[Weekender] On-screen scares for summer

As the sweltering Korean summer sets in, theaters are gearing up to open a series of horror movies for audiences wishing to cool off with goosebumps and chills.

Coming soon to the screens are a diverse horror films, from spectral and psychological to survival thrillers. 

American supernatural horror flick “Sinister 2,” set to open in local theaters on July 7, features ghostly children and demonic sacrifices taking place inside an isolated farmhouse. Directed by Ciaran Foy, it is the sequel to the 2012 film “Sinister,” starring Ethan Hawke and which received mild critical praise for its “surprising number of fresh, diabolical twists.”

“Sinister 2” revolves around a 9-year-old boy, Dylan Collins, played by Robert Daniel Sloan, who begins sleepwalking and having nightmares about a family being hung up and burned alive in a cornfield, the faces of its members masked with sacks. He is haunted nightly by specter-like children who force him to watch home movies of families being murdered in various unthinkable fashions – such as being devoured by alligators while hanging upside-down above a river, electrocuted in water in the kitchen, buried alive in snow on Christmas Day and so on. An evil spirit is manipulating the children, it is revealed, into murdering their loved ones. 

Also opening on July 7 is a Japanese horror-mystery flick, “The Inerasable,” directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura. Its protagonist, played by the actress Yuko Takeuchi, is a writer who writes for a horror magazine by compiling stories readers send in. One day, a university student submits an eerie letter claiming she he hears strange sounds in her new apartment. As the mystery unravels, horrific events are revealed to have taken place there.

Coming up on July 13th is American survival-horror-thriller “The Shallows,” directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and featuring Blake Lively as a surfer who gets stranded only a short distance away from shore on a submerged rock formation. Due to a ferocious great white shark which circles the waters around her, Nancy, played by Lively, is unable to return to land. She must use her resourcefulness and determination to survive as the ever-bloodthirsty shark proceeds to kill all humans in its path.

Korean classics

The two-part “Whispering Corridors” series, released in 1998, embodies one of the most representative themes of Korean horror stories –- the jealousy and bloody rivalry among students at an all-girls’ high school.

The 2004 film “R-Point,” written and directed by Kong Su-chang, is another horror flick that received approving nods from fans of the macabre. The film, starring actors Kam Woo-sung and Son Byong-ho, take place after a Korean base in Vietnam during the war receives news of a missing platoon. A squad of soldiers head off to find the missing soldiers. In the course of their journey they come across a haunted Vietnamese mansion, and soldiers start dying in horrific ways.


By Rumy Doo (doo@heraldcorp.com)