Disclaimer: This post discusses the relationship between real-world socio-economic crises and three specific South Korean horror films. Important spoilers are included.
There is something wrong in the world.
Do you feel it?
As of this writing the novel coronavirus Covid-19 has officially killed over 700,000 people worldwide – a number that increases every day, and does not count the substantial number of uncounted and indirect casualties.
The continued murder of Black people by U.S. police has prompted worldwide outrage and protests, part of a newly invigorated civil rights movement. China packs Uighur Muslims into concentration camps and the US holds immigrant children in cages. A 5-year conflict in Yemen has displaced millions who now face starvation in the midst of a global pandemic. The rainforests continue to burn. Climate change threatens the health of our oceans and life as we know it on this planet. The temperatures rise, and so does authoritarianism across the globe. Some scientists warn that Earth’s sixth mass extinction is already underway. As far as introductions go, this one is rough. But please bear with me.
What does any of this have to do with horror? (And why, might you ask, do we need horror when we have the news?)
I’ve made the point before, and make it again now: the arts always matter, even in times of crisis. Of course a painting cannot feed a child, and art alone cannot solve the humanitarian and climate crises that we are facing now. But when we have the time and resources to write and film and sculpt, we take stock of ourselves. Art can inform and galvanize and give voice to the voiceless. We can tell our histories and caution our children about the places we’ve been. Art, a form of human history, warns us not to repeat our mistakes. It holds our memories, more precious than any metal.
Horror specifically forces an emotional and intellectual reckoning with our shared and personal trauma, and we need that even more in times of catastrophe. Across the globe, our past is coming back to haunt us just as the future comes crashing against the bows of our imperfect vessels. This is not normal, and this will not go away.
For the sort and scale of dilemmas we are experiencing now there can be no single boogeyman. What we are going through is the result of a complex and globalized interaction of many political, economic, cultural and scientific forces all coming together in a perfect storm.
But there are at least two South Korean directors who are showing us, at least in part, what has gone so terribly wrong. Their films are not dissecting the past or predicting the future; they are merely showing us what we have wrought. The sight of it should scare us.
These movies are not acting as the canary in the coal mine, warning of calamity. They’re telling us that the canary is dead and has been for a long time. They’re telling us that the air we’re breathing is poison, and that the mine is collapsing. It’s already too late for some, and it might even be too late for the rest of us. I’m not trying to be alarmist—these are appropriate terms for the challenges we face.
The first of these films has written its own introduction.
Bong Joon-ho’s dark comedic satire Parasite became in 2019 the first South Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and it eventually grossed over 22 times its roughly $11 million budget to become the highest grossing South Korean film of all time. The critical acclaim was nearly unanimous in hailing it as a thrilling classist masterpiece, and it went on to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards. This was the first time in history a non-English language film had won Best Picture.
It has been hailed as a major turning point for Hollywood and international cinema alike: commercial and critical proof that audiences can, in fact, read subtitles and appreciate more than what Hollywood has to offer. Parasite, perhaps moreso than any other film in history, has made “foreign” films mainstream. Many do not consider it horror exactly, but it has enough of the characteristics for me to include it under that broad umbrella.
If Bong Joon-ho blew the doors off Korean cinema internationally, then Yeon Sang-ho led much of the world to its doorsteps in 2016. His zombie horror film Train to Busan made nearly $100 million worldwide, and it is in the Top 10 highest grossing South Korean films since the Korean Film Council began publishing such data in 2004. It didn’t achieve the same level of crossover success that Parasite did four years later, but it received widespread critical acclaim for its deeply human story at the center of a visceral and blisteringly paced zombie thriller. Regardless of its larger cultural context, it is one of the best zombie films of all time.
That same year, Yeon Sang-ho released Seoul Station—an animated prequel to Train to Busan that told an even grimmer zombie tale that lives in the same universe and expands on some of the themes of its live action companion. Together, they present a unified message to the world that sugarcoats nothing and spares no one.
It is when you look for the villains in these films that something peculiar happens—namely, they are hard to find. In Train to Busan and Seoul Station you could point to the zombies. Are they not the monsters against which all is set? But zombies are rarely (and perhaps never) the actual villains of the story—and if they were, it would probably be a terribly boring story indeed. They are a force of nature, revealing by their presence our own strengths and weaknesses.
