Exhuma (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: whenever somebody sees or mentions foxes
Take a Drink: whenever anyone coughs up blood or vomits
Take a Drink: for each shaman ritual
Do a Shot: for each exhumation
Do a Shot: fireball!
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Exhuma is tearing up the box office in South Korea right now (and correspondingly getting a release Stateside in all kinds of markets like mine, which usually is lucky to get half the Foreign Language Film nominees each year). It’s a genuine global sensation, so film (and particularly Horror) fans everywhere should add it to their watchlist.
The film is about a couple of shamans and a couple of grave relocation experts who are hired by a rich family whose firstborn sons are tormented with screams only they can hear. Since that’s usually a sign of an ancestor pissed by the view from their gravesite, a relocation is in order, but when they find grandfather’s grave, everything is very, very wrong. They probably shouldn’t touch it, but the money is good…
A Toast
The Wailing proved that there is an extremely rich vein of potential horror to be mined from traditional Korean shamanism and folk tales, but despite a few subsequent attempts of varying degrees of quality, no film has recaptured those heights. Prolific Korean horror director Jang Jae-hyun certainly makes his aspirations clear in assembling a starry cast that includes Lee Do-hyun, Kim Go-eun, Yoo Hai-jin, and the inestimable Choi Min-sik.
Choi Min-sik im-ni-da!
Cast and crew certainly deliver- this is a movie where you want to take it in with as little foreknowledge as possible and just let it take you where you will. It establishes its horror ground rules organically, and every spade in gravedirt, shamanistic ceremony, and coffin opening crackles with tension, the mystery of where this is all going propelling the film along. It’s polished, continuously intriguing, and most importantly, pretty damn scary.
Beer Two
This isn’t The Wailing, but it’s the closest thing we’ve gotten to it since in the realm of Korean traditional horror. It really goes for it in ways that are far more fantastical, though, which requires the audience to make quite a leap along with it. It does pay off to just go ahead and make that leap.
Perhaps a bit more substantial, the commentary on Korea’s long history of Japanese subjugation is unmistakable but very muddled. There are references to WWII-era collaboration, battles from the Middle Ages, and most oddly, the separation of North and South Korea, but none of it is put in conversation with the rest in such a way that a thesis emerges. It’s a mélange of not altogether complimentary spices instead of a main ingredient.
Verdict
Exhuma is the latest blockbuster sensation in Korea, and its smart and unique approach to Korean folk horror is likely to play worldwide as well.
