Before watching “Epitaph,” I thought that I would not be able to keep my eyes open for more than half the movie. However, I am a little disappointed that it was not as scary was I was expecting it to be. I think that many Korean horror movies center around ghosts and supernatural things, much like this movie. One element that stood out to me was the use of music. Every time a scary scene was coming up, eerie music played beforehand. This would tell me to get ready for a something coming up. However, I thought that the music itself was scarier than the “horror” scenes. There were also long takes before the scary scenes to build anticipation.
Throughout the movie, the time kept changing. The movie started with a movie clip from the past of a brain surgery and went to 1979. Then, the movie went back to the past at the hospital. The changing of time and setting were used to tell the story, but this was confusing to me and was hard to follow at times. The characters were all connected in some way, but constant time changes made it hard to keep up with what was happening at times.
Epitaph pays much attention to the effect of close shots and unpleasant sound effects to build up suspense and stimulate nervousness in the viewers. The movie takes place in various facilities of the Ansaeng hospital: the morgue, the hallway, and the patient room. All of the places are either dim with flickering lights or completely dark. Technical skills with the camera slowly zooms into the darkness, staying fixed onto the dark for at least three seconds to hint for an upcoming shock. When paired up with screechy cacophonous background sound effect, the horror of the film is successfully created. For example, the sudden non-diegetic screech heightens the suspense, immediately making the scene tense with supernatural aura.
Just by looking at the plot, Epitaph is rather a strange form of tragic love story of the living with the dead. Individual story tells a different love story- love between arranged fiancé, parental love, and inseparable love between married couple. Little symbols like snails refer to the inevitable relationships formed between the living and the dead, as the snail's love dart signifies courtship. The focus of the story seems to lie heavier to each love story that the movie loses cohesiveness when viewed as a whole. As a whole movie the plot was somewhat weak in terms of tying the three stories together as one movie. Some ambiguity is left behind concerning the relationships between characters. Why was the doctor so eager to help Asako? Why did Asako look down at the doctor on the ground dying with such indifferent, or maybe complacent face? Some parts of the movie is unclear and needs a second thought.
One of the factors that make the Epitaph unique would be the plot. Three different stories of love are intertwined beautifully. From the beginning of the first story, we are given with the clues about the other two stories and continue to get them throughout the film. I was puzzled with so many different clue scenes until the very end of the film. This may be an advantage of the film in that it keeps the audience intrigued. On the other hand, this may be a big disadvantage in that until the end of the film, the audience are left puzzled and that in order to explain them, those clue scenes were repeatedly screened. For example, a scene of everyone walking out of the hospital with a candle due to a blackout, which is one of the most symbolic scenes of the film, was screened a couple of times. Yet it can be said that this repetition does not bore the audience because each time the same scene delivers different meanings and understanding.
Not just the unique plot but also the visual effects made me consider the Epitaph as an art film. Although its genre is horror, a lot of scenes were aesthetically beautiful. The visual effects that I remember the most is falling objects and colors. As for the falling objects, for example, in the important scene I spoke about above, we see a falling snow. And in the first love story of Jeongnam, we constantly see cherry blossoms falling beautifully. As for the colors, white certainly is the most prominent color because everyone in the hospital is wearing white and a lot of the furniture is also white.
Epitaph was interesting and not quite what I expected it to be in a lot of ways. In some respects, it is not particularly scary, however, the film is more refined than others in its horror, using it in a more limited, intentional way. It held back in a lot of moments, resisting the cheap thrills that a many other movies tend to overuse. In this way, the viewer's response seems very manipulated, as the film builds up suspenseful moments where one expects something to happen, but never does. Though others may not agree, I find this quality to be one of the strengths of the film. Some of the more classic scares, on the other hand, did seem cheesy, though. The woman pops out of the drawer in the morgue, not unlike The Ring and, more than once, the stereotypical screeching violin was used and, at some point, was so over-emphasized that it made everyone laugh. Other than that, the film used subtle tones and sounds, such as tapping and footsteps to create anticipation of (not-so) imminent terror, crucial to achieving this suspense in the film. The camera functions in a similar way, using slow zooms, tight shots, and close-ups to make the viewer apprehensive about something behind the subject, or long shots to create the sense that something is present, but unseen. Also, only capturing things in part or as shadows, such as in the girl's vision of the father figure from the shoulders down, were effective for this film. All of these elements used together build up a lot of suspense in the viewer, which is not always immediately relieved. I would put this film into the “body genre” category, as it evokes the same kind of physical responses typical to horror movies, which was especially clear after viewing the film as a group.
On another note, I found that, while the story itself was interesting, it was difficult to follow. The non-linear structure of the narrative and the various stories made it tough to bring it together into one cohesive story. All the characters were interrelated in that they were all in the hospital, but it feels disjointed. For example, the young girl's experiences are probably the most frightening in the whole movie, but I don't understand the relevance of that side story to the narrative as a whole. Because of this, the film reads more like “a compilation of sorta-related ghost stories” to me, rather than something more cohesive. I feel that each story could have separately developed into something more detailed and intriguing by itself. The added twist at the end was unexpected for me. It was easy to get caught up in the drama of the serial killings and the realization that the killer was the man's supposedly dead wife to recognize the actuality of the situation. One reoccurring element is that of the bus passing by on the road where the doctor is struck by the car, foreshadowing death. Also, snails and butterflies are significant symbols in the story. Butterflies are often thought of as being omens of death, which makes sense, especially as you see them before and after In Young commits one of her crimes and also modeled on her pin.
In Epitaph, the use of scenery helps portray the character’s emotion and also aid in characteristics. For instance, in the scene where Dr. Jung Nam finishes eating with his daughter, the film flashes the table again at where they just ate, but now without Dr. Nam and his daughter. This shows emptiness inside of him. He also asks his daughter to not come by so often. Another scene, where the empty door way was shown, expresses loneliness. The use of scenery alone conveyed Dr. Jung Nam’s feelings. Another use of scenery was to help portray a character. For the serial killer, her shadow cannot be seen. A long shot of her standing in the background with no shadow on the floor help express that she is like a “ghost”.
Ordinary sounds that are used in daily life are amplified to help create tension, express a character’s feelings, and express significance. Amplification of footsteps is used to create tension and at the same time, isolates the character in the scene. Loud breathing noises, which can be heard throughout the movie was used to express the character’s fear. The amplification of the lights flickering on and off help create an ominous background. The loud flickering of fire as the protagonist and his dead fiancé’s picture being burned was significant to show a marriage.
I found this movie a bit confusing. It is probably because too much was going on with little explanation. There was the doctor and his dead fiancé, the child that was haunted by ghosts, and the serial killer that had two souls in one body. The ending with him walking with the candlelight in the “old photo” was confusing to me.
Epitaph is a first horror movie is seen in this class. I do not like a horror movie. So, I have just seen few horror movies in my life. The reason I hate a horror movie is a surprising scene. Most of horror movies have a surprising scene which can make people scary. Therefore, I believed that a horror movie is made just for an entertainment in summer and a horror movie is not a work of art. But, Epitaph was different. Epitaph has three different stories which are connected each other. The first story is of a medical student. He engaged a daughter of a hospital owner. But he had not met her ever. One day, he took care of a dead body of woman and fell in love with it. In the end, the daughter he engaged was the dead body. The hospital owner cheated him and held soul wedding between him and daughter. The second story is of an only survived girl after a car accident and her mother and stepfather died in the accident. She feels guilty for the accident and saw a mother ghost. At last, she died and made a doctor who helped be dead. The third story is a doctor couple. A husband died during a surgery and a wife denied his death. She got a split personality. Superficially, three stories are just a ghost story. They have a scary and a surprising scene. However, I felt this film is a sad love story. In the first story, the hospital owner made a medical student be lonely during his lifetime. But, she loved her daughter so much, so she held very strange soul wedding. And, in the second story, there was a mother’s love. Her mother did not blame her daughter although she was dying. She just tried to make a little daughter relax till very last moment. Besides, in the third story, I could see the great eternal love. Because she loved her husband very much, she denied he is alive. The third story was finished as a tragedy. But, I could see the feeling of sad woman who lost her one love. Epitaph is definitely classified to a horror movie. However, the sad scenes in the movie made me think and feel about love.
Bo Lee After finishing this movie, I had many thoughts and questions running though my head. For me, the beginning of the story and the end of the story didn’t quite match up. The film shows that last time Jungnam sees his daughter, which didn’t make sense either because at the end of the film, he wasn’t dead, he was still quite alive and I also didn’t see the reason for the daughter’s character. The daughter was there to reveal that Jungman had two wives that died within a year after marriage to him. I felt that this information did very little to help the audience understand the story. Also, the three stories don’t really have any connection besides the fact that the people died in the same hospital/location and that Jungman knew the characters in some way.
The type of music that the director chose for this film was very interesting and helped to add suspense to the movie. During the scenes where the audience is taken by surprise, the director used high pitch sounds and for memory scenes, he used classical music to give the audience a feeling of comfort and ease. At times though, the high pitch sounds gave away too much at what was to come next. Overall, this movie wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be and it was really mind blowing.
The movie Epitaph was a compilation of three stories that happened during the memorable four days at the Anseng Hospital. At the beginning, the movie reminded me of an old film with its black and white scenes and opening credit in a font that would be used for an old film. This “old” sensational mood helped to create a feeling that the story would be from something of the past and, evidently, the movie presented its stories in flashbacks. There were three main stories presented in the movie: Park Jungnam’s story, Asako’s story, and Kim Dongwon’s story. All of these have an overarching theme of love in them. Jungnam’s story was about the love between a live man and a ghost, a dead soul. Asako’s story was about her love towards her new stepfather and her mother’s love towards her. Asako later falls in love with Dr. Lee takes away his life, because she loves him and would like to be with him. Kim’s love story was the most mind-blowing and had a shocking twist to it. Nevertheless, all of these stories showed eternal love that could not be parted with death.
Throughout the movie, I was confused about the story line. I was trying hard to find connections between all of the small stories told by the movie. It was difficult for me to piece everything together while I was watching the movie. The story became clearer when I was done with the movie and had a time to reflect upon it. I watched the movie with an extreme caution to the details of the movie, because I was unsure of where the ghost might appear and what kind of symbolic or metaphoric objects signify the appearance of the ghost. By doing so, I noticed several obvious details of the movie such as, the blinking lights and mirrors, but I figured a few other details to be more significant. The movie’s frequent use of the close-up shot on the faces of the characters to magnify the horrified feelings of the characters added intensity to the movie. In addition, snails appeared in multiple scenes throughout the movie. Since snails are “hermaphrodites,” snails might represent the soul of the dead that coexist with his/her love in the body of the living one. This was apparent in the case of Jungnam’s and Dongwon’s story in which the ghosts stayed besides their loved ones. In conclusion, the movie was about the eternal love of the couples that wanted to love beyond the boundaries of the different worlds.
Epitaph is a Korean Horror and melodrama film directed by the Jung Brothers.
Similar to the melodrama films of the South Korean Golden Age, the tone of Epitaph combined historical reference with melodramatic narration. The three stories of the film were of tragedy and a harsh realism that took place in 1942, during the Japanese occupation of Korea. However, these "tragedies" were were not stemmed from the Japanese themselves, but from overbearing sensations of loneliness, guilt, and sexual desire.
One scene that stood out to me was the when (in Jung-Nam's Dream), the ghost of Aoi captures Jung-Nam and then he imagines scenarios of what would have been his life with Aoi had she not committed suicide. The Mise en scène of this scene tells a beautiful story of a japanese marriage, birth of a son, and romantic love to reveal in the end the necrophilic desires of Jung Nam and the superstitious marriage between dead soul and living body. The scene shows the grisly realism of the japanese occupation and possibly the disgust or disdain towards the japanese through the act of necrophilia (i may be pushing it here).
Throughout the film the Jung Brothers use medium shots of character faces centered in the middle to isolate the characters and show that even though there may be someone by their side or in the background, they are alone. the sense of loneliness is a recurring theme and the desire to be with a loved one is part of every story. Epitaph is very much a melodrama as it is horror as the film displays the sensations of love and loneliness with great exaggeration. But since the film is a horror film, those evoked emotions are distorted into characteristics of personality disorders, incestuous relationships, and necrophilia. One scene I really liked was the scene where Dr. Kim discovers his wife, In-young has no shadow. As he waves the light left and right, the Mise en scène again evokes the sensation of loneliness as the scene shows the shadows of the furniture moving but since his wife has no shadow, he tells her to walk to him to be with her since one of them is not there in the room.
The Epitaph deals with the theme of ‘love’ and ‘death’, telling three different sub-stories, which all takes place at the “An-saeng” hospital. The first story is about the soul marriage of a living person and a dead person. The audience is shocked when Jung-nam’s fiancé is turned out to be the corpse in the scene that a woman tears off two charms from the two pictures, which are Jung-nam and the daughter of director of the hospital. This gives the audience fear and shock by reversal. The second story is about a young girl’s illusion made by her guilt. As she feels guilty thinking that her mother, her stepfather, and an old woman with a kid crossing the road are all died because of her, she sees illusions of them. After the doctor consoles her, she realizes that her dying mother told her that it was not her fault. The doctor who became to love her also dies after he sees the girl’s illusion. The last story was the saddest of all, and it was quite complex to understand. During the surgery, a husband Dong-won is killed by a patient, and his wife In-young lives thinking as if she is Dong-won. Here, Dong-won (actually In-young) realizes his wife has no shadow, which means she is not a living person. This couple loves each other so much that even after a partner dies, she does not accept her husband’s death. While she is dying after she stabs herself, she says “I feel lonely.” I could presume the meaning as she is now alone after realizing that her husband was not living one. In the whole movie, snails often appear, and they may be symbolize the eternal love because snails are hermaphrodite.
The movie ‘Epitaph’ has 3 different stories which are all related to love. By arranging stories in this way, using omnibus plot, it not only made audience easier to understand the stories but also made scenes classical. These features have differentiated the movie from the other horror movies which contain too complicated characters and structures. Every part of this movie, such as props, acting, sound effects, background, made this movie really scary, but each of the parts does not just pop up alone. They altogether soak into the stories and maximizes the fear. It means the movie could scare the audience by just well-ordered stories with basic effects unlike other horror movies which uses lots of cruel and shocking scenes to surprise audience. Also unlike other horror movies which only show dark and gloomy background, ‘Epitaph’ sometimes shows polished scenes as well as dark scenes. We can see the director's aesthetic sense in those scenes. This movie 'Epitaph‘ is kind of unique because it connected romance and horror which is an odd combination. Nonetheless the movie showed both very well and made audience moved. One of the symbols that appeared in the movie, snail which is hermaphrodite, means the sad love that cannot be broken even by death. By such symbol the movie expresses the theme effectively and touching. Therefore to me, this movie was very unconventional and shocking but also very moving by the color and romance.
The Chung brothers 2007 film Epitaph, explores themes of love and guilt and its association with death. The film follows the story of three interrelated characters, a child patient who survived an automobile accident that killed both her parents (which she caused), a medical intern forced into an arranged marriage (leading to the suicide of the future wife), and two surgeons in love (with one of them sacrificing their life to save the other). In all three cases someone whom the characters “loved” died leaving with extreme feelings of guilt because of their belief in causing the death.
The directors do this in order to convey a message about how extreme guilt haunts people until death. The directors convey this message through the use of a reoccurring symbol, the ghosts. Although in the movie the ghosts seem to be used to scare the audience, they represent much more. The ghosts represent the guilt that follows the three survivors, and that constantly haunts them until they die. In the case of Asako the child patient it is revealed that she caused the accident that killed her parents. In turn the ghosts that continually haunt Asako are her parents and only when she dies is she able to move on (Dr. Lee see her when he dies and she thanks him). In the case of Jeong-Nam Park although it is not explicitly seen that he feels guilty in causing his future wife’s (through arranged marriage) death, he is haunted by her ghost inferring that he does in fact feel guilty in causing her to commit suicide. Once again only through death is Jeong-Nam relieved of his guilt (when he dies after seeing Aoi’s ghost). The last case following Dr. Dong-Won Kim and Dr. In-Yeong Kim it is less straightforward in understanding. In-Yeong Kim suffers mental problems believing she is Dong-Won trying to stop In-Yeong from killing people. In relating this back to how guilt haunts people until death Dong-Won was killed in her hands (as he sacrificed himself for her). In-Yeong becomes haunted by Dong-Won as she comes to believe he has become a part of her. Again only after committing suicide is she relieved from her guilt.
It is true that Epitaph is not a conventional horror movie. Surprisingly, I was able to watch a good amount of the movie without having to look away. The eerie sounds and sudden pop up of some dead characters did startle and scare from time to time. For a horror movie, however, I was surprised there were some happier tones of music playing in the background. One was playing during the scene with the power outage, where one of the interns was wishing the problem wouldn’t be fixed so he and the other interns would have the night off. Another one was during the scene of Asako’s flashback of her first love.
Overall, the movie is confusing. With three storyline being intertwine as one, I wasn’t able to follow or connect some of the storyline. The repeated scenes, especially the autopsy scene, added more to the confusion. I’ve also noticed how there’s minimal explanation to the events. We would see familiar faces throughout the movie, but their appearances would be questionable because they may already be dead. One particular example is the scene with the doctor getting hit by a car in a hit-and-run accident, but he sees Asako, who is dead, amongst the crowd in the bus just before his death. This entire movie seems like a puzzle waiting to be solved.
I am not a fan of horror movies but Epitaph was not that scary. The movie seemed a bit contrived and used everything in the scare book, making the overall impression very slow and uninteresting. The acting was really frustrating; I believe the slow, monotonous mode of conveying the script was supposed to come off as spooky but it just felt very awkward and forced. I wish the film had been more linear, jumping from story to story made it hard to resonate with a single, main character. However, I enjoyed the artistic quality that came through in various flashbacks and supernatural settings.
I noticed the use of white throughout the film. All of the characters were seen wearing white clothing (hospital gown, patient gown, blouse, etc.) This is a common choice for horror films and understandably so. The sterile, unfeeling conveyance of the color does produce a level of fear.
If you take a step back, the film is an unconventional portrayal of three love stories, an honoring of deceased persons as in "epitaph" Despite this basis, the film failed to stir any emotion and I left the movie feeling unsatisfied.
This movie contains three stories. Three stories are about love, and death. The story of old days start with the main character Jungnam's rememberance. Jungnam is a doctor, and he had two wives, but both died in one year after a marriage with Jungnam. That reason is revealed in the first story. He wanted to be an artist, but he became a doctor, because of the owner of the hospital. The owner of the hospital wanted Jungnam to get married with her daughter. However, Jungnam had not seen her even once. Later, Jungnam got fall in love with a dead girl. The dead girl was the daughter of the owner, but he did not know that. At last, Jungnam got to get married with the dead person. That was why Jungnam's wives died in a year after a marriage with him. I have one curiosity here. Snails keep coming out in the movie. I could not guess why snails kept coming out until finishing the movie. The second story is about one girl who had a car accident, and her mom and stepfather died, but she is the only survivor. She feels guilty much because she loved stepfather and was jealous of her mom. She sees mom's ghost, and suffers. Doctor Sooin takes care of her, and she gets better, and realizes that her mom loves her even after the car accident. However, at last she dies. And, after a few days later, doctor Sooin dies as well. I think the girl's love toward stepfather changed to doctor Sooin. The third story is about one married doctor couple. One female doctor regards herself as her husband, and kills many people. However, she does not know that who she is till she stands at the court. Also, when she regards herself as her husband, whenever she sees herself, she realizes that herself does not have a shadow. I think that contains deep meaning. Also, I realized why snails keep coming out in this movie after watching this. Snails are hermaphrodite. I think snails keep coming out mainly for the last story.
First of all, the setting really impressed me. Even though I am not familiar with old hospitals, but with old-fashioned Japanese style furniture and items are good enough to develop creepiness. Also, the backgrounds of setting are unique and beautiful. I don’t quiet get what brings Kyung Sung in colonized Korea and horror film, the three stories are quiet similar to Korean, Japanese folk tales. It brought me genre confusion. From the beginning, because it showed a high school female ghost haunting aged Jung-Nam, but the story developed overall it is somewhere between melodrama and horror. Overall what left in me after watching movie is neither horrifying that I can’t go to bed alone or a romantic such as movie “Ghost”.
There are few things I want to make point. Firstly, it is a white hair that Jung-Nam dyed (?) after a suicide of the dean of the hospital. To me, this was a quiet cliché because this motive often shows in folk tales or literature that the person is haunted. The interesting part was the ghost dyed in weird position like 80th or 90th high teen star. Secondly, the symbol of snail has two interpretations. One is related to third story in film about Japanese soldier serial killer. Kaeda killed soldiers for her revenge and she missed the husband so much that she had dissociative identity disorder. In other words, she kept two identities because she loves him so much. Snail is hermaphrodite. The other interpretation would be; Snail symbolizes pure ghosts that have no harm to people in Japanese myth. After Jung-nam made love with the ghost, snails were all over her dead body. It’s a symbol of purification, maybe a salvation.
I feel that the main weakness in this film has to do with transitioning from scenes to flashbacks in time. At the end of each flashback I couldn’t distinguish where, in terms of the sequence of events, in the story we were picking up from; after a while I couldn’t interpret the chronological sequence of events that took place. Aside from this primary factor, the director did a great job in scaring me out of my wits thanks to a combination of factors. “Epitaph” consists of many slow forward and backward tracking shots when, in combination with a dark setting producing a multitude of shadows and eerie background noise, was more than enough to evoke fear in those who cannot stand to watch horror films. Even though the camera is following the character in this way, these tracking shots make me feel like someone or something was also creeping up behind me.
One notable scene in this film for me was when Asako recalls the accident that left her an orphan. The camera is situated so that the audience sees the event occurring through Asako’s eyes because this is her story to tell. The camera pans from left to right revealing Asako, her mother and new father, Koshiro, in a car. It’s snowing as they drive through a road surrounded by trees and already covered in snow. Close ups and extreme close ups of the back and side of the Asako’s parents’ heads reveal everything we see set in a dull grey color scheme: Asako’s mom is wearing an ivory dress while Koshiro is in a heather grey suit with white stripes; both their faces are as pale as the snow along the road. Asako, on the other hand, is the only thing that stands out in this scene: she wears a bright red coat and her face is warm with color. This color contrast is done to focus on Asako; this is her story to tell and the bright red coat she wears is used to symbolize how she is responsible for the blood spilt from the three people who were killed in the car accident she caused.
The movie Epitaph features three different love stories that happen in and around Anseng Hospital in 1942. What I noticed about this movie was Chung Brothers’ delicate way of depicting a very sensitive period in Korea’s history. This particular year can be interpreted as part of an important historical period of Korea since Japanese colonial era went on during this time. Most of Koreans generally response to this topic very negatively, but I felt like the movie portrays Japanese soldiers (as well as the Korean soldiers and the nurse) as victims, rather than giving them the images of the violent colonialists who invaded Korea. Some major characters such as Japanese commander, a bipolar professor, and Dr.Kaeda are bilingual in Korean and Japanese. Not only that, I also noticed that these protagonists all share love between Japanese and Korean.
All of these stories involve two major figures that share similar characteristics when it comes to love; there is always a protagonist who gives unconditional love and another protagonist who is obsessed with the lover. Jung-nam gets obsessed with Aoi as he takes Aoi’s ring and attempts to put it on his finger; ring indicates an obvious symbolic meaning of marriage and a tie between one another, and when Jung-nam puts a ring on Aoi’s finger, he also becomes spiritually dead. This indication can be seen when he spills a chemical product on his shirt, which looks as if he is bleeding. Another metaphor is the close-up shot of the dead bird and Aoi’s body; we get a glimpse of Jung-nam’s portrait drawings of these two particular objects. Aoi then reacts to Jung-nam’s love and gradually gets obsessed with Jung-nam and does not let him marry or be happy with the other women in his life. The second story of Asako shows a twisted emotion of Asako toward his stepfather as she even feels jealous of her mother. Her obsession later passes on to her personal doctor at the hospital, resulting to another death. Lastly, the tragic love connection between the doctor and the professor display love that crosses certain mortal line and the spiritual world itself. During In-young’s lecture, she explains to her students about the weight of the spirit from the dead body and bipolar incidents in the past, which gives many clues to the audiences about the plot of the story.
The film “Epitaph” calls attention to love, guilt and loneliness a bit more than its scariness. Comparing to other films of its genre, it seems to be more elegant and poetic in telling the stories. For example, the scenes that describe Dr. Jeong-Nam’s flashback of his days as a medical student in An-Seng Hospital at the opening are very peaceful and relaxed, especially with the graceful background music and slow camera movement. In addition, the scenes that depict the beautiful life that Jeong-Nam and Aoi would have had had she not committed suicide are particularly poetic and elegant. There are many other such scenes, include the one where Aoi first appeared, concealing in the ice under the snow, and when Dr. Kim In-Yeong and her husband were having a very romantic moment with the snowing couple toy. These scenes all set “Epitaph” apart from conventional horror film. It leads the audience to reflect more about the bittersweet love and the underneath themes of the movie and to empathize more with the characters, instead of the creepiness and gruesomeness that most horror films left with.
