Horror Beyond the Margins: What Kdramas Keep in Rural Spaces
More than half of South Koreans live in the Seoul metropolitan area; more than 80 percent live in cities. What's left is ripe for the unknown.
Some kind of weather was snarling up Atlanta, and thus the entire eastern U.S., that Wednesday. I landed in Washington, D.C., just as my connecting flight — the last of the evening — was taking off. I knew my airline had to supply me with a hotel, a meal voucher and a taxi to and from my lodgings. I should have figured they would take the budget option for each. Only authorized airport taxis can take those vouchers as payment; only two hotels were on offer, one of them all the way at Dulles.
Abdul and his white SUV whisked me over the Potomac. The monuments along the National Mall fell behind us: Washington, Jefferson, Smithsonian Castle. The hotel was only four miles away, east of Alexandria in a little pocket of Maryland. Paint and vinyl flaked off the discount Brutalist siding. The ceilings stooped low beneath wan fluorescent lights. The furnishings had come in bulk, probably four decades ago, all in unfashionable browns. Phyllis behind the front desk called me baby and advised me to go out the side door for the Chipotle. I slipped past two people embracing on the step. “Sorry, sis,” the man drawled, not too sorry. The woman smirked at his shoulder. I told them to have a good night.
The sun was setting now after bouts of rain. Across the asphalt street, tall metal poles staked out a netted driving range which broke up the sky’s orange and pink. Instead of burritos, I stumbled into the Peruvian roast chicken joint, where a man hit on me earnestly but relentlessly as I waited. He gave me two business cards: Will Smith, of a mobile phone retailer. “Maybe we can text,” he purred, when I wouldn’t give him my name and lied that I was married. This makes him sound slick, and he was trying, but he was a little pathetic, like someone had told him to just be brave and practice.
The chicken, pupusas and garlic-heavy sides were divine. Phyllis got me plasticware from the back office, since I’d forgotten to grab some in my effort to give Will Smith the slip. Outside, past the parking lot, it was all scrub — fast-growing spindly trees, weeds, humidity, dark chickenscratch shapes. Abdul picked me up at 6:25 the next morning, chipper as he’d been the night before. He narrated the skyrocketing cost of real estate, now that Amazon was building up. “Look at that townhouse,” he’d say, as we passed an old brick structure. “One point eight million. One door.”
My hometown is the seat of the poorest county in Ohio. We were eighty miles from anywhere growing up; it took so long to get out before the bypass got built. When I came to Chicago to attend an elite college, I met so many who’d never seen poverty, who’d never been anywhere but the top of the metropole. Outsiders ate up the backroads monster-fighting of Supernatural, the bootstrapping fables of Hillbilly Elegy, but these gothic romances often had little taste for what’s actually complex in rural America. I can’t claim insider knowledge of that life, but I had friends and classmates who could, and I passed through lots of the same spaces. I know enough to spot a rustic folly.
About 1 in 5 Americans live in “areas outside of those classified as urban,” although in fine originalist fettle, our discourse gives the American countryside outsized heft. Proportionally, that’s only a little more than rural residents of South Korea, who have not comprised greater than one-fourth of the population since 1991. More than half of all South Koreans live in the Seoul metropolitan area alone.
Kdramas tend to depict an ultramodern, tech-heavy, hyperconnected world — urban, urbane, dense and engineered. That’s one kind of national imagination. Then there’s the back country, the transitional spaces. Every group stashes a different kind of anxiety there.
A morbid dread of certain places
Our big family vacation when I was 11 took us to Ireland. The only place that I hated, absolutely could not get out of fast enough, was the Burren — bare, undulating hills of shattered, leprous rock, no horizon, just the carsick sensation of being trapped in a tilting bowl. I always felt the same driving through the strip-mined dead land around St. Clairsville, Ohio, and the salt marshes of the East Bay in Northern California, metal-hued vegetation unfurling under indifferent sky-flung wind farms.
Geographers and horror enthusiasts call that reaction topophobia, negative “affective bonds between human beings and environments.” It’s a crucial component of horror subgenres like folk horror, urbanoia, ecohorror and Lovecraftian reclamation. In these media, topophobia is not just a visceral sensation but a social one. “Small towns and rural-area residents are both isolated and extremely visible,” writes Tai Gooden for Nerdist. “There’s no crowd to dissolve and blend into like you can in a city. If the town is small enough, it’s likely that too many people know your business, for better or worse.”
Kdrama creators know their audiences are hungry to nurse and confront that feeling. One 2021 study found that horror media in South Korea was 40 percent more profitable than the global average. Titles like Kingdom, Sweet Home, All of Us Are Dead, The Silent Sea, Exhuma and The Guest litter your favorite streaming services. For someone who often tells herself that she’s not cut out for horror, I do have favorites, and they tend to draw heavily from their rural settings. Beyond Evil, for instance, begins as a serial killer procedural and ends up in the dark heart of exploitive capitalism and political ambition; it mostly takes place in the empty northwest, connected to but well outside of Seoul. Revenant follows a young city-dwelling woman possessed by a malevolent spirit, which she seems to have picked up from an old house in the countryside.
“Horror is a reaction,” the director John Carpenter said in 2015; “it’s not a genre.” Scholars and critics have long tied an era’s favorite horror flicks to the things that traumatize society most. Slasher films are responding to the Vietnam War, and the economic and political crises of the 1970s; hillbilly horror like Deliverance and Texas Chainsaw Massacre touches on class, history and environment in the United States; folk horror, exemplified by The Wicker Man and Midsommar, struggles with the corruption of modernity and the lack of redemption in “authenticity.” Origin changes how horror is generated too — even the casual viewer understands that Scandinavian frontier horror is different from the Puritan fear of the wilderness is different from the rage of gender suppression in Japan.
Every culture rests on a mycelial network of horrors holding together its present. The fruiting bodies of the past emerge in stories no matter how many times you cull them.1 The Korean peninsula holds centuries of invasion, poverty, disaster, war, collapse, famine, catastrophe after catastrophe on which modern troubles can grow. Aside from the DMZ and the scars of Japanese colonialism and the dread of living up to the beauty standard and the suffocating debates about masculinity, consider the ravages of the present economy. The Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s feeds the backstory of even the most grounded kdramas. Many shows are driven to extremes in premise simply because it’s so difficult for young people especially to find work.
Fear and dread of the countryside is a universally relatable impulse, the inverse of pastoral and historical fantasies. The city represents youth, opportunity, wealth, the future; travel outside it and you’re bogged down by superstition, isolation, dirty work — people and lifestyles the denser world is actively leaving behind. Separation is the point. Rural landscapes are carbon sinks for history. Even what looks like nature is responding to abandonment.
Most negative language about place — for instance placelessness, non-places, dislocation, uprooting, dystopia, displacement, delocalization, disembedding — has to do with processes that have suppressed or undermined positive place experiences. Some of these are primarily about loss of topophilia, but others involve topophobia because a once pleasant place has become abhorrent. —Ted Relph
Impossible to kill
On first encounter, I was tempted to find a place for Bulgasal: Immortal Souls in my American frame of reference. It kept resisting me until I paid closer attention. The show is about monsters, but it’s not folk horror, which is more concerned with rural societies whose lore makes them monstrous. It’s not mythic horror, although it deals with stories that ancient peoples tell to make sense of the world.
To a viewer with no background in horror or Korean history, Bulgasal thrills on its own merits. It’s one of the most beautifully shot dramas I’ve ever watched, as rich, artful, brutal and emotional as Guo Jingming’s My Journey to You. It’s also widely accessible — you can stream it on Netflix. In brief, it’s about a man whose hunt for monsters destroys his family and turns him into the thing he hates most. He spends centuries trying to become human again through revenge, but once his goal lands virtually in his grasp, his understanding of the truth rapidly unravels.
Bulgasal also stands out for how thoroughly it discards the urban, the networked and the privileged. The story passes through peasant refugees of dynastic instability clawing out subsistence farming deep in the mountains; through remote towns without industry limping toward extinction; through feral landscapes, fallow fields, abandoned public works and decaying hunters’ shacks. When Bulgasal brushes up against a city, it brings us only into teardown ruins, warrens of small shops run by old men, late-night bus stations and claustrophobic tenements.
