Publication Date
Fall 2025
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This chapter examines Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016) as an allegory of South Korea’s unresolved colonial and Cold War traumas, arguing that the film’s deliberate ambiguity, cacophony, and generic instability reflect the difficulty of recovering histories of violence that have been suppressed, erased, or inadequately mourned. While scholarship on South Korean zombie cinema has frequently interpreted the zombie through neoliberal capitalism, economic crisis, contagion, and social alienation, this chapter locates the Korean zombie within a longer history of civil war, massacres, sexual violence, and authoritarian state repression. Drawing on Heonik Kwon’s concept of Cold War “decomposition,” the zombie is both a literal and figurative manifestation of historical trauma that has never been fully incorporated into the past and therefore continues to haunt the present.
Page Range
187-206
Book Title
Zombies in Contemporary Culture: Journeys, Bodies, Pandemics and Politics
Book Publisher
University of Wales Press
Book Editor(s)
Conor Heffernan, Emma Tonkin, and Linda Flores Ohlson
Book Edition
1st
Book ISBN
9789888754205
Recommended Citation
Jung, Grace. “Decomposition and Excavation of War Memories and Massacres in Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing.” In Zombies in Contemporary Culture: Journeys, Bodies, Pandemics and Politics, edited by Conor Heffernan, Emma Tonkin, and Linda Flores Ohlson, 187–206. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2025.
Document Version
Publisher's PDF
Included in
Asian History Commons, East Asian Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons
