Korean horror cinema is a beautiful sickness. It contains that slow, creeping dread that nestles in your bones, a shadow that won’t leave even after you turn on the lights. It doesn’t just haunt; it stains, sinking under the skin, warping everything familiar into something chillingly wrong.
The Wailing and I Saw the Devil represent Korean horror at its finest, showcasing a unique level of depth and psychological intensity. These films capture Korean horror’s unique ability to blend visceral dread with existential weight, creating nightmares that haunt not only the mind but the soul, lingering well beyond the final frame.
In I Saw the Devil, we follow the harrowing descent of Soo–hyun (Lee Byung–hun), a special forces agent whose fiancée is brutally murdered by sadistic serial killer Kyung–chul (Choi Min–sik). But Soo–hyun doesn’t seek justice through conventional means. Instead, he orchestrates a twisted game of cat and mouse, capturing and torturing the killer repeatedly. (Imagine if Tom and Jerry were rated NC–17 and had a penchant for cannibalism and DIY guillotines.) The gore isn’t just there for shock value, but serves as a relentless reminder that in this game, nobody walks away clean.
Then there’s The Wailing, a Shakespearan fever dream of shamanistic dread and spiritual unraveling hailed by Ari Aster himself. In the sleepy village of Gokseong in rural Korea, strange deaths start piling up, and Jong–goo (Kwak Do–won), a bumbling everyman cop, finds himself out of his depth. Jong–goo’s desperation grows as the plague of violence creeps closer to home, threatening his daughter, Hyo–jin. His faith—never particularly strong to begin with—crumbles, leaving him floundering between shamanic rituals, Christian warnings, and pure panic. He becomes a man willing to believe anything and everything, which is exactly what evil feeds on. And by the end, the scariest realization isn’t that evil won—it’s that it never had to fight at all.
In both I Saw the Devil and The Wailing, evil doesn’t wear a name tag. It isn’t an easy enemy with a single face—it’s a spreading, festering wound that infects everyone it touches. In these films, theodicy—justifying the existence of evil in a world created by a supposedly good and omnipotent God—feels like a cruel, cosmic joke. If God is good, if God is powerful, then why do horrors like these exist? Leibniz may have argued that ours is “the best of all possible worlds,” but these films feel like a sick twist on that idea: If this is the best, what kind of horrors lurk in the rest?
The verse "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord" looms over I Saw the Devil as a silent condemnation of Soo–hyun’s relentless pursuit of retribution. In the Christian context, this line serves as a reminder that revenge belongs to God alone. Soo–hyun’s decision to take justice into his own hands is not only a rejection of this doctrine but an assertion that his personal pain outweighs divine judgment. This rebellion against the divine order sets him on a path where he becomes a kind of anti–Christ figure, one who takes vengeance not as a holy mission but as an obsessive, destructive force.
The Wailing is a chilling immersion into a world where the sacred and the profane collide, leaving a rural community vulnerable to forces it cannot comprehend. Unlike Western horror, where faith often acts as a protective barrier—like in The Exorcist, where the power of God ultimately vanquishes the demon—Na Hong–jin’s film suggests that faith itself can be fragile, porous, and susceptible to manipulation by dark forces. In Gokseong, traditional shamanic practices coexist uneasily with Christianity, creating a cultural tension that reflects a Korea grappling with its own identity, a blend of old–world rituals and new–world faith. The Wailing portrays the community’s spiritual crisis as both a personal and cultural unraveling, a descent that blurs the line between religion, superstition, and hysteria.
Jong–goo, in his desperation, places his faith in his role as a father and policeman—a protector—only to find that these identities hold no power against true evil. His last moments, desperately trying to assure his daughter that all will be well, encapsulate the ultimate tragedy: humanity’s reliance on flawed structures, on faith that is as breakable as the people who hold it. The Wailing’s finale drives a nail through faith’s coffin, where Christian symbolism serves as a harsh reminder that even the purest beliefs can be manipulated, twisted, and rendered powerless in the face of evil. It’s a spiritual horror that questions whether our beliefs are protections or illusions, leaving the audience to grapple with the terrifying idea that perhaps evil is not an outsider we can battle, but a sickness already within us.
In I Saw the Devil, forgiveness isn’t just absent; it’s the ghost haunting every act of vengeance, a whisper of something Soo–hyun has no intention of giving. Hannah Arendt describes forgiveness as a paradox—a clean slate that erases the past as soon as it’s granted. But in this film, Soo–hyun chooses not to erase but to inscribe, each act of vengeance a fresh carving into his own humanity. Vengeance binds him to Kyung–chul, locking them in a loop of violence that is perversely intimate. Forgiveness would be a severing—a liberation from that bond. But it’s precisely this freedom that Soo–hyun cannot accept because forgiveness would mean living with grief alone, unavenged and unfulfilled. Instead, he wears his vengeance like armor, never realizing it’s eating him alive from the inside.