The dramatis personae are just as marginal. Our human leads are a drifter laboring at a laundry plant, a newly pregnant single woman, a disgraced unmarried detective, an orphan who’s fallen through every crack, a divorced woman in her 50s working the most untouchable job in Korean society. Dan Hwal (Lee Jin-wook) begins life as a cursed and unnamed orphan, is rescued by a warlord to be raised in relative wealth and earns fame as a destroyer of monsters in the wilderness, but his lieutenants disdain him as low-born and frightful. His wife loathes him and his son longs for connection. When Dan Hwal becomes a monster himself, the Bulgasal who can only sustain himself on blood, he retreats to a cave in the mountains for centuries.
It is a choice to situate a story about profound love, fear, connection and pain among people with so little security, and to give them happiness even as they chase down danger and suffering for a chance at release. Horror is also an excellent genre with which to frame basic assumptions about this story’s worldview. Reincarnation is a fact of the universe, regardless of whether one believes in it. Karma follows a soul wherever it goes, no matter if it’s attached to the person who amassed it. Monsters retain specific and nonsensical predilections when they’re reborn as humans: Gapsangoe is a wild woman who sets fires and hates drums; Teoreokson has hairy arms and hunts from freshwater; Geuseunsae stands on one leg in the rain and kills with a noose.
Bulgasal is about samsara, “[t]he process of rebirth … driven by delusion and desire.” This show is Buddhist horror, and only enlightenment can end the cycle of suffering. On my first watch, once I made it through the relentlessly dire Dan Hwal origin story, I was surprised and delighted by his adult self’s “Goryeo hotness” — no scholarly waif he, but a rough, bearded, muscular warrior, grimy with gore and sweat.2 This Dan Hwal grows up at the cusp of the Buddhist Goryeo dynasty and the Neo-Confucian Joseon dynasty. While Koreanists debate how much Buddhism was truly expelled from the power centers of Joseon, the narrative usually goes that it survived at the margins of society, hand in hand with shamanism. To root Bulgasal in the Goryeo era and earlier is to tie it to the countryside and to the deep history of Buddhism in Korea.3
When I first wrote about Bulgasal in June, I noted that “the undying Dan Hwal grapples with the horror of persistence, of self-knowledge, of actually getting revenge, of ending a cycle of karma.” I remain fascinated by what this show proposes about time and loci and self-inflicted wounds. The great tragedy of the monsters in Bulgasal is that they cannot change — the desires they were once thrall to are even less suited to their lives as people. In every lifetime, the shaman played by Park Myung-shin pleads with Bulgasal to set aside his rage and end the curse which ruins those around him. The only way out is to break free from what drives him down the centuries, the one thing that gives him momentum amid his despair and self-loathing. How this show resolves that is part of what makes me unable to set it aside.
The future-oriented zeitgeist that marks most of modern South Korea slots in nicely with this fear of being trapped by the past. It’s also what makes audiences romanticize rural life — if only we could get off the hamster wheel of false choices and just do what we want. Almost two thousand years ago, the Indian Buddhist monk Nagarjuna actually declared that “there is no distinction whatsoever between samsara and nirvana.” Commenting, scholar Andrew Olendzki writes, “With this insight, the meanings of samsara and nirvana are turned inward to refer not to outer worlds, fallen or perfect, but to inner perspectives, deluded or awakened, on the world as it actually is.” There is horror in wherever you go, there you are, especially when it’s so far away from everything. But like all final girls, we have the tools, if not the map, to find our own way out. ✶
What do you love about East Asian horror? Let me know in the comments or on Bluesky. I love recs and growing my teetering to-watch list.
Thanks for reading Excited Mark! If you’d like to support my work, please share, toss a few bucks at my Ko-Fi or become a subscriber, free or paid. I’m also available for hire as a fact-checker, editor and journalist — visit my RealName.com for clips, services and more.
Kdrama Fortune Tellers Are Always Right
South Koreans report the second-highest rate worldwide of adults who disaffiliate with the religion they were raised in, and while nearly half identify with organized religion in some way, only 16 percent say it’s important in their lives. All that has nothing to do with saju (fortune telling) and shamanism — they’re thriving.
Side note off the taproot of my extended metaphor, but I love mushroom lore. Can I interest you in my favorite book about the subject, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake?
There is a famous Tumblr copypasta about Chris Evans in Snowpiercer that thoroughly applies to Dan Hwal — not that I don’t love a beautiful boy who showers, but unf.
Footnotes do not work on image captions, so read more on the symbolism in the Wheel of Existence at the Rubin Museum of Art.
“Rural landscapes are carbon sinks for history” — WOW yes!