Zombie vs Modern Zombie.” Revenant Journal, Dec. 2021, www.revenantjournal.com/contents/therepresentation-of-the-zombie-in-korean-films-medieval-zombie-vs-modern-zombie/. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2006. Si-jin, Lee. “What Do You Know about Korean Zombies?” The Korea Herald, Herald Corporation, 26 Jan. 2022, www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220126000820. Vincentelli, Elisabeth. “‘#Alive’ Review: From Great Graphics, to Graphic.” The New York Times, 11 Sept. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/movies/alive-review.html. Gray images by Freepik.