In that sense, the most apparent villain of the film is the appalling businessman Yon-Suk, played by Eui-Sung Kim. But even he is not a traditional villain, and his cold self-preservation seems to be molded by larger forces. He makes for a ruthless but incomplete boogeyman. The same is true in Seoul Station—in the human element we find villainous men but no one to pin the blame on.
Even more perplexing is the identification of any one antagonist in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. This in fact is one of the cleverest traits of the genre-bending thriller: the longer we watch, the less sure we are of who is “good” or “bad,” until we start to suspect that such shortchange labels are useless in the moral complexity that persists through its tragic and bloody conclusion. Who or what precipitated such tragic comedy, and what can we do about it? How can we fight what we can’t see?
It is when we understand the whole of the stories being told that we see that the villain in these films is not the zombies, or even the rich. It is capitalism.
More specifically, it is a particular brand of neoliberal capitalism that was sold to us decades ago as a false bill of goods. This is the insidiousness of the world in which these films are couched, one which very much reflects our own. The tragedy that transpires is put into motion by a system which is altogether more comprehensive and unseen than any one human or monster. Without it, nothing makes sense.
To understand the context and motive of these films we must understand our own world. Capitalism means many things to many people, and it is not as simple as pitting one economic system against the other.
How did we get here, and what does neoliberalism really mean?
Capitalism itself can be traced back to the early Renaissance, but for the sake of simplicity our story begins around the time of the Second World War. At that time, capitalism as an economic system wasn’t all that popular (even in a country like the USA, which we tend to think of as a capitalist stronghold). The Great Depression has a way of disillusioning folks.
In the fallout from WW2, a group of developed countries (particularly in North America and Western Europe) moved towards a “mixed economic system” that aimed to combine the strongest traits of capitalism and socialism—providing together what they hadn’t been able to do separately.
This system implemented basic tenets of capitalism that we are still familiar with today—the private ownership of the means of production, competitive markets, and basic property rights. I am a layperson, and obviously I am summarizing.
But this next bit is important: to protect against economic collapse and mass unemployment, these capitalist systems were offset and guided by fairly strict regulations. On top of that, the working class was further supported by new welfare programs—in the US this included FDR’s New Deal, enacted after the Great Depression.
These Keynesian economics continued through a post-war boom and weren’t strongly challenged until the 1973 oil crisis and ensuing recession, which provided a crucial opportunity for the rapacious upper class. They took their chance to reframe government regulation as an attack on individual freedoms, an act of propaganda so deft that it still exists and frames the discussion today, regardless of its logical and philosophical fallacies.
It is important to clarify that the argument of the Mont Pelerin Society and their contemporaries is indeed philosophical, or at least claims to be: at the heart of neoliberal thought lies the idea that self-interest is what drives human ingenuity and expansion, and that it is competition which drives forward human endeavors. Not only does this excuse self-centeredness, it validates and promotes it. “Greed,” as Gordon Gekko says, “is good.”
This mode of quasi-philosophical economic thought found its political champions as we entered the 1980s, with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the UK and US, respectively. Almost immediately they began aggressively lowering corporate taxes, and this is when the concept of “trickle-down economics” became normalized—essentially, that investments by the rich would create a healthy economy that benefited all. A rising tide lifts all boats, at least in theory. The rich would get richer, but the rest of us could ride their sequined coattails into the bright unfettered future.
The corporate cash grab was aided by a rollback of the protections enacted after the war, namely the deregulation of the financial and other sectors, in conjunction with a concerted attack on labor unions and workers’ rights. It was during this time that multiple political leaders worked to severely limit the power of the working class to find justice, stability or agency in their political and economic systems. This balance of power has still not tipped back in the other direction.
This “neoliberal revolution” was not a program of any one group or political party, nor was it geographically confined. If neoliberalism was the elixir, then modern globalization was the current that carried it to the far corners of the earth. And if it hadn’t made it into your port, the central banks often made sure that it did—whether or not you wanted it to. The role of banks like the IMF and World Bank in the spread of neoliberalism is the subject of entire books.
Globalization itself is not inherently bad, and it allows for a previously unheard-of exchange of ideas, trade and culture. To pivot metaphorically, globalization serves as the trellis on which neoliberalism grows—and the conventional thinking has been that any attempt to tend to this garden is not just unnecessary but immoral. Laissez-faire claims that such a perfect ecosystem wants for no gardener.
