Suddenly in the Dark (1981)

 

Director: Young Nam Ko

Screenplay: Sam-yuk Yoon

Cast: Kim Young-ae as Seon-hee; Lee Ki-seon as Mi-ok; Yun Il-bong as Yu-jin

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Candidate

 

After a photo of a Sharman shrine doll inexplicably appears in the butterfly slides of Professor Yu-jin (Yun Il-bong), his wife Seon-hee (Kim Young-ae) becomes increasingly paranoid when he returns home from a trip with a nineteen year old young woman named Mi-ok (Lee Ki-seon). Brought into their lives as a live-in maid, with no surviving family, Seon-hee becomes wary of a potential affair between her husband and Mi-ok that she starts to believe is transpiring. It is real, it is a psychological breakdown or of the supernatural, especially as Mi-ok's only possession is a shrine doll exactly like the one in the slides? This story, in its various storytelling parts, is one heard of many times before and after, though for its director Young Nam Ko, a studio director, this story was the only horror film he ever made.

He has over a hundred films in his filmography, a number only matched by the likes of Takashi Miike and Jesus Franco in the length of his career. Melodrama, comedy, action and yet only one horror film exists he desired to make, completed and never got another chance at repeating, making Suddenly in the Dark a curiosity. Peel the layers of this one entry into the horror genre from him, one which at first may be (understandably) questioned for its plot logic and gender politics, and it has a lot more going on as well as becoming a more macabre melodrama as a result, far more progressive even if entirely with unintentional hindsight to the ideas it wished to play with as a pure genre story. It is a Repulsion-like tale in which nothing, even when it is openly supernatural by the end, is spelt out for viewers as actually happening or not. The world of middle class South Korea is seen here, all lavish chairs and wooden furniture, modern supermarkets for the seventies, yet the paranoia is timeless, that Seon-hee is a woman in her late twenties, viewed as a married woman, as her female friend remarks, to be no different to old women in the world, least enforced onto their views as middle class women and housewives.

Already with a young daughter, this film is of its own country, but I cannot help but think of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, a famous feminist non-fiction work where, documenting the obsession with the idealised housewife in fifties Americana, the grim onslaught of teaching women to want to be housewives and have kids very early from that time in the culture, still in their teens, had a variety of detrimental effects psychologically, as much for men but for women especially, including the need to want to be sexually appealing to the husband, with all the potential neurosis from this ideal being contrived, and the endless monotony of their lives once they got their dream told to them to have. Seon-hee, whose romantic life with her husband Yu-jin is ordinary, is clearly having a breakdown which is not helped when a youthful woman is brought into the house, her youth as much the feared attraction as her physical beauty, someone dismissed by her female friend as not being attractive in the face but vibrant physically. Aptly, whilst an adult actress, Lee Ki-seon's Mi-ok uncomfortable evokes a teenage nymphet in appearance and manner, her naïveté and scenes of nudity a more pointed issue for Seon-hee to be anxious about.

Never was there a film about the perils of domestic life, if the various times Kim Ki-young remade his seminal The Housemaid (1960) over the years attested to just from South Korean cinema, Mi-ok becoming the maid to their home and a perceived threat to Seon-hee just to connect to the two films in this concept of the live-in maid having a neurosis to it as well. In the slew of various films about the supernatural invading homes, this one stands out with the sense that, even if there is an outside influence that eventually takes violent action, it is revealed to be vengeance for the transgressions a person does, all tangled in this theme which feels more striking now for me to see in the film. Within itself is that such actions that happen, between reality and the imagined, comes from material that is very real, which is heavy handed in depiction, a little green light of jealousy at points, but in itself is far more complex and making things more interesting.

The layer of patriarchal sexism, or the sense of Seon-hee's fears being ingrained from her environment adds a great depth, the fear a woman nearing her thirties is viewed as practically sixty, a streak throughout of confinement of these women in their middleclass lives. Whilst aesthetically, there is something pleasurable about the later seventies decor crossing into the eighties, there is also a sense of suffocation felt for Seon-hee in its immaculateness. A sense, like the really interesting psychodramas (i.e. most if not all of them), the modernity of their settings is as much complicit in the events, and that the reoccurring choice of female leads, even if it could be seen as sexist stereotyping and almost all of them directed by men, is subconsciously an awareness that these modern lives are life draining even if pleasant to look at.