Kierkegaard once described forgiveness as “granted yet not fully realized”—an act that, even when given, may never feel complete. Soo–hyun’s inability to even attempt forgiveness leaves him with a void he desperately tries to fill with cruelty, but it’s like trying to quench his thirst with salt water. Each blow, each cruel twist, is an attempt to reach some mythical sense of justice that forgiveness might have given him in an instant. Kierkegaard’s concept hangs over the film like an accusation. The peace he seeks is unattainable precisely because he’s chosen vengeance over grace. And instead of the redemption he craves, he finds only an endless corridor of despair, each act of revenge leading him further from the closure he can never reach.
In The Wailing, faith is not a fortress—it’s a fragile bridge, suspended over an abyss, wavering under the weight of doubt. For Kierkegaard, the leap of faith is an existential commitment, a surrender to something beyond reason. But Jong–goo, the film’s protagonist, is caught in limbo, unable to take that leap. Every ritual and every prayer is marked by his hesitation, a wavering that leaves him vulnerable to the very evil he fears. His crisis isn’t just one of faith but of self, and his failure to commit to one belief or another opens him up to manipulation and dread, sealing his fate long before the film’s end. Had he taken that leap, his journey might have been different, but The Wailing is a tragedy because he can’t—not fully, not in time.
Jong–goo’s wavering reveals the dark side of faith. In a world this cruel, belief itself can feel like a cruel joke, a taunt from a God who refuses to intervene. Kierkegaard’s leap requires absolute surrender, but Jong–goo cannot release his grip on doubt long enough to find solid ground. He’s left spiraling, a man unmoored in a sea of shadows, and it’s precisely this refusal to leap—to trust in something beyond his senses—that allows evil to consume him. In The Wailing, faith isn’t the answer; it’s the test and one that Jong–goo fails with devastating finality.
In I Saw the Devil, Soo–hyun’s revenge is an absurdity—a twisted ritual that repeats without meaning, each act of violence deepening his despair rather than offering relief. For Sartre and Camus, absurdity is the recognition that life has no inherent purpose, a cycle that spirals on whether we act or not. Soo–hyun’s vengeance becomes a hellish Sisyphean task, where each act of retribution binds him closer to his enemy and further from his own peace. He keeps rolling the boulder up the hill, yet every brutal strike leaves him emptier, more detached from his humanity.
In The Wailing, existential dread seeps through every frame. Jong–goo’s helplessness in the face of an incomprehensible evil mirrors Camus’ notion of the absurd hero, struggling against forces that offer neither answers nor solace. But unlike Camus’ hero, who finds peace in rebellion, Jong–goo’s dread only swallows him whole. He is trapped in an endless search for meaning where none exists, left to flounder in a nightmare with no rationale and no salvation. In The Wailing, the horror isn’t that evil exists; it exists without reason, without explanation, leaving humanity adrift in a world that refuses to make sense.
Both films confront us with a terrifying question: If evil is truly meaningless, then what hope do we have in fighting it? I Saw the Devil and The Wailing suggest that perhaps the only thing scarier than confronting evil is realizing it has no meaning at all—that, like Sartre’s vision of hell, we are left to grapple with monsters of our own making, endlessly and alone.
The Wailing explores the problem of evil in chilling, existential terms. The village is isolated, not just physically, but spiritually. Faith becomes brittle and evil slips in like a mist, filling the empty spaces left by doubt. This is Augustine’s view of evil as a privation of good, an emptiness rather than an active force. Evil here isn’t a fire, but an absence, a coldness that devours everything warm, sane, and sacred, like a parasite in the flesh of faith.
If The Wailing is a film about the silence of God, I Saw the Devil is a film about the failure of humanity. Soo–hyun’s descent isn’t due to some external demon; it’s his own darkness, his own choice to ignore the warning that vengeance belongs to God. He’s trying to play judge, jury, and executioner, but in doing so, he becomes nothing but a hollow echo of the very monster he hunts. Both films ultimately suggest a terrifying theological possibility, in which evil isn’t a test from God or a temporary darkness. Maybe it’s just a fact of existence—a crack in the foundation of creation that no amount of faith or justice can repair.
In the end, I Saw the Devil and The Wailing are both meditations on the idea that evil doesn’t need a reason or a purpose. Sometimes, it simply just is, seeping through the cracks of faith, sanity, and justice like poison in the bloodstream. They don’t just question the existence of evil but question the value of trying to understand it at all. Herein lies the terrible beauty of Korean horror: It doesn’t end with the credits. It ends only when you’ve seen your own reflection in the dark.