Decades of real life examples tell us otherwise. The staggering gap between rich and poor shows that an untended garden chokes out the life of those that can’t reach the sun.
Regardless, neoliberalism was promoted and spread as something more than just an economic and political imperative—it became a moral precept, an ideal which promised a free market utopia, unhindered by big government and protectionist restrictions. As economic theorist David Harvey states, it became “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs.”
So what happened between then and now? And how does it connect with the dystopian scenes depicted in these examples of South Korean horror?
After all, South Korea famously and rapidly transformed itself from a poor, largely agricultural post-war economy in 1960 into one of the largest and most tech-savvy economies on the planet mere decades later. Even today, they boast one of the lowest unemployment rates in developed countries and hover just outside the top 10 nominal GDP rankings worldwide. Isn’t the country a capitalist success story? Where is the real-world tragedy?
The problem is that such large-scale observations do not reflect the reality of life for most people. Indices do not live in our homes or tell our stories. They are not us, and they do not know us. Not only does the GDP, stock market and Gini index fail to tell the story of real people, but we are measuring success entirely wrong. As Edward Abbey said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the idealogy of the cancer cell.”
The truth is, the wealth gap in South Korea is widening, and a vast number of people live below the poverty line. Many South Koreans, particularly the young, are increasingly scared for the future. They discern a troubling divide between rich and poor. There is an increasing disillusionment with the current state of capitalism and its ability to account for shifting demographics, predatory financial systems and the well-being of the old and infirm.
Rising home prices and a sluggish economy have given the self-proclaimed “dirt spoons” in Korea the idea that they can never be “gold spoons,” paralleling a similar disillusionment with youth in the USA and their conception of the fabled American Dream. In both cases, upward mobility is understood as a mirage. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer Survey, nearly half of South Koreans are losing faith in capitalism’s ability to provide a better future (and Korea is among the most optimistic of polled countries). Let that process.
With this in mind, we begin to understand more fully the grim and even apocalyptic tone of these films. We can see on the characters the dress code of capitalism, and the way these signifiers change the way they treat each other and by extension the way we treat ourselves. We sense more clearly the presence of an invisible chasm between the dirt spoons and the gold spoons, the poor and the rich.
In Parasite, the urbane Mr. Kim (Lee Sun-kyun) treats his staff with civility while repeatedly acknowledging class hierarchy. In his own quiet way he admits to detesting those who do not respect the rules of the game:
“I can’t stand people who cross the line.”
He refers to this line repeatedly, and even in his closer working relationships there is an invisible tension: do your job, but do not disturb the status quo. While Mr. Park cannot see this line, he can occasionally smell those on the other side. When the Kim family has to hide under a table upon the unexpected return of the upper class family, Mr. Park senses something vaguely wrong.
“Where’s that smell coming from? Mr. Kim’s smell. That smell crosses the line.” He adds, “you can sometimes smell it on the subway.”
From beneath the table, Mr. Kim takes a sniff of his “semi-basement” shirt and internalizes the slight, though we don’t know that for sure until later. Eventually, Mr. Park’s inability to disguise his disgust for the working class leads to his violent demise—a grisly illustration that wealth disparity, while excessively hurting the poor, can also be bad for the rich.
This olfactory signifier is found too in the opening moments of Seoul Station, when an old man wanders, visibly wounded, through the crowded plaza of a sparkling office building. A couple of college students approach him with concern.
“That stench!” says one, wheeling around. “He’s a homeless. I was gonna help if he was hurt.”
There might be no better way to succinctly illustrate the stultifying effects of a system that diminishes the homeless—and to a lesser extent the poor—to something less than human, undeserving of attention or basic kindness. These invisible poor are castaways from a neoliberal idealogy that reduces them to mere points on a graph. It dismantles their methods for liberation and then blames them for not liberating themselves—and it excuses the more privileged among us from giving a shit.
In both Seoul Station and Train to Busan, the homeless are the first to be victimized by the literal and symbolic zombie outbreak, and the first also to be blamed for it. It soberly reflects capitalism’s cycle of disproportionately disenfranchising the most marginalized while simultaneously using them as scapegoats for society’s problems. Even the term homeless foists upon every unhoused person the expectations and often inaccurate judgements of a society that has made little attempt to understand their story or circumstances.
