The Uninvited

From the late 1990s onward, Korean horror increasingly embraced graphic gore, with revenge at the center of many of its narratives. Then came LEE Su-yeon’s The Uninvited, a wholly different kind of horror film. It is a film about seeing what others cannot see, and about confronting the traumas and terrible truths buried in the deepest recesses of memory. Descending into the abyss of the human psyche, it asks what true fear really is. Most strikingly, it transforms the home from a place of refuge into a site of terror. At its center is a dining table where the ghosts of children appear. The Uninvited goes beyond the immediate shocks of horror, using the genre to evoke an inescapable, hellish reality. It also saw Gianna JUN, then emerging as a major young star, make a radical departure from her established screen persona. Few Korean films have captured the desolation of the modern psyche at the turn of the millennium with such force. It remains a horror film ahead of its time