Although the elegant way of telling the story sets the film apart from its counterparts, the scary parts of the movie to me are formulaic and cliché, such as the use of eerie background music to build up suspense and anxiety, the sudden pop out of the scary people, and the blood. However, the three stories of the film were interwoven and were told in a non-chronological way. This creates confusion and I can hardly grasp the timeline of the stories. I think this technique helps with creating suspense but at the same time creates unnecessary confusion for the audience. The constant switch back and forth in time takes away audience’s attention and appreciation on the core parts of the movie.
Overall I think “Epitaph” is quite a breakthrough in horror film for I remember more vividly the sentimental and touching themes of love and guilt rather than the horridness of the film.
While watching this movie “Epitaph”, I thought the light was the most important part of this film. The director placed significant amount of scenes related to light, darkness, shadow, what light and darkness reflects, etc. Just like any horror film, something always happen in the dark. When Jungnam was in the autopsy room he notices dark water leaking from where Aoi’s body was stored. He’s almost gets sucked into the darkness of the empthy storage and suddenly spirit of Aoi shows up and actually pulls him into the locker. Also Asako follows into the darkness, when she walks into the dark hallway, she sees her mom, grandmother, child, and her stepfather she accidently killed. Asako’s mother, whos’ face is covered with blood, comes to her and combs her hair. In another scene, she follows her loving stepfather into the light and when the horrific scenes continues even in the bright background, made the scene even more frightening.
Shadow was a big part of Dongwon and Inyoung’s story because it was a clue and an evidence of who they are. Dongwon first appears by saying how he doesn’t see Inyoung’s shadow and unravels the mystery (whether his wife was the serial killer or not) Eventually his identity is revealed as a persona Inyoung have made up in response to the trauma she had when her husband died. She didn’t see a shadow of Inyoung because while she believed herself as Dongwon, the image of Inyoung was actually another imaginary of herself.
The opening of the movie, Epitaph was very puzzling and mysterious. The clip of the brain surgery that was shown at the first start of the movie links to the scene that came up later in the film. There also was an unknown girl that sits next to the main character(Jungnam) and later, at the end, the film reveals her identity, as a ghost. This kind of drawback pattern repeats throughout the whole movie, and due to that, it was kind of difficult to grasp the plot of the film. One of the shots that was the plus to the movie was using the corridor as the horrifying place where ghosts come out. There were a lot of shots with zooming in and out of the corridor. And there would always be a ghost at the end of the hall. Zooming in and out of camera made the scene a lot more dramatic and horrifying to watch. Additionally, crescendo of the background aural effect adds more impact to the scene. There were also a lot of objects that foreshadows, for instance, snail, mirror, bird, ring, and butterfly all foreshadows the future scene. Overall, all the visual and aural effect perfectly created highlighted scenes of the movie and horror.
The horror film, ‘Epitaph’, consists of three separate stories, which all have connection, few characters (human and ghost), same location (Ahn Seng hospital) and same theme of frustrating love. In the first story, Jung-Nam finally falls in love with dead girl. The second story is about Asako’s love toward her stepfather and later she falls in love with Dr. Lee. The last story is about a widow, Doctor Kim Inyong, who cannot admit her husband death. All of these stories have turned into tragic events by either love or obsession. Overall, the film was not easy to follow because of the movie jumping through many time levels including the dream sequence. The director of ‘Epitaph’ has used the sound effects including instrumental music and high pitch (noisy) sounds. The peaceful sound begins and often substituted to fearful sound then slowly increasing the level of sound and this has generated horror to the audience. In other words, the director has expressed the process of changing protagonist’s feeling from peace to fear through the sound effects. In addition, the sad music is used at some scene to create sad mood. The symbolic characters such as ‘black butterfly’ and ‘snail’ can be found in the film. When Kim Dongwon sees his wife’s pillow, there is ‘black butterfly’ that lie on the pillow then it flies away. This black butterfly has a symbolic meaning of grudge soul. Kim Inyong who found as dead person or ghost, she started to commit a crime for her revenge to random innocent people. She murders a Japanese soldier and Nurse Choi. The ‘snail’ often appears at many scenes. The snail has a symbolic meaning of hermaphroditic which it represents the connection between live and dead figure that these cannot have real ordinary relationship while it has dual meaning of unable to set apart between them.
First of all, this movie was so scary. Overall, every three stories were connected by some objects and scenes.
The movie started with long shot of phone calling. Old person taking a call and the stories begin. It was pretty long intro to go to past
The first story started with the white fabric dried on the ropes with natural light.
First story - the story begins with the myth that doctors should not see the mirror in the funeral room and do not break. Unless, they will see the ghosts. The main character Jung nam Park break the mirrors and the medicines. He started see the ghost after than. However, the important fact of first story is snail that jung nam found in funeral room. Snail connects between ghost and jung nam. In few scenes, the gaspel song played near the funeral room. Also, the boss of the hospital is the key character of this story. Every happening are occured from her. The ghost Aoi was her daughter and she died with a man who she loved. However, head of the hospital wanted to marry with jung nam park because he's parents and the boss promised to make them engage. Thus, boss make them married in spirit, the monk helped them them to marry in secretely. In this story the time flows very fast. After ghost took him to the unreal world, he saw she pregnant, play with his child, and see each other with grabing the hand each other. The white fabric was tied them together. The light if the hospital on and off often in this movie and this element also connected with other stories. Also, the snow falling scene was important fact to next story.
Second story - 2days ago. the story brgins with one child injured by car accident. Her mom was dead and covered with white fabric. This means her mom alreay dead. In this story, the hallway was the connection between the real world and the place that Asako got accident. She dreamed through her mother and one old woman with a baby on her back. Also a man who is her new father occured in her dream. Actually Asako loved him and be jealous to her mother. Every happenings are started from her mother introducing new father to Asako. In this moment, she took the picture with her mother in a specific place. This phto is a key element of the start and end of this story. The sound of breaking mirror and gaspel song also added in this story too. Dr.Lee is a key character that telling the story of her and the happenings. He tried to bring her stories through his experiences. He promised to her that he will always be with her. In this sotry the snow is a connection element between hospital hallway and the place she got accident. Also, due to the snow Asako and Dr.Lee got a car accident. The scene after car accident , Asako and her mom fall in to the ground and grab the hand on the snow. However, this scene overlaped with first story scene which is Jung nam and the ghost kissing in the white fabric. Thus, these two scenes are conmected by white fabric. At the end of the story when Dr.Lee got an accident Asako appeared in the train and watching him. The glass ball with sniw falling scene comes next that continue to third story.
2nd Sang Won Jee Third story - 3days ago. The fist story scene came out first and give us a connection. Also, the glass ball with falling snow, light and shadow and butterfly is a key concept of this story. Through the glass ball, the teacher who teache about the ghost and soul found his wife is a ghost because she doesn't have a shadow on her. The butterfly binyu represented the love between the teacher and his wife at first. However, this object changed in to the weapon that killing people. Finally, In young actual human and the dead man's wife killed herselves with butterfly bi nyu and every mudered happening solved by glass ball with a letter that she wrote down. This story is about the bing ui which is interacting with ghost. However, director represented the love that don't have the limit through the objects such as butterfly, snow, light and shadow. In this story the gaspel song appears too but actually this somg ends too. It means this story is the last story and everything finalize in this moment.
At the end of third story, every stories conclusion came out. Head of the hospital died herselves after she saw her daughter Aoi, and Dr.Lee died in the hospital with Asako saying love him.
Through the white fabric, the old man who is Jung nam in first story died due to the ghost with holding the drawing that he drew brfore.
At the end of the movie, during the passage of the hospital collapse, every character of the movie shring the fire on the candle and walked out.
Every story of this movie connected each other with some objects and places. So it continues the stories. Director used long shoe extreme close shot, zoom in and out alot. These long shots and close shots made people to focus on the scene and the sound effects made people nervous or relax.
Sound effects were key elements of this movie too . Due to the sounds people could connect some sences and stories. Also these sound effects made people know which situation it is.
I focused on the time flows, actually the story concluded in thrid story which is 3days ago. However, second story which is 2days ago and first story finished in last story. The time mixed and twisted eachother and connected through the happenings and the objects.
Epitaph has three stories that occur in a hospital in Japanese colonial era. The movie title in Korean is called, “ki-dam” which means “weird story“. The weird story make more sense because the movie ends with an implication that the ghost does not really exit but rather a kind of mental illness. I think the subject of three stories has to do with “wrong family love”.
First of all, the movie started with mother(director of hospital)’s wrong love, like an obsessive attachment about her daughter(Aoi). Aoi suicided with her lover, because of the arranged marriage with Jungnam. But her mother made her dead daughter’s soul marry with Jungnam so that Aoi couldn’t meet with her lover even after she’s dead. Everything was done without telling to Jungnam, this wasn’t just maternal love of mother but selfish greed. It shows mother’s greedy love that too much care about her daughter, even she is dead. Also mother killed herself because she missed her daughter so much. The mother didn't do anything that her daughter would really want. The second wrong love is Asako’s love for her stepfather. Asako loved her stepfather as a man and she envy her real mother and their relationship. In the car, Asako holds stepfather and gets into accident, killing 4 people without herself. This tragic accident would not have happed only if Asako wasn’t greedy wanting to have her stepfather all on her own. Asako’s wrong love for her stepfather ended the life of her family. The last one is a female doctor who lost her husband during the surgery. Longing for her husband wasn’t the problem, it seemed like she couldn’t let go of her husband. Her obsession toward her husband grew and made herself to become a serial killer with mental disorder. These wrong way of family love make “weird stories“ and tragic stories.
Andrew Song I personally hate horror movie, but in the class, I found out that in this film sound was the main component to push reactions out of the audience. I think it was not that scary as i thought to be but it was the sound that makes me creep. The harsh shrieking sounds and some of the carnivalesque melodies that tried to enhance the suspense only detracted from it. The non diegetic sound which not only consisted of shrieking instruments and carnival sideshow melodies also consisted of piano clips that were meant to push the mood toward a sense of anxiety and we knows its the pop out part is coming. Some of the diegetic sounds such as the crying and the wind chimes were more effective in setting a more dramatic mood for the film, but I think the nondiegetic sound was definitely worked in this film. Secondly, this movie, it deals with three different stories that eventually connect together under the theme of love. I found it to be still scary but with the stories, unlike other typical horror movies, The movie Epitah connects the horror part and melodramatic component together to enhance the theme of the movie.
The Jung-Brother’s horror film, Epitaph, defies usual horror conventions and manages to create an extremely visually beautiful tale of human loss and grief. As an avid fan of horror, I was delightfully surprised by the film’s lack of an essential “big baddie” that basically kills everyone in sight for no apparent reason accept for a the sake of the film. The film’s plot almost creates a type of an anthology by interweaving three different stories that all intersect in some way. The three stories all illustrate human connection and how we are affected when our relationships are severed by death. This sense of loneliness is perpetuated throughout the film. When Jungnam is introduced at the beginning, he is almost never accompanied by anyone within the frame until an eerie schoolgirl figure is introduced. Jungnam is centered in the middle of the frame while he lectures making him seem small in comparison to the space around him continuing the theme that he is lonely even while he is in the room full of students. Not only is this sense of loneliness prevalent but it is also the loss of identity that a person suffers when they lose a loved one. When Asako is plagued with the guilt from her parents’ deaths, she flashes back to a close up shot of her mother letting go of her previously held hand to rush to her new husband. This shot illustrates how her new stepfather threatens Asako’s identity as her mother’s daughter so she attaches herself to the new man. In the crash, Asako loses both of them totally forfeiting her identity. An extremely close up shot of her mother’s bloodstained hand now regripping Asako’s after the crash is what finally sets Asako free from her terrible hallucinations perpetuating that Asako has now regained her identity. Dr. Kaneda’s identity is most literally compromised as she develops an extreme case of multiple personality disorder. The film cleverly re-takes previous scenes that do not seem significant, such as the students discussing ghosts with a professor, and replays them almost exactly but with a change of character. The repetition of these scenes shows how Dr. Kaneda was almost living life twice as two people. From a historical perspective, the Korean identity was compromised during Japanese Colonial reign, the time period which the film is partly set. Koreans were forced to change their names to Japanese ones, and essentially forced to try to forget their Korean culture. This film in a most literal way illustrates how our sense of self is affected when part of it is taken away.