While fleeing the hordes of fast-moving zombies in Train to Busan, the pregnant Seong-kyeong (Yu-mi Jung) holds a door open for escaping humans. In a moment of split-second decision making, she hesitates as a street-dwelling man tries to get through. Not only does his appearance and evident social status trigger a set of callous conditioned responses, but they make him look more like one of the approaching horde. It’s hard to decide which hesitation-causing factor is more heartbreaking.
Seong-kyeong does let him through, but those few seconds tell us a lot about what unchecked capitalism does to our humanity. Later in the film, that same man—whose name we never learn—sacrifices himself to save Seong-kyeong and the young Su-an. It is a moment of unselfish heroism that spits in the face of neoliberal ethics. Compassion is not a weakness—it is an act of courage. Kindness begets kindness, and if anything can save us it might be that.
Parasite acknowledges this low status by likening the basement-dwellers to stink bugs or cockroaches:
“Leave it open,” Mr. Kim says as pesticides fill their partially submerged apartment. “We’ll get free extermination.”
It’s not as if the film is trying to hide its metaphorical layers. When Ki-woo’s friend gifts the Kims a scholar’s rock as a symbol of material wealth, Ki-woo proclaims: “This is so metaphorical!” It’s almost as if the director Bong is saying: LOUDER, FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK. Later in the film, Ki-woo is unable to shake the presence of the symbolic Suseok. After their apartment floods during a torrential downpour, the rock inexplicably floats up to the surface to greet him.
“It keeps clinging to me,” he explains to his father in a gymnasium full of other displaced families.
This persistent metaphor is not something that anyone chooses in a system which values wealth and status above everything else. The Suseok is thrust upon the Kims as a gift of enlightenment and good luck but all it does is drag Ki-woo down, and eventually it nearly kills him. The point does not need to be subtle.
The hard and necessary message of these films is communicated in a uniquely Korean context, but the application is broad. If US audiences think they’re off the hook, for example, think again. By nearly every metric, the USA is faring worse in the midst of late stage capitalism.
We can see it in the dwindling middle class, the grotesque enrichment of greedy oligarchs, the monopolization of industry, the assault on environmental protections, the outsourcing of manufacturing, the cynical commodification of culture, the moral evil of mass incarceration, and the frustrated populism that elected Donald Trump. We see how it accelerates climate change and pollution and how these things in turn disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
While the widening wealth gap is a national and global problem, the US faces a gap within a gap. The average White family possesses roughly ten times the wealth of a comparable Black family, and a White college graduate in America will make about three times as much money as a Black person with a similar degree. Multigenerational White inheritance and involuntary Black land loss are two sides of an ugly coin. These phenomena are the result of decades of systemic oppression and discrimination—it is a complex and long-term problem, and I am only summarizing it in the broadest of terms.
In the New York Times podcast 1619, host Nikole Hannah-Jones explains how the brutality inherent in a slavery-based capitalism turned the US into an upstart world power but also created a “tolerance for inequality” that is still very much a part of our legacy and makeup. In other words, slavery damages not just slaves and their descendants, but all of us.
We have normalized a system that is unsympathetic to the hardships of the working class. In 1837, the cotton plantations were too big to fail. In 2009, it was the banks that got bailed out. When we say “freedom” in America, what we really mean is freedom for the super rich. I diametrically disagree with the rhetoric and methods of those that elected Donald Trump, but I understand their frustration. Their country has left them behind, and they don’t know where to put their anger. We have built a life boat for those that can afford it and an ocean for the rest of us.
The US has its own horror films responding to this multifaceted crisis. Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us are both informed by our unresolved history of racial injustice. Dawn of the Dead critiques the cannibalistic effects of commercial culture. Other films, similar to Parasite, find comedy amidst the tragedy: Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell punishes the punitive actions of a loan officer, and 2019’s Ready or Not turns class warfare into a satirical blood sport. The rungs of the ladder have been knocked out by those at the top, and those at the bottom pitted against each other. Even our entertainment reflects it.
So what are we to do?
These films by Bong and Yeon are not, clearly, the first films to rebuke the neoliberal doctrine, nor do they give us a road map to escape it. No one in Parasite beats the system or transcends its structure of neo-feudalistic commercialism. After the bloody events of its climax, Ki-woo’s plan is simply to become rich enough to buy the house where his father stays in hiding. So the cycle continues: Ki-woo’s coup would still play by the capitalist rules that precipitated the tragicomedy in the first place.