Without giving away too much, Seon-hee will commit a crime believing in the old cliché of an evil force, Mi-ok the daughter of a shaman, has invaded her home and threatens her nuclear family, [Spoiler Warning] committing deliberate manslaughter presuming to fight this evil [Spoilers End], all in the presumption she is defending her home but filtered in a questionable sense, alongside the slippery form of her worldview, of whether this middle class world of hers was worth defending. That the "other" is shamanism, Korean's old customs, is pretty much without need for an elaborate reasoning on it, as this old culture of the past against the stifled modernity, where Professor Yu-jin's attempts to rationalise his wife's psychological state backfires poorly, does not need to be seen as a metaphor but  meaning in itself. The daughter of a female shaman versus as housewife needing to take tranquilizers to fell at ease, who does not even do the housework as the maid is there for this, itself is a comparison loaded in symbolism itself.

Like any good psychodrama, it is entirely about being placed in the protagonist's state of reality as everything around our lead is suspect. This includes as much its characters behaviour, as likely to be reflecting Seon-hee's distortions of her reality as there is the potential danger of heavy-handedness in the material. It also does so by a lot of visual trickery to depict this. Never subtle, including segmenting the screen into fragments as if through a kaleidoscope, or what appears to be the camera shooting through the bottom of a beer glass, to depict her mental state. Heavy handed but it is effective in its crudeness; in another film it would not work at all, but here the context and general energy elevates the flourishes. Especially when simple things, like where exactly her husband is in the house, or not, raise her suspicions and paranoia, adds to these flourishes being worthy as creative choices, as they are aptly visual tricks which distort her vision as for us.

Also of interest is to see a Korean horror film from before the late nineties, in general a rare sight for a Western viewing to see a Korean production from their studio system era. Many will be aware of the South Korean New Wave that came in the 2000s, films like Oldboy (2003) and The Host (2006) and their directors, which has grown over the decades to even Best Picture Oscars being won, and arguably with a horror film, Whispering Corridors (1998), was one of the first to make their prescience in a variety of genres known, meaning horror whilst not as prolific as for Hong Kong and Japan is still with importance in South Korea. Sadly, growing up with this wave, the older era films were never taken into considering by the likes of Tartan Video's Tartan Extreme sub label, the rush for the new shining gems of South Korean cinema never fully leading to their older films getting proper retrospection. Were it not for the Korean Film Archive's hard labour and admirable zeal to preserve their country's cinema, including restoring Suddenly in the Dark itself, these films would still not be known outside the nation barring cineastes on website forums, as with the likes of Mondo Macabro, who brought the film to the West from this restoration in the late 2010s.

So to see Suddenly in the Dark is interesting, a production which shows the efficiency of a film crew that has worked over many films, even if this was a one-off genre hop for its director. Like Japan, they gladly made a lot of horror films, even in the case of Suddenly in the Dark if they had their eyes off to the side during South Korea's political climate, and whether censorship was relaxing by the point of this production or not. Like 1965's A Devilish Murder, or Whispering Corridors and its themed sequels, it is interesting to note how their horror cinema (whilst not suggesting all films made within the country are alike) was nonetheless filled with psychological tales where the ghosts haunt people with already troubling neurosis and ordinary human anxieties. Your appreciation of Suddenly in the Dark is as much for a fresh take on the material. That it does have a distinct artistic style is fascinating, as is how Korean shamanism plays a part, even if is not elaborated greatly upon, an aspect of South Korean culture not depicted at least for the West outside of films like this or The Wailing (2016) having a meaning here in the subtexts and blatant texts here. It also depends on whether you find the central anxieties of the protagonist too over-the-top or not, whether it comes off as crass or if you can appreciate its melodramatic streak as I did. Melodrama feels appropriate as, whilst not a perfect, Suddenly in the Dark does intrigue for tackling the themes it does this way as a psychodrama, one whose finale at least does live up to the horror genre by becoming gothic, even more over-the-top, and leading to an entire house being wrecked, thus being a film which will win people over for its great virtues, and a great horror film just that finale and its finale punch of a last shot.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychodrama/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None