The use of lights and sound in this film makes it scary. Whenever a scary scene will occur, a sharp and sudden screeching sound plays in the background, which sort of prepares us for the scare. However, even though we know that the next scene will be scary, it still does not reduce much of the scariness, perhaps due to the suddenness and extreme close-ups shots of the images. The use of shadows to signify the presence of a supernatural occurrence also adds to the shroud of mystery surrounding the horror. By not directly showing us what the ‘ghosts’ do, we are left to imagine what goes on in the shadows. In a way, this makes the film even more mystifying and thus scary. The odd angle of shots also adds on the mystery of the film. For example, whenever Aoi’s mother was talking to Jung Nam, she is not facing the camera straight on. This is in contrast to Jung Nam, who always faces the camera straight on, or where there are close-ups of his ‘facial expression’. Rather, she was shot from the side or slightly from the back. This makes us wonder if something more is going on, or whether she is hiding any secrets.
The use of the hospital hallway and partitions also appear to signify passages or spaces of death, where the ghostly hauntings mostly appear along the hallway, or through partitions. Also, snow appears to be the signal for ghostly happenings. Perhaps it was also used to show a starker contrast with the dark red of the blood, thus further adding to the visual gore aspect. Perhaps it was also used to symbolise purity and goodness, where the good of the victims appear to be contrasted with the ‘bad’ of the ghosts who kill people.
Unlike any other common horror genre, “Epitaph” has visualized very poetic, aesthetic cinematography throughout the movie. The directors have divided a three different stories as a flashback in 1942 under Japanese occupation, specifically at Anseng Hospital. In the first story, the main character Jung nam was about to get arranged married with hospital director’s daughter. However, this daughter turned out to be a ghost. Surreal scenes of their “honeymoon” were emotionally drawn out along with melancholic beauty. During this first story, snails are used in order to symbolize the eternity. This “eternal love” added with the mother’s guilt provide tragic side of plot. Second story involves Asako, a girl who survived from the car accident where her mother and the stepfather were killed and Soo-in, her doctor. They share their own trauma together and become companions to each other. We could observe loss and gain of companions. Last episode tries to shows how supernatural forces or souls are part of us or within us and that how lonely it would be without them as In-young mentioned in the movie as Dong-won. Because this is the horror movie it does have the effect of sound, still shots of camera, flickering lights, and blood were used to elevate the mood of the movie.
However, the purpose of this movie is what makes it special; it does not try to scare the viewers. Although it was really confusing to understand the whole movie with flow, I think that the main theme of this movie was well directed. This movie's emotional connections in time and space between life and death, demonstrate whole experiences or occasions we go through in our lives.
Black and white silent brain surgery. What a perfect way to start off a horror movie... I automatically looked at the corner of the screen and then away... The fact that it was silent made it worse because I watch scary movies with my ears... The music usually gives me the cue to look at the screen or look down. Fortunately, the black and white silent brain surgery ended after a minute or two.
As I mentioned above, I watch scary movies with my ears. Because I make short film/vlogs on my spare time, I know and understand the importance of soundtracks. However, I appreciate it most when I am watching horror movies for the cues. The soundtracks in this film was on point -I knew when it was okay to watch and I knew when I should expect a scare. The sound accentuates every frightening image.
I hate the feeling after watching scary movies. Can I walk to the bathroom by myself? Can I sleep with the lights off? Although most scary movies end up being very stupid, the thrill still haunts me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed having to THINK about this film. No matter how dark the eerie hallways were or how creepy the sounds were, I was surprised at how I watched most of the film -it was because of the thinking I had to do. The movie went back and forth with some scenes and there were so many random stories that I questioned; I had to watch in order to figure out the riddle.
“Epitaph” is an omnibus movie. This movie looks like progressing different story but eventually connected as one. I think it is kind of weird. “Epitaph” is horror movie but love, mother’s instinctive love and sympathy reflects in horror genre as complexly. It is not a same as other omnibus style movie because “Epitaph” combined each episode to one smoothly than staccato. This movie can separate as 3 big episodes and I can felt different feeling. This movie is little bit different with others because this movie is not only focused on horror but also strange background as horror movie that is Japanese colonial period. Some people can say there is nothing need at horror movie but materials touched sensitivity and story-unfolding method is unique.
Every episodes made well and director painstakingly and classy. Music and movie also matched well. So “Epitaph” is little bit sensibility and beauty as horror genre movie. Of course, I was freak out at second episode that is mother ghost but generally movie filled with emotional that is other horror movie can’t follow. I am still confusing about hospital owner’s daughter and medical school student’s marriage of convenience. Personally, third episode’s reversal was kind similar as “Six Sense”. But, most counterphobic episode was second episode’s mother ghost and also I felt sympathy, sorrowful and sad.
The material of love in movie, usually be expressed as beautiful, but I never thought love is well matched with horror. “Epitaph” showed to me shocked moments using love with horror.
This movie tried to hard to be a horror film when there was very little horror to it. The constant jumps and shifts in time made the movie far to confusing to follow and be afraid of. The jumps in time also did not help with the double twist about the killer imagining her husband imagining her doing the killing when in reality it was her doing it her self. It was hard to connect that the dead perfect woman was in fact the main characters finance. And the sub-story of the little girl just felt like it didn't fit. It was as if this were 3 movies in one but there was not any clear connection, nor disconnection between them. This all led to a confusing story.
Some good things for the horror type film that it wanted to be was the sound track. It had the very familiar sounds that we know from normal horror movies that would lead up to the big scare. It would help to bring a sense of urgency and anticipation to it. The music along with some of the track shots helped a lot with the anticipation which horror films are all about.
When I was watching “Epitaph,” I could barely open my eyes because of the unpleasant sound in the film. There are many kinds of sounds that add an element of suspense. The bell and drum sounds signify that something is going to happen, and the eerie, grating sound creates a feeling of avoiding. Also, I found that there are many scenes are actually silent; what we can hear are just the breaths of the characters. Since those scenes are already tense enough, no artificial sound is needed. With many combinations of these sounds, the directors successfully constructed the creepy atmosphere of this film. In addition, I believe that snails, which we’ve seen many times in the film, also help create the sticky, creepy feeling.
The flow of this film makes me a bit confused when watching. In this film, we can see something like “3 days ago” and “four days ago.” However, when I got home and had some time to think through the film again, I found that this way of editing actually helps build up the emotions for three different stories because each story flows smoothly without being interrupted. Although this is indeed a horror movie, the stories are in fact very moving. I totally agree that this is not a conventional horror movie. I almost cried when Asako remembered that her mother told her that it was not her fault, so she can finally leave this world with peace of mind. And things became really clear that Asako’s mother was never trying to scare Asako in the hospital; she was just worried about her daughter and wanted to comb her daughter’s hair. Therefore, the key motif in this film seems to be love: the unconditional love Asako’s mother gave her and the unbending love between In-young and Dong-won, the doctors.
Epitaph is most noted with settings of two different time zones and three different stories. Such non-linear narrative structure with three episodes provides ambivalence for the audience in understanding the film, however, the episodes of different background-setting and protagonists are inter-related in that they all take place in Anseng Hospital. Distinctive feature of setting two different time zones, the year of 1979 when old Jungnam works as a director of Anseng hospital and his reminiscence of the colonial period in 1942 when he works as a medical intern. Unlike dominant notion of being a doctor, which provides an insight of stability and success, his life as a doctor continually generates an isolation and loneliness. Such aspect reflects the state of emotions, especially “loneliness” through an empty room and a scene where Dongwon finds out that Inyoung has no shadow. Portrayal of Inyoung as a shadowless protagonist provides a sense of horror and identifies her as a ghot, however, it greatly contributes to generating a sense of sorrow and loneliness through dualism. Such dual expression is also well reflected in the scene where Jungnam falls in love with a corpse in autopsy. Autopsy is dominantly distinct as a space of horror and death, however, it transforms to that of love, which illustrates a dramatic effect in that he finally gets to meet his fiancé that he never met and falls in love with her. As previously discussed, the motif of loneliness is significantly amplified through various techniques of cinematography. A long shot that portrays Inyoung as shadowless crucially contributes to creating a greater sense of horror a critical threat is imminent, but unseen. Furthermore, slow zooms into the darkness, and tight shots and close-ups of a dead bird and the body of Aoi not only create a simultaneous tension and build up the suspense, but also functions as a metaphor. It is clearly visible that stimulation of sound effects through amplified footsteps and loud breathing noise was effective in portraying the state of emotions and the dominant motif. In addition, the symbolic expression through particular objects such as snails and butterfly enhances the sense of loneliness. Snails illustrate an inevitable relationship between the living and dead, Jungnam and Aoi. Aoi was dead before the marriage, but their bond perpetually continued through the ghost marriage. Another symbol butterfly signifies death in that Inyoung kills innocent people such as soldiers and nurse Choi. As well reflected in the phrase, “I would like to believe in the souls”, loneliness and nostalgia remain a crucial recurring motives throughout the film.
Epitaph is unique in that the movie is divided into three stories. This plot format could be advantageous in providing different storyline with various mood and camera effects. All three stories take place in the Anseng Hospital. The facilities in the hospital are shown in dim or dark lights, and the darkness itself gives the tension to the movie. The first story about the living and the dead's soul marriage, there are a few sudden frightening scenes such as the ghost popping out of the drawer, which is similar to the other horror films of today. Nevertheless, the movie did not just focus on the classic scares. The visuals of the living and the dead's soul marriage scenes were very beautiful and touching that were not usually seen in the horror films. The snails shown on the dead bride's body symbolizes the love that even death cannot break apart. The snail's hermaphrodite feature could also be the meaning of the two being together whether one is living or dead. Another interpretation of the snail symbolism is that, the snail in Japan represents a ghost of resentment.
The second story about a girl having illusions due to the guilt of killing her mother in a car accident has many scenes of scary visual and audio effects. The ticking sounds made by the mother ghost made all the viewers get goosebumps. Also, the monotonous piano sound in the background builds the suspense and tension. The third story is rather like a mystery than a horror. This last story is very complicated compared to the other two, and due to many reversals to the story, it was a little hard to grasp and understand the plot line. The killing of the Japanese soldier was not just random, but it was due to the revenge to the Japanese soldier patient that killed her husband during the surgery. The usage of the butterfly hairpin as a killing instrument was interesting. It could be a hint to the viewers in advance that the real living serial killer is a female doctor Inyoung, not her husband. Overall, the movie was not boring and it was different from other horror films in that there are love stories involved throughout the storyline.
“Epitaph” is an eerie but beautifully shot film set during the Japanese Imperial Period of Korea. Although within the horror film genre, “Epitaph” rises above its mainstream counterparts through its stunningly memorable cinematography. One scene that particularly comes to mind when discussing the beauty of this film was when Aoi is seen underneath the frozen river as a single red rose petal gently lays to rest on the ice. The sudden cracking of the river creates a hauntingly ominous effect emphasizing the importance of Aoi throughout the film. To be honest, the background stories of the characters, such as Asako and her naïve love for her step-father, were so visually and aesthetically alluring that I forgot I was even watching a horror film.
However, where the film superseded in cinematography, it lacked in plot and character development. With its predictable plot twists, such as the multiple identity disorder in the nurse serial killer, and its easily anticipated “scare” and “shock” moments, there were for lack of a better word, some very corny moments in the film. One such example is when Dr. Kim realizes that his wife, In-Yeong, doesn’t have a shadow. The dramatic close-up on his face in combination with the overly intense music created a rather ridiculous scene that felt like watching some cheesy daytime soap opera. As a viewer, it was hard not to laugh. In these ways, “Epitaph” and its stunning cinematography is a unique film in that it defies the stereotypes of the quality of the horror genre, but at the same time keeps true to them through its predictability.
Epitaph was one of very few scary movies that I have watched in my whole life. Personally I despise watching scary movies for I cannot withstand scary scenes and sound effects. So I had to force myself to stick through the whole movie. I could not watch almost half of the movie so I am still confused about the connections between three different stories. However, continual appearance of snails during the first story was notable. The scenes where they marry, have sex and have babies seemed very unreal. This unreal love between dead and alive is expressed through snails. Snails are hermaphrodites, meaning that they have both female and male reproductive organ. Appearance of snails was a symbolical way of signifying the marriage of dead and alive and them becoming one.
Throughout the movie, it implied that love is eternal and death cannot separate two sincere lovers. The first story was about the marriage between dead and alive. The second story was about the love of mother who protected her daughter. The last story was about the love of wife who thought that her husband was alive and that he was with her even after his death. The main theme I found in epitaph was nothing is what it seems because there were a lot of secrets hidden within the souls of deceased. May be this is why many of the scenes seemed very fanciful and stories seemed tangled up and hard to understand.
Epitaph was released in 2007 and was directed by Sik Jung and Beom-sik Jung. The reoccurring theme of the movie seems to be dead spirits who never depart from their loved ones, and one involves man whose wife died and continues to stay around him. Although the twist about the husband actually being the dead one sounds like an intriguing concept, I felt like the film did a poor job on its execution. The Jung brothers’ did a better job portraying Jung-Nam’s ghost wife appearing in and out the background of sequence when he visits his daughter, but during almost the whole section of the husband story, the character is seen interacting alone with his wife on benches, in the living room, and in the forest, which makes it hard to doubt what is real or not. Another film with similar twists like David Fincher’s Fight Club, or Jay Chou’s Secret (which was also released in 2007), hid away multiple subtle hints through what appeared to be normal interactions with people in the film. One scene in Epitaph shows the husband interacting with the students with little or no hints, and it is included in the montage sequence during the reveal. A better scene is done with the general officer later on near the reveal, but feels a little too late by then.
but I had an issue with what unsatisfying unanswered questions are left at the end. Not that unanswered questions are a problem in any film, but the ones left in Epitaph seemed “on-the-surface,” like what was the girl doing in the bus, rather than more compelling questions, such as in Ringu when we ask why Sadako wishes spread her curse to others. Part of this may also be due to the seemingly linked stories that are really only related in that they happened to end up in the same hospital. I feel like this disjunction also may possibly be a byproduct of two directors. The film is considered horror, but I am confused on what the film was trying to be at all with the not so unjust deaths of loved ones, and clash of typical eerie screeches plus dramatic orchestral music.
The epitaph is a horror movie with several different stories. A story line of this movie was unfamiliar to me. New story came up unexpected, ending the other one. At first it was hard to notice starting point of new story and also couldn’t understand what is going on. All events were occurred in a hospital (anyeong? I don’t remember what it was called.) It might have more than three stories, but there were three stories that I noticed. One is the story about a medical student who fell in love with dead body, which was actually one, who was going to marry with him. Even though they couldn’t marry in real life, dead body’s mother secretly held wedding between him and dead women’s soul. The ceremony eventually didn’t let him have healthy relationship with his wife until he died. The second story is of a girl who lost her mom and stepfather. She was in love with her stepfather and her jealousy led to car accident and only survived. She suffered from nightmares, seeing a mother ghost. At last, both the girl suddenly died and also doctor who took care of her died from car accident. Her ghost was in a car, saying something like I love you, doctor. I thought this ending is weird. The third story is about a doctor who lost husband during a surgery and denied his death. This was most confused one among three of them. Still quite don’t understand. Overall, personally, this horror movie also seemed more like a love story, having sad ending than scary movie. Although it wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be, the story line was impressive.
First object that I carefully looked and considered was a snail which appeared from beginning to an end. A snail represents the distorted love in this movie. In fact, a snail is a hermaphrodite which is bisexual itself. Throughout the all of the omnibuses in the movie, one thing those are sharing is the distorted loves taking driven other side to be a death in order to be together endlessly. First, a leader of a hospital forcefully brings Jung-nam and Aoi together through the soul marriage. Therefore, Aoi takes Jungnam’s life away to being together in real at the end of cinema. Second, the target of Asako’s distorted love changes from Kioko to a doctor, who promises her that he will be at her side after he makes his rounds. Third, Dr. Kaneda has multiple characteristics so that she believes that her dead husband still living in her body. At the scene of the head of hospital weeps and mourns at the soul marriage of Jungnam and Aoi, she crouches back as similar to a snail. Also, Jungnam’s distorted face because of the backlight metaphors the distorted ratio of the face and body as like as a snail. Furthermore, at the end of cinema, a tremendous amount of snails crawl around the hospital due to the fact that all of the couples to be together without any doubt of it.
In this film, the supply of electricity consistently prevents to be flow so that blackout occurs and keep blinking. The hospital is a place where the life and death co-exists. To me, seems like the blinking light and blackout emphasize and exaggerate the significance of a hospital. At the scene of Asako firstly appears at the beginning of the second omnibus, blinking light tells that Asako continuously crossing from existence to a death in back and forth. In addition to this, people who closely shot at the scene of getting a candle light from one to another while blacking out in hospital encounter the tragedy with the unwanted death at the end.
The film Epitaph was rather confusing for me to follow in the beginning as I found myself trying to piece the timeline together more than anything else. As time went on however, I began to see that all the stories were somehow intertwined with the hospital showing elements of love, guilt, and death through cinematography.
Music's was heavily used to intensify emotion in scenes throughout the film for each story part. Slower music was used when there was realization or understanding while quicker speed was used to built up thrill. An example would be of the scene where Inyoung realizes that she is the one who has been murdering people there is no sound but music to show how it was her all along.
There was also quite visual with use of color, objects, and texture to go along with each story. An example of such would be the story of Jungnam and his supposed life with his dead fiancee. There were sliding doors to show each life stage as it opened to show them. There was also this shot of the tree drawing on a door. The pink flowers fell from the door as if it were real perhaps symbolizing love.
All in all I viewed the film Epitaph as being quite confusing in the beginning but in the end it seemed to come together a little bit.
Today we’ve watched a horror movie called the “Epitaph”. Although I rarely watch horror movies due to their contents that frightens me and affects my daily life, I found this particular movie less terrifying compared to other Asian horror movies. Unlike other horror movies, Epitaph intends to portray one man’s loneliness. As the movie storyline developed, not only the story of Dr. Jung nam, but also the story of the dead patients in the hospital that he used to work in the past was told. Since there were several different stories of different people were being told and there wasn’t enough explanation to it, I had hard time understanding the real message the director was trying to convey. ‘
The movie used sound effects to create and intensify the atmosphere and create tension. Every time the sound of big footsteps, an ear-piercing scream, and an instrument playing high notes were heard, which reflected that something was going to pop up soon. Then the character’s loud panting voice in the background portrayed fear. In terms of techniques used, long takes and long shots of scenes accelerated the audience’s tension. The empty table and chairs in the very first scene, blinking lights, and close-up shots of the faces of ghosts and people were the attempts to draw the audiences into the movie. Even though I was not able to keep up with the intention of the movie because of the confusing storyline, it was interesting enough to watch the little details of the movie and the unique techniques that this movie used. In my personal opinion, I think this movie is one of the well-made movies that attained completeness of artistic achievement.
The movie "Epitaph" is sort of horror movie but not completely horror genre because of film's artistic approach to individual's emotions and feelings. The overall theme of this movie was loneliness and love, which caused almost all the characters in the movie to have side effect to each other's relationships. The movie is divided into three different stories to illustrate different but necessary narratives to have connections to one another that develop the main subject of the movie, which is the horror followed by love and loneliness. However, it was interesting to see the horror movie being very poetic, beautiful, and sentimental that actually did not really help to concentrate on the horror part of the movie. The transition of the movie was not that smooth to begin with, but at the same time, I feel like the directors focused too much on the artistic part, like using so many metaphors(mirror, snail, picture, beautiful hairpin, shadow, etc) to foreshadow so many different things like danger, love, death, loneliness, etc.
The magnificent style of the music help the movie to feel more horrific though it only helped momentarily through out the movie when the scary scene is about to happen. The directors used these kind of musics to build psychological and emotional sensations to help the viewers to perceive the overall theme of the movie which is love, death, revenge, loneliness, sadness, and madness. I feel like the movie itself was not that bad overall, although the movie was too emotional and artistic to be a horror film.
The film "Epitaph" jumps between the 1970s and 1940s, focusing primarily on the events in the 1940s. However the sequence of events is somewhat confusing and was difficult for me to follow. The hospital obviously had multiple hauntings going on, but the scene cuts were very abrupt and sometimes left little resolution to the three separate story lines. Obviously a dead woman's soul being married to the main character had the biggest effect on him, however it was a bit unclear to me how the other two stories really impacted him, other than that they happened at the same hospital.
Each different storyline seemed to have it's own symbol throughout. When the main character has his soul married, snails re-appear frequently. In the little girls car crash story snow is the theme, and in the husband wife story the butterfly makes many appearances. The main link between all the stories is the hospital. At the end when the hospital is being torn down, we see what could be the ghost of those who died or were involved in the hauntings there apparently passing on along with the hospitals demolition. The main character too passes away on the same day of the demolition.
"Epitaph" makes me reconsider being a doctor. The biggest fear that I have had of being a doctor is that the profession sucks the life out of you because of physical and emotional exhaustion. This is what Epitaph does through certain symbols. The symbol that most struck me in this movie was the snail. When the young student is putting away the body of his future wife, a snail is seen coming out of a vial. The snail is in the foreground while the young students is blurred out in the background. The directors want us to see the struggle of the snail coming out of the vial, expectedly to search for sustenance. In the same way, the dead in this hospital are also looking for sustenance in the form of emotional help. The same snail is found on the chamber of the young student's supposed wife. It is slowly crawling across the chamber's wooden panel. Shortly after, the chamber opens and brings the young student into the world of the dead. In this way, it is evident that the dead wife has latched on to the young student like the snail and will feed off of him emotionally. After this, the water that falls out of the chamber shows his reflection. In that reflection, we see that the dead wife is right behind the young student as if she has latched on to his body. She has grabbed hold of the young student's body and will not leave for the rest of his life. A snail will only leave a plant once it is done feeding and if one notices a plant that a snail has consumed, one can see a hole on the leaf. In the same way, the dead wife will not leave the young student until his death as seen at the end of the movie. She has carved out a hole in the life of the young student as his life is devoid of happiness. The dead wife has sucked everything out of him. The snail also has an appearance on the movie's poster as a snail is seen sliding across the neck of a woman. It is not discernible who the woman is but maybe that is the point as it can affect anyone. The neck of the woman seems to be unnaturally long as well which maybe says that snails (or traumatic medical experiences) will suck the life out of those who are more susceptible and more easily affected by the trauma. The snails entrails are blood instead of slime which indicates that life has been literally sucked out in the form of blood. This is true as the people in the movie that are most affected are people who can be seen as the most susceptible: the doctor whose brother died in the well and committed suicide after a patient of his died due to losing her mom; the doctor who lost her husband from a patient murdering him. Medicine is a traumatic career at times and will expose the person to grotesque and emotionally distressful situations. There is a thin line between getting too involved in a patient and being distant from the patient and Epitaph explains the dangers of the former.
I watched this movie few years ago even though I don’t like horror movies. I remember I was scared by some of the horror scenes and creepy sounds throughout the movie, and as I watched this movie again today, the sound effect was still very scary and made me nervous. I think the sound effect is one of the major factor in the horror movies since the sound creates the background and plays an important role for the atmosphere. The effect of sound is enormous, that if the scary scene or creepy ghost scene without the sound wouldn’t have the same effect without the sound. In this movie, footsteps, person’s creepy voice, background music (I think it’s Korean instrument. Korean flute?) all create tensed mood of the scenes and expresses the feelings of the characters.
The story of the movie is unique. Three different, but somewhat related stories appear in the movie. All three small stories have similarities in that they all are sad love story. Also, the three sad love stories involve the ghost, which makes this movie creepier. However, I had difficulties connecting all three different stories. They were three pieces in the movie but I didn’t see the connection between those three besides the three stories take place at Ansaeng Hospital. But considering this movie as an omnibus movie, I think this horror sad love story movie has a distinctive storyline dealing with soul, body and love.
The movie "Epitaph" was a korean horror film that deals with three different plot summary in one film. This movie deals with three unlike stories that is not connected to one another but shares three common themes of love, guilt, and death. In this response paper, I wanted to talk about the camera lightening and some mysterious story portrayed in the third story. In terms of camera effect, I really liked the traditional and colorful image portrayed in this film. But I thought the camera lightening was little blurry compare to other scary movie. I wished the color of the movie could be little more vivid so that it portrays better image of the scene. I also think that this blurriness is purposely filmed in order to mimic the traditional film in 1940s. In terms of the story line, the third story about Inyoung and Dongwon captured my sight. It was the most mysterious story, a story about a married couple who are both doctor, Inyoung and Dongwon. Not only it deals with the couple, but a serial killer who killed three people, Japanese soldier, Korean soldier, and a nurse at Anseng hospital. In this movie, I want to point out the shadow of the Inyoung in the third story. The fact that Dongwon do not see his wife's shadow is a mystery in this story. This not existing shadow gives the clue to the audience that she is not a human or having a mental disorder. It is revealed that she was a serial killer and also killed her husband who constantly stopped her from killing people. The shadow portrays her own imagination of metal guilt. She believes that she is haunted by her dead husband by looking in his view.
