Exhuma

A wealthy Korean American family hires a team of spiritual specialists after their daughter starts screaming the house down thanks to a furious ancestor. Andy, Dave, and David follow the trail as the Scooby Doo crew of geomancers, shamans, and funeral whisperers are flown in to sort out the cursed feng shui. It begins simply enough. Move granddad to a nicer bit of land, make his afterlife more pleasant, try not to set anything on fire. Then they open the coffin and a snake with a woman’s head slides out. Things go downhill from there.

Granddad turns out to be a collaborator from the Japanese occupation, buried on poisoned land, and very keen on terrorising his own descendants. His ghost pops up in mirrors, squeezes hearts, and generally behaves like the world’s worst patriarch. Once he is dealt with, the film cheerfully announces that there is an enormous coffin hidden underneath his grave. Of course there is. Inside is a giant samurai, pinned upright through the chest with a sword and absolutely not in the mood for reconciliation.

From there it all escalates. Exploding pig sheds. Monks being flung about. A fireball streaking across the sky that looks suspiciously like Monkey from Monkey Magic. The shamans work overtime. The geomancer questions every life choice that led him here. And the three of us attempt to keep up with the folklore, the history, and the subtitles, which sometimes appear to have been written by a cheerful intern with Google Translate.

The big argument comes when we try to decide if Exhuma counts as folk horror. Andy swears it does because the whole story is steeped in Korean folklore, national wounds, and the idea of land holding centuries of rage. Dave sees it more as a straight horror film with history glued on top. David goes in thinking it is folk horror, then changes his mind halfway through, then changes it again. Which is very on brand for David.

What we do all agree on is that the Scooby Doo crew are brilliant. They feel like real people with real skills, not just exposition machines, and the film wisely keeps them alive. For a two and a quarter hour horror film, it rips along with barely a moment to breathe, and even when we have no idea what is happening we are having a great time.

Exhuma shocked us with how spectacular it is. Massive in scale, rich in folklore, packed with ideas, and somehow still funny in places where it should not be. It also made ninety four million dollars and became the sixth biggest South Korean film ever, so clearly the rest of the world had as much fun as we did.

A wild, baffling, folklore soaked ride that we happily dropped a score of twenty two out of thirty on

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