Seoul Station is even less hopeful. Of all the zombie and horror films I’ve seen, I can think of few more bleak than Yeon’s funeral song for the victims of our self-devouring system. After running desperately from a horde of unthinking zombies, a street-dwelling man—who is a main character, despite never giving a name—comes up against a military blockade that is cutting their losses and leaving desperate citizens to die.
“It’s all over. It’s all going to shit!” he wails, and knowing everything that led to that point, it is clear that his statement is all-encompassing. Soon after this, he is gunned down by his own government.
Train to Busan also does not give us answers, but it does have at least a glimmer of hope—a suggestion of where to look if we are to reform a broken system. The cynical fund manager Seok-woo has spent what little time he has with his daughter teaching her the inherently selfish tactics of survival in a capitalist culture. They are so deeply ingrained that he does it unthinkingly and with the best intentions. To “look out for yourself” is the best lesson he can think of teaching his daughter in a scary world. The end result of this thinking is epitomized in the pessimistic COO Yon-suk, who serves as a stand-in villain for capitalism, more overtly evil than any brain-dead zombie.
However, in the defining moments of climactic struggle, Seok-woo breaks his own advice. For the first time in the film, he sheds his self-preserving worldview and sacrifices himself to save his daughter and the pregnant Seong-kyeong. Every aspect of the mise-en-scène comes together to emphasize the emotional and symbolic importance of the moment, and it forms a beautiful and tragic denouncement of the very heart of neoliberal thought.
If we are to dismantle and reform a system that throws us towards catastrophe and destitution, we might so start with ourselves. The road back to an equitable world starts with listening and sharing and understanding each other and our struggles, both unique and shared. This responsibility is especially important for those of us who have long enjoyed the benefits of a skewed and damaging hierarchy.
Understand, for instance, the kind and simple fact that those without homes of their own are not of any less worth, and that the value of life is not dictated by any market or currency in the world. Homeless is a static and monolithic term that replaces empathy with connotation. When passing by someone who has fallen on hard times, do not ask yourself, “Why don’t they get a job?” Ask instead: “How did they end up here? Did we as a society fail them, and if so how?” Show them a small kindness.
Rethink, if you haven’t already, how you value yourself and your time. Understand that you have most likely lived your entire life in a system that measures success a certain way—and it’s not the way it has to be. Remember that every time you buy something with money earned you are paying for it with your time—the only currency that matters. Imagine a world that is not driven by a moral imperative for growth and endless consumerism. If we let them, our economies of growth will devour the whole world.
You are more than just a hungry and self-serving instrument of capitalism, and better. The tragedies depicted by Bong and Yeon cannot tell us how to solve the problems they dramatize, but they hint that the way forward is not through individualistic greed and its cunning justifications but by cooperation and basic empathy for others, even and especially those outside our familial or cultural bubble. The cannibalistic effects of either zombies or capitalism amount to basically the same thing, and if there is any chance of surviving it will happen because of our capacity for compassion and organized action.
This is not a kumbaya moment. We cannot solve our problems with self-care and wishful thinking. The meanest and cleverest thing that long-form neoliberalism does is quietly strip away the power of working people to change the course set by those in power. Noam Chomsky says that the “crucial principle” of neoliberalism is “undermining mechanisms of social solidarity and mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy.”
Neoliberalism destroys democracy and replaces it with a system that does not need, want or allow the full participation of the people. That is why kindness is not enough. Enlightenment begins in the individual but change happens when we take to the streets. It happens when we work together to form social movements and use our numbers to demand change.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” I am not excusing violence, but I am saying that those who would denounce constitutional protests have thrown their lot in with the despots. Those who decry property damage before the deaths of their fellow compatriots have succumbed to the machinery of oppression, and themselves become part of it.
These films show us how genre—both utilizing it and transcending it—can help us understand such dilemmas better and more truly. A horror movie can move us closer to a calamitous truth that literally threatens the survival of our species and the dignity of all life on this planet. If those terms seem mythical in scope it is because they are and they must be; the fight against human greed and neoliberal capitalism is a battle for civil rights, human rights, and the continuation of animal ecosystems across the globe. Is it too late for us? Time will tell. In the meantime it is worth trying regardless of the outlook. It is the courageous and right thing to do. If the system turns us into parasites, we must dismantle the system.