Before watching the movie, Epitaph, I was sick of typical repertorial storyline of the korean horror film. I always thought that Korean horror movies focus on the scariness of the film, not the storyline of the film. But Epitaph showed a developed horror movie which contains historical reference that deals with trouble between Japan and Korea but also a outstanding storyline that deals with combined themes of love, guilt, and death. I think this movie has opened up a possibilities for Korean film industry to further develop.
Melody Chi 7-22-13 Korean Cinema YISS, Summer 2013 Prof. Steven Chung Movie Response #3: Epitaph
One theme of Epitaph that becomes obvious through the use of framing and camera POV is voyeurism. Not only is the audience initially being encouraged to spy on the film’s various characters’ lives and secret inner feelings, these voyeuristic tendencies are then consistently being indulged. For example, when the doctor and nurses are attempting to resuscitate Asako after she suddenly goes into cardiac arrest, the camera’s viewpoint is such that we, the audience, appear to be peering into the scene through a crack between the room’s sliding wooden doors. The shot is framed on both sides by sections of the sliding doors, which are reminiscent of stage curtains in that they are being used to block out other areas of a scene to draw the audience’s focus to the action in the center of the frame (between these two “curtains”).
This voyeuristic atmosphere evokes a sense that the events are a secret that should not be revealed, or more specifically, that they belong in a world separate from the natural, normal world. This idea is further expressed by the fact that the elderly father (who was the young doctor at the hospital in the past storyline) never actually tells anyone (even his wives or daughters) what happened in his past at the hospital. In fact, even at the end of the movie, he still has no idea at all why the spirits/curses chose to haunt him, or why they decided to kill all of his family members before ultimately targeting him. This underscores the separation between the supernatural and natural world; the supernatural world is inscrutable and does not follow natural rules. In addition, as the elderly father states in the beginning of the movie when he visits the abandoned hospital after finding out it is scheduled to be demolished, the supernatural world that exists only within the location of the hospital should not be revisited or allowed to merge with the outside world. However, these voyeuristic scenes signal the unstoppable and terrible merging of the supernatural and natural world. For instance, the protagonist's life is shown as a succeeding series of rooms, in which major events (such as getting married and having a child) are represented in scenes that are only seconds long. We see each room by looking through a series of wooden doors that open for the audience's viewing as the protagonist's life progresses. Thus, similar to how we voyeuristically observe the attempt to resuscitate Asako from a viewpoint of a crack between two sliding doors, we then spy the protagonist's life by opening the doors to the rooms that portray important scenes from his life. Basically, although the scenes that are portrayed are extremely natural and commonplace, the unnaturally quick progression of the scenes and the sense we get that the action is staged and "off" in some way give us a sense that the supernatural has invaded the protagonist's life. This atmosphere foreshadows the supernatural's subsequent overtaking of the hospital and the protagonist's life.
Esther Oh
ReplyDeleteBefore watching “Epitaph,” I thought that I would not be able to keep my eyes open for more than half the movie. However, I am a little disappointed that it was not as scary was I was expecting it to be. I think that many Korean horror movies center around ghosts and supernatural things, much like this movie. One element that stood out to me was the use of music. Every time a scary scene was coming up, eerie music played beforehand. This would tell me to get ready for a something coming up. However, I thought that the music itself was scarier than the “horror” scenes. There were also long takes before the scary scenes to build anticipation.
Throughout the movie, the time kept changing. The movie started with a movie clip from the past of a brain surgery and went to 1979. Then, the movie went back to the past at the hospital. The changing of time and setting were used to tell the story, but this was confusing to me and was hard to follow at times. The characters were all connected in some way, but constant time changes made it hard to keep up with what was happening at times.
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ReplyDeletestudent number 2013841579
Eunice Choi
ReplyDeleteEpitaph pays much attention to the effect of close shots and unpleasant sound effects to build up suspense and stimulate nervousness in the viewers. The movie takes place in various facilities of the Ansaeng hospital: the morgue, the hallway, and the patient room. All of the places are either dim with flickering lights or completely dark. Technical skills with the camera slowly zooms into the darkness, staying fixed onto the dark for at least three seconds to hint for an upcoming shock. When paired up with screechy cacophonous background sound effect, the horror of the film is successfully created. For example, the sudden non-diegetic screech heightens the suspense, immediately making the scene tense with supernatural aura.
Just by looking at the plot, Epitaph is rather a strange form of tragic love story of the living with the dead. Individual story tells a different love story- love between arranged fiancé, parental love, and inseparable love between married couple. Little symbols like snails refer to the inevitable relationships formed between the living and the dead, as the snail's love dart signifies courtship. The focus of the story seems to lie heavier to each love story that the movie loses cohesiveness when viewed as a whole. As a whole movie the plot was somewhat weak in terms of tying the three stories together as one movie. Some ambiguity is left behind concerning the relationships between characters. Why was the doctor so eager to help Asako? Why did Asako look down at the doctor on the ground dying with such indifferent, or maybe complacent face? Some parts of the movie is unclear and needs a second thought.
Michelle Kim
ReplyDeleteOne of the factors that make the Epitaph unique would be the plot. Three different stories of love are intertwined beautifully. From the beginning of the first story, we are given with the clues about the other two stories and continue to get them throughout the film. I was puzzled with so many different clue scenes until the very end of the film. This may be an advantage of the film in that it keeps the audience intrigued. On the other hand, this may be a big disadvantage in that until the end of the film, the audience are left puzzled and that in order to explain them, those clue scenes were repeatedly screened. For example, a scene of everyone walking out of the hospital with a candle due to a blackout, which is one of the most symbolic scenes of the film, was screened a couple of times. Yet it can be said that this repetition does not bore the audience because each time the same scene delivers different meanings and understanding.
Not just the unique plot but also the visual effects made me consider the Epitaph as an art film. Although its genre is horror, a lot of scenes were aesthetically beautiful. The visual effects that I remember the most is falling objects and colors. As for the falling objects, for example, in the important scene I spoke about above, we see a falling snow. And in the first love story of Jeongnam, we constantly see cherry blossoms falling beautifully. As for the colors, white certainly is the most prominent color because everyone in the hospital is wearing white and a lot of the furniture is also white.
Kathryn Brown
ReplyDeleteEpitaph was interesting and not quite what I expected it to be in a lot of ways. In some respects, it is not particularly scary, however, the film is more refined than others in its horror, using it in a more limited, intentional way. It held back in a lot of moments, resisting the cheap thrills that a many other movies tend to overuse. In this way, the viewer's response seems very manipulated, as the film builds up suspenseful moments where one expects something to happen, but never does. Though others may not agree, I find this quality to be one of the strengths of the film. Some of the more classic scares, on the other hand, did seem cheesy, though. The woman pops out of the drawer in the morgue, not unlike The Ring and, more than once, the stereotypical screeching violin was used and, at some point, was so over-emphasized that it made everyone laugh. Other than that, the film used subtle tones and sounds, such as tapping and footsteps to create anticipation of (not-so) imminent terror, crucial to achieving this suspense in the film. The camera functions in a similar way, using slow zooms, tight shots, and close-ups to make the viewer apprehensive about something behind the subject, or long shots to create the sense that something is present, but unseen. Also, only capturing things in part or as shadows, such as in the girl's vision of the father figure from the shoulders down, were effective for this film. All of these elements used together build up a lot of suspense in the viewer, which is not always immediately relieved. I would put this film into the “body genre” category, as it evokes the same kind of physical responses typical to horror movies, which was especially clear after viewing the film as a group.
On another note, I found that, while the story itself was interesting, it was difficult to follow. The non-linear structure of the narrative and the various stories made it tough to bring it together into one cohesive story. All the characters were interrelated in that they were all in the hospital, but it feels disjointed. For example, the young girl's experiences are probably the most frightening in the whole movie, but I don't understand the relevance of that side story to the narrative as a whole. Because of this, the film reads more like “a compilation of sorta-related ghost stories” to me, rather than something more cohesive. I feel that each story could have separately developed into something more detailed and intriguing by itself. The added twist at the end was unexpected for me. It was easy to get caught up in the drama of the serial killings and the realization that the killer was the man's supposedly dead wife to recognize the actuality of the situation. One reoccurring element is that of the bus passing by on the road where the doctor is struck by the car, foreshadowing death. Also, snails and butterflies are significant symbols in the story. Butterflies are often thought of as being omens of death, which makes sense, especially as you see them before and after In Young commits one of her crimes and also modeled on her pin.
Tina Kim
ReplyDeleteEpitaph
In Epitaph, the use of scenery helps portray the character’s emotion and also aid in characteristics. For instance, in the scene where Dr. Jung Nam finishes eating with his daughter, the film flashes the table again at where they just ate, but now without Dr. Nam and his daughter. This shows emptiness inside of him. He also asks his daughter to not come by so often. Another scene, where the empty door way was shown, expresses loneliness. The use of scenery alone conveyed Dr. Jung Nam’s feelings. Another use of scenery was to help portray a character. For the serial killer, her shadow cannot be seen. A long shot of her standing in the background with no shadow on the floor help express that she is like a “ghost”.
Ordinary sounds that are used in daily life are amplified to help create tension, express a character’s feelings, and express significance. Amplification of footsteps is used to create tension and at the same time, isolates the character in the scene. Loud breathing noises, which can be heard throughout the movie was used to express the character’s fear. The amplification of the lights flickering on and off help create an ominous background. The loud flickering of fire as the protagonist and his dead fiancé’s picture being burned was significant to show a marriage.
I found this movie a bit confusing. It is probably because too much was going on with little explanation. There was the doctor and his dead fiancé, the child that was haunted by ghosts, and the serial killer that had two souls in one body. The ending with him walking with the candlelight in the “old photo” was confusing to me.
Seungyoon, Mok
ReplyDeleteEpitaph is a first horror movie is seen in this class. I do not like a horror movie. So, I have just seen few horror movies in my life. The reason I hate a horror movie is a surprising scene. Most of horror movies have a surprising scene which can make people scary. Therefore, I believed that a horror movie is made just for an entertainment in summer and a horror movie is not a work of art. But, Epitaph was different.
Epitaph has three different stories which are connected each other. The first story is of a medical student. He engaged a daughter of a hospital owner. But he had not met her ever. One day, he took care of a dead body of woman and fell in love with it. In the end, the daughter he engaged was the dead body. The hospital owner cheated him and held soul wedding between him and daughter. The second story is of an only survived girl after a car accident and her mother and stepfather died in the accident. She feels guilty for the accident and saw a mother ghost. At last, she died and made a doctor who helped be dead. The third story is a doctor couple. A husband died during a surgery and a wife denied his death. She got a split personality.
Superficially, three stories are just a ghost story. They have a scary and a surprising scene. However, I felt this film is a sad love story. In the first story, the hospital owner made a medical student be lonely during his lifetime. But, she loved her daughter so much, so she held very strange soul wedding. And, in the second story, there was a mother’s love. Her mother did not blame her daughter although she was dying. She just tried to make a little daughter relax till very last moment. Besides, in the third story, I could see the great eternal love. Because she loved her husband very much, she denied he is alive. The third story was finished as a tragedy. But, I could see the feeling of sad woman who lost her one love. Epitaph is definitely classified to a horror movie. However, the sad scenes in the movie made me think and feel about love.
Bo Lee
ReplyDeleteAfter finishing this movie, I had many thoughts and questions running though my head. For me, the beginning of the story and the end of the story didn’t quite match up. The film shows that last time Jungnam sees his daughter, which didn’t make sense either because at the end of the film, he wasn’t dead, he was still quite alive and I also didn’t see the reason for the daughter’s character. The daughter was there to reveal that Jungman had two wives that died within a year after marriage to him. I felt that this information did very little to help the audience understand the story. Also, the three stories don’t really have any connection besides the fact that the people died in the same hospital/location and that Jungman knew the characters in some way.
The type of music that the director chose for this film was very interesting and helped to add suspense to the movie. During the scenes where the audience is taken by surprise, the director used high pitch sounds and for memory scenes, he used classical music to give the audience a feeling of comfort and ease. At times though, the high pitch sounds gave away too much at what was to come next. Overall, this movie wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be and it was really mind blowing.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSangbin Park
ReplyDeleteResponse: Epitaph
The movie Epitaph was a compilation of three stories that happened during the memorable four days at the Anseng Hospital. At the beginning, the movie reminded me of an old film with its black and white scenes and opening credit in a font that would be used for an old film. This “old” sensational mood helped to create a feeling that the story would be from something of the past and, evidently, the movie presented its stories in flashbacks. There were three main stories presented in the movie: Park Jungnam’s story, Asako’s story, and Kim Dongwon’s story. All of these have an overarching theme of love in them. Jungnam’s story was about the love between a live man and a ghost, a dead soul. Asako’s story was about her love towards her new stepfather and her mother’s love towards her. Asako later falls in love with Dr. Lee takes away his life, because she loves him and would like to be with him. Kim’s love story was the most mind-blowing and had a shocking twist to it. Nevertheless, all of these stories showed eternal love that could not be parted with death.
Throughout the movie, I was confused about the story line. I was trying hard to find connections between all of the small stories told by the movie. It was difficult for me to piece everything together while I was watching the movie. The story became clearer when I was done with the movie and had a time to reflect upon it. I watched the movie with an extreme caution to the details of the movie, because I was unsure of where the ghost might appear and what kind of symbolic or metaphoric objects signify the appearance of the ghost. By doing so, I noticed several obvious details of the movie such as, the blinking lights and mirrors, but I figured a few other details to be more significant. The movie’s frequent use of the close-up shot on the faces of the characters to magnify the horrified feelings of the characters added intensity to the movie. In addition, snails appeared in multiple scenes throughout the movie. Since snails are “hermaphrodites,” snails might represent the soul of the dead that coexist with his/her love in the body of the living one. This was apparent in the case of Jungnam’s and Dongwon’s story in which the ghosts stayed besides their loved ones. In conclusion, the movie was about the eternal love of the couples that wanted to love beyond the boundaries of the different worlds.
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ReplyDeleteYoung Joon Kim
ReplyDeleteEpitaph is a Korean Horror and melodrama film directed by the Jung Brothers.
Similar to the melodrama films of the South Korean Golden Age, the tone of Epitaph combined historical reference with melodramatic narration. The three stories of the film were of tragedy and a harsh realism that took place in 1942, during the Japanese occupation of Korea. However, these "tragedies" were were not stemmed from the Japanese themselves, but from overbearing sensations of loneliness, guilt, and sexual desire.
One scene that stood out to me was the when (in Jung-Nam's Dream), the ghost of Aoi captures Jung-Nam and then he imagines scenarios of what would have been his life with Aoi had she not committed suicide. The Mise en scène of this scene tells a beautiful story of a japanese marriage, birth of a son, and romantic love to reveal in the end the necrophilic desires of Jung Nam and the superstitious marriage between dead soul and living body. The scene shows the grisly realism of the japanese occupation and possibly the disgust or disdain towards the japanese through the act of necrophilia (i may be pushing it here).
Throughout the film the Jung Brothers use medium shots of character faces centered in the middle to isolate the characters and show that even though there may be someone by their side or in the background, they are alone. the sense of loneliness is a recurring theme and the desire to be with a loved one is part of every story. Epitaph is very much a melodrama as it is horror as the film displays the sensations of love and loneliness with great exaggeration.
But since the film is a horror film, those evoked emotions are distorted into characteristics of personality disorders, incestuous relationships, and necrophilia.
One scene I really liked was the scene where Dr. Kim discovers his wife, In-young has no shadow. As he waves the light left and right, the Mise en scène again evokes the sensation of loneliness as the scene shows the shadows of the furniture moving but since his wife has no shadow, he tells her to walk to him to be with her since one of them is not there in the room.
The Epitaph
ReplyDeleteYunhwa Choi
The Epitaph deals with the theme of ‘love’ and ‘death’, telling three different sub-stories, which all takes place at the “An-saeng” hospital. The first story is about the soul marriage of a living person and a dead person. The audience is shocked when Jung-nam’s fiancé is turned out to be the corpse in the scene that a woman tears off two charms from the two pictures, which are Jung-nam and the daughter of director of the hospital. This gives the audience fear and shock by reversal. The second story is about a young girl’s illusion made by her guilt. As she feels guilty thinking that her mother, her stepfather, and an old woman with a kid crossing the road are all died because of her, she sees illusions of them. After the doctor consoles her, she realizes that her dying mother told her that it was not her fault. The doctor who became to love her also dies after he sees the girl’s illusion. The last story was the saddest of all, and it was quite complex to understand. During the surgery, a husband Dong-won is killed by a patient, and his wife In-young lives thinking as if she is Dong-won. Here, Dong-won (actually In-young) realizes his wife has no shadow, which means she is not a living person. This couple loves each other so much that even after a partner dies, she does not accept her husband’s death. While she is dying after she stabs herself, she says “I feel lonely.” I could presume the meaning as she is now alone after realizing that her husband was not living one. In the whole movie, snails often appear, and they may be symbolize the eternal love because snails are hermaphrodite.
Yoonil Cho
ReplyDeleteThe movie ‘Epitaph’ has 3 different stories which are all related to love. By arranging stories in this way, using omnibus plot, it not only made audience easier to understand the stories but also made scenes classical. These features have differentiated the movie from the other horror movies which contain too complicated characters and structures. Every part of this movie, such as props, acting, sound effects, background, made this movie really scary, but each of the parts does not just pop up alone. They altogether soak into the stories and maximizes the fear. It means the movie could scare the audience by just well-ordered stories with basic effects unlike other horror movies which uses lots of cruel and shocking scenes to surprise audience. Also unlike other horror movies which only show dark and gloomy background, ‘Epitaph’ sometimes shows polished scenes as well as dark scenes. We can see the director's aesthetic sense in those scenes.
This movie 'Epitaph‘ is kind of unique because it connected romance and horror which is an odd combination. Nonetheless the movie showed both very well and made audience moved. One of the symbols that appeared in the movie, snail which is hermaphrodite, means the sad love that cannot be broken even by death. By such symbol the movie expresses the theme effectively and touching. Therefore to me, this movie was very unconventional and shocking but also very moving by the color and romance.
The Chung brothers 2007 film Epitaph, explores themes of love and guilt and its association with death. The film follows the story of three interrelated characters, a child patient who survived an automobile accident that killed both her parents (which she caused), a medical intern forced into an arranged marriage (leading to the suicide of the future wife), and two surgeons in love (with one of them sacrificing their life to save the other). In all three cases someone whom the characters “loved” died leaving with extreme feelings of guilt because of their belief in causing the death.
ReplyDeleteThe directors do this in order to convey a message about how extreme guilt haunts people until death. The directors convey this message through the use of a reoccurring symbol, the ghosts. Although in the movie the ghosts seem to be used to scare the audience, they represent much more. The ghosts represent the guilt that follows the three survivors, and that constantly haunts them until they die. In the case of Asako the child patient it is revealed that she caused the accident that killed her parents. In turn the ghosts that continually haunt Asako are her parents and only when she dies is she able to move on (Dr. Lee see her when he dies and she thanks him). In the case of Jeong-Nam Park although it is not explicitly seen that he feels guilty in causing his future wife’s (through arranged marriage) death, he is haunted by her ghost inferring that he does in fact feel guilty in causing her to commit suicide. Once again only through death is Jeong-Nam relieved of his guilt (when he dies after seeing Aoi’s ghost). The last case following Dr. Dong-Won Kim and Dr. In-Yeong Kim it is less straightforward in understanding. In-Yeong Kim suffers mental problems believing she is Dong-Won trying to stop In-Yeong from killing people. In relating this back to how guilt haunts people until death Dong-Won was killed in her hands (as he sacrificed himself for her). In-Yeong becomes haunted by Dong-Won as she comes to believe he has become a part of her. Again only after committing suicide is she relieved from her guilt.
It is true that Epitaph is not a conventional horror movie. Surprisingly, I was able to watch a good amount of the movie without having to look away. The eerie sounds and sudden pop up of some dead characters did startle and scare from time to time. For a horror movie, however, I was surprised there were some happier tones of music playing in the background. One was playing during the scene with the power outage, where one of the interns was wishing the problem wouldn’t be fixed so he and the other interns would have the night off. Another one was during the scene of Asako’s flashback of her first love.
ReplyDeleteOverall, the movie is confusing. With three storyline being intertwine as one, I wasn’t able to follow or connect some of the storyline. The repeated scenes, especially the autopsy scene, added more to the confusion. I’ve also noticed how there’s minimal explanation to the events. We would see familiar faces throughout the movie, but their appearances would be questionable because they may already be dead. One particular example is the scene with the doctor getting hit by a car in a hit-and-run accident, but he sees Asako, who is dead, amongst the crowd in the bus just before his death. This entire movie seems like a puzzle waiting to be solved.
Alice Kwon
ReplyDeleteI am not a fan of horror movies but Epitaph was not that scary. The movie seemed a bit contrived and used everything in the scare book, making the overall impression very slow and uninteresting. The acting was really frustrating; I believe the slow, monotonous mode of conveying the script was supposed to come off as spooky but it just felt very awkward and forced. I wish the film had been more linear, jumping from story to story made it hard to resonate with a single, main character. However, I enjoyed the artistic quality that came through in various flashbacks and supernatural settings.
I noticed the use of white throughout the film. All of the characters were seen wearing white clothing (hospital gown, patient gown, blouse, etc.) This is a common choice for horror films and understandably so. The sterile, unfeeling conveyance of the color does produce a level of fear.
If you take a step back, the film is an unconventional portrayal of three love stories, an honoring of deceased persons as in "epitaph" Despite this basis, the film failed to stir any emotion and I left the movie feeling unsatisfied.
Joung Eun Kim
ReplyDeleteThis movie contains three stories. Three stories are about love, and death. The story of old days start with the main character Jungnam's rememberance. Jungnam is a doctor, and he had two wives, but both died in one year after a marriage with Jungnam. That reason is revealed in the first story. He wanted to be an artist, but he became a doctor, because of the owner of the hospital. The owner of the hospital wanted Jungnam to get married with her daughter. However, Jungnam had not seen her even once. Later, Jungnam got fall in love with a dead girl. The dead girl was the daughter of the owner, but he did not know that. At last, Jungnam got to get married with the dead person. That was why Jungnam's wives died in a year after a marriage with him. I have one curiosity here. Snails keep coming out in the movie. I could not guess why snails kept coming out until finishing the movie.
The second story is about one girl who had a car accident, and her mom and stepfather died, but she is the only survivor. She feels guilty much because she loved stepfather and was jealous of her mom. She sees mom's ghost, and suffers. Doctor Sooin takes care of her, and she gets better, and realizes that her mom loves her even after the car accident. However, at last she dies. And, after a few days later, doctor Sooin dies as well. I think the girl's love toward stepfather changed to doctor Sooin.
The third story is about one married doctor couple. One female doctor regards herself as her husband, and kills many people. However, she does not know that who she is till she stands at the court. Also, when she regards herself as her husband, whenever she sees herself, she realizes that herself does not have a shadow. I think that contains deep meaning. Also, I realized why snails keep coming out in this movie after watching this. Snails are hermaphrodite. I think snails keep coming out mainly for the last story.
Response to Epitaph
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the setting really impressed me. Even though I am not familiar with old hospitals, but with old-fashioned Japanese style furniture and items are good enough to develop creepiness. Also, the backgrounds of setting are unique and beautiful. I don’t quiet get what brings Kyung Sung in colonized Korea and horror film, the three stories are quiet similar to Korean, Japanese folk tales. It brought me genre confusion. From the beginning, because it showed a high school female ghost haunting aged Jung-Nam, but the story developed overall it is somewhere between melodrama and horror. Overall what left in me after watching movie is neither horrifying that I can’t go to bed alone or a romantic such as movie “Ghost”.
There are few things I want to make point. Firstly, it is a white hair that Jung-Nam dyed (?) after a suicide of the dean of the hospital. To me, this was a quiet cliché because this motive often shows in folk tales or literature that the person is haunted. The interesting part was the ghost dyed in weird position like 80th or 90th high teen star. Secondly, the symbol of snail has two interpretations. One is related to third story in film about Japanese soldier serial killer. Kaeda killed soldiers for her revenge and she missed the husband so much that she had dissociative identity disorder. In other words, she kept two identities because she loves him so much. Snail is hermaphrodite. The other interpretation would be; Snail symbolizes pure ghosts that have no harm to people in Japanese myth. After Jung-nam made love with the ghost, snails were all over her dead body. It’s a symbol of purification, maybe a salvation.
I feel that the main weakness in this film has to do with transitioning from scenes to flashbacks in time. At the end of each flashback I couldn’t distinguish where, in terms of the sequence of events, in the story we were picking up from; after a while I couldn’t interpret the chronological sequence of events that took place. Aside from this primary factor, the director did a great job in scaring me out of my wits thanks to a combination of factors. “Epitaph” consists of many slow forward and backward tracking shots when, in combination with a dark setting producing a multitude of shadows and eerie background noise, was more than enough to evoke fear in those who cannot stand to watch horror films. Even though the camera is following the character in this way, these tracking shots make me feel like someone or something was also creeping up behind me.
ReplyDeleteOne notable scene in this film for me was when Asako recalls the accident that left her an orphan. The camera is situated so that the audience sees the event occurring through Asako’s eyes because this is her story to tell. The camera pans from left to right revealing Asako, her mother and new father, Koshiro, in a car. It’s snowing as they drive through a road surrounded by trees and already covered in snow. Close ups and extreme close ups of the back and side of the Asako’s parents’ heads reveal everything we see set in a dull grey color scheme: Asako’s mom is wearing an ivory dress while Koshiro is in a heather grey suit with white stripes; both their faces are as pale as the snow along the road. Asako, on the other hand, is the only thing that stands out in this scene: she wears a bright red coat and her face is warm with color. This color contrast is done to focus on Asako; this is her story to tell and the bright red coat she wears is used to symbolize how she is responsible for the blood spilt from the three people who were killed in the car accident she caused.
Grace Chang
ReplyDeleteThe movie Epitaph features three different love stories that happen in and around Anseng Hospital in 1942. What I noticed about this movie was Chung Brothers’ delicate way of depicting a very sensitive period in Korea’s history. This particular year can be interpreted as part of an important historical period of Korea since Japanese colonial era went on during this time. Most of Koreans generally response to this topic very negatively, but I felt like the movie portrays Japanese soldiers (as well as the Korean soldiers and the nurse) as victims, rather than giving them the images of the violent colonialists who invaded Korea. Some major characters such as Japanese commander, a bipolar professor, and Dr.Kaeda are bilingual in Korean and Japanese. Not only that, I also noticed that these protagonists all share love between Japanese and Korean.
All of these stories involve two major figures that share similar characteristics when it comes to love; there is always a protagonist who gives unconditional love and another protagonist who is obsessed with the lover. Jung-nam gets obsessed with Aoi as he takes Aoi’s ring and attempts to put it on his finger; ring indicates an obvious symbolic meaning of marriage and a tie between one another, and when Jung-nam puts a ring on Aoi’s finger, he also becomes spiritually dead. This indication can be seen when he spills a chemical product on his shirt, which looks as if he is bleeding. Another metaphor is the close-up shot of the dead bird and Aoi’s body; we get a glimpse of Jung-nam’s portrait drawings of these two particular objects. Aoi then reacts to Jung-nam’s love and gradually gets obsessed with Jung-nam and does not let him marry or be happy with the other women in his life. The second story of Asako shows a twisted emotion of Asako toward his stepfather as she even feels jealous of her mother. Her obsession later passes on to her personal doctor at the hospital, resulting to another death. Lastly, the tragic love connection between the doctor and the professor display love that crosses certain mortal line and the spiritual world itself. During In-young’s lecture, she explains to her students about the weight of the spirit from the dead body and bipolar incidents in the past, which gives many clues to the audiences about the plot of the story.
Shi hui Chen Lin
ReplyDeleteThe film “Epitaph” calls attention to love, guilt and loneliness a bit more than its scariness. Comparing to other films of its genre, it seems to be more elegant and poetic in telling the stories. For example, the scenes that describe Dr. Jeong-Nam’s flashback of his days as a medical student in An-Seng Hospital at the opening are very peaceful and relaxed, especially with the graceful background music and slow camera movement. In addition, the scenes that depict the beautiful life that Jeong-Nam and Aoi would have had had she not committed suicide are particularly poetic and elegant. There are many other such scenes, include the one where Aoi first appeared, concealing in the ice under the snow, and when Dr. Kim In-Yeong and her husband were having a very romantic moment with the snowing couple toy. These scenes all set “Epitaph” apart from conventional horror film. It leads the audience to reflect more about the bittersweet love and the underneath themes of the movie and to empathize more with the characters, instead of the creepiness and gruesomeness that most horror films left with.
Although the elegant way of telling the story sets the film apart from its counterparts, the scary parts of the movie to me are formulaic and cliché, such as the use of eerie background music to build up suspense and anxiety, the sudden pop out of the scary people, and the blood. However, the three stories of the film were interwoven and were told in a non-chronological way. This creates confusion and I can hardly grasp the timeline of the stories. I think this technique helps with creating suspense but at the same time creates unnecessary confusion for the audience. The constant switch back and forth in time takes away audience’s attention and appreciation on the core parts of the movie.
Overall I think “Epitaph” is quite a breakthrough in horror film for I remember more vividly the sentimental and touching themes of love and guilt rather than the horridness of the film.
Ji Hee Lee
ReplyDeleteWhile watching this movie “Epitaph”, I thought the light was the most important part of this film. The director placed significant amount of scenes related to light, darkness, shadow, what light and darkness reflects, etc. Just like any horror film, something always happen in the dark. When Jungnam was in the autopsy room he notices dark water leaking from where Aoi’s body was stored. He’s almost gets sucked into the darkness of the empthy storage and suddenly spirit of Aoi shows up and actually pulls him into the locker. Also Asako follows into the darkness, when she walks into the dark hallway, she sees her mom, grandmother, child, and her stepfather she accidently killed. Asako’s mother, whos’ face is covered with blood, comes to her and combs her hair. In another scene, she follows her loving stepfather into the light and when the horrific scenes continues even in the bright background, made the scene even more frightening.
Shadow was a big part of Dongwon and Inyoung’s story because it was a clue and an evidence of who they are. Dongwon first appears by saying how he doesn’t see Inyoung’s shadow and unravels the mystery (whether his wife was the serial killer or not) Eventually his identity is revealed as a persona Inyoung have made up in response to the trauma she had when her husband died. She didn’t see a shadow of Inyoung because while she believed herself as Dongwon, the image of Inyoung was actually another imaginary of herself.
The opening of the movie, Epitaph was very puzzling and mysterious. The clip of the brain surgery that was shown at the first start of the movie links to the scene that came up later in the film. There also was an unknown girl that sits next to the main character(Jungnam) and later, at the end, the film reveals her identity, as a ghost. This kind of drawback pattern repeats throughout the whole movie, and due to that, it was kind of difficult to grasp the plot of the film.
ReplyDeleteOne of the shots that was the plus to the movie was using the corridor as the horrifying place where ghosts come out. There were a lot of shots with zooming in and out of the corridor. And there would always be a ghost at the end of the hall. Zooming in and out of camera made the scene a lot more dramatic and horrifying to watch. Additionally, crescendo of the background aural effect adds more impact to the scene.
There were also a lot of objects that foreshadows, for instance, snail, mirror, bird, ring, and butterfly all foreshadows the future scene. Overall, all the visual and aural effect perfectly created highlighted scenes of the movie and horror.
Won Jae Chang
ReplyDeleteThe horror film, ‘Epitaph’, consists of three separate stories, which all have connection, few characters (human and ghost), same location (Ahn Seng hospital) and same theme of frustrating love. In the first story, Jung-Nam finally falls in love with dead girl. The second story is about Asako’s love toward her stepfather and later she falls in love with Dr. Lee. The last story is about a widow, Doctor Kim Inyong, who cannot admit her husband death. All of these stories have turned into tragic events by either love or obsession. Overall, the film was not easy to follow because of the movie jumping through many time levels including the dream sequence.
The director of ‘Epitaph’ has used the sound effects including instrumental music and high pitch (noisy) sounds. The peaceful sound begins and often substituted to fearful sound then slowly increasing the level of sound and this has generated horror to the audience. In other words, the director has expressed the process of changing protagonist’s feeling from peace to fear through the sound effects. In addition, the sad music is used at some scene to create sad mood.
The symbolic characters such as ‘black butterfly’ and ‘snail’ can be found in the film. When Kim Dongwon sees his wife’s pillow, there is ‘black butterfly’ that lie on the pillow then it flies away. This black butterfly has a symbolic meaning of grudge soul. Kim Inyong who found as dead person or ghost, she started to commit a crime for her revenge to random innocent people. She murders a Japanese soldier and Nurse Choi. The ‘snail’ often appears at many scenes. The snail has a symbolic meaning of hermaphroditic which it represents the connection between live and dead figure that these cannot have real ordinary relationship while it has dual meaning of unable to set apart between them.
Kidam response
ReplyDeleteSang Won Jee
First of all, this movie was so scary. Overall, every three stories were connected by some objects and scenes.
The movie started with long shot of phone calling. Old person taking a call and the stories begin. It was pretty long intro to go to past
The first story started with the white fabric dried on the ropes with natural light.
First story - the story begins with the myth that doctors should not see the mirror in the funeral room and do not break. Unless, they will see the ghosts. The main character Jung nam Park break the mirrors and the medicines. He started see the ghost after than. However, the important fact of first story is snail that jung nam found in funeral room. Snail connects between ghost and jung nam. In few scenes, the gaspel song played near the funeral room. Also, the boss of the hospital is the key character of this story. Every happening are occured from her. The ghost Aoi was her daughter and she died with a man who she loved. However, head of the hospital wanted to marry with jung nam park because he's parents and the boss promised to make them engage. Thus, boss make them married in spirit, the monk helped them them to marry in secretely. In this story the time flows very fast. After ghost took him to the unreal world, he saw she pregnant, play with his child, and see each other with grabing the hand each other. The white fabric was tied them together.
The light if the hospital on and off often in this movie and this element also connected with other stories. Also, the snow falling scene was important fact to next story.
Second story - 2days ago. the story brgins with one child injured by car accident. Her mom was dead and covered with white fabric. This means her mom alreay dead. In this story, the hallway was the connection between the real world and the place that Asako got accident. She dreamed through her mother and one old woman with a baby on her back. Also a man who is her new father occured in her dream. Actually Asako loved him and be jealous to her mother. Every happenings are started from her mother introducing new father to Asako. In this moment, she took the picture with her mother in a specific place. This phto is a key element of the start and end of this story. The sound of breaking mirror and gaspel song also added in this story too. Dr.Lee is a key character that telling the story of her and the happenings. He tried to bring her stories through his experiences. He promised to her that he will always be with her. In this sotry the snow is a connection element between hospital hallway and the place she got accident. Also, due to the snow Asako and Dr.Lee got a car accident. The scene after car accident , Asako and her mom fall in to the ground and grab the hand on the snow. However, this scene overlaped with first story scene which is Jung nam and the ghost kissing in the white fabric. Thus, these two scenes are conmected by white fabric. At the end of the story when Dr.Lee got an accident Asako appeared in the train and watching him. The glass ball with sniw falling scene comes next that continue to third story.
2nd
ReplyDeleteSang Won Jee
Third story - 3days ago. The fist story scene came out first and give us a connection. Also, the glass ball with falling snow, light and shadow and butterfly is a key concept of this story. Through the glass ball, the teacher who teache about the ghost and soul found his wife is a ghost because she doesn't have a shadow on her. The butterfly binyu represented the love between the teacher and his wife at first. However, this object changed in to the weapon that killing people. Finally, In young actual human and the dead man's wife killed herselves with butterfly bi nyu and every mudered happening solved by glass ball with a letter that she wrote down. This story is about the bing ui which is interacting with ghost. However, director represented the love that don't have the limit through the objects such as butterfly, snow, light and shadow. In this story the gaspel song appears too but actually this somg ends too. It means this story is the last story and everything finalize in this moment.
At the end of third story, every stories conclusion came out. Head of the hospital died herselves after she saw her daughter Aoi, and Dr.Lee died in the hospital with Asako saying love him.
Through the white fabric, the old man who is Jung nam in first story died due to the ghost with holding the drawing that he drew brfore.
At the end of the movie, during the passage of the hospital collapse, every character of the movie shring the fire on the candle and walked out.
Every story of this movie connected each other with some objects and places. So it continues the stories. Director used long shoe extreme close shot, zoom in and out alot. These long shots and close shots made people to focus on the scene and the sound effects made people nervous or relax.
Sound effects were key elements of this movie too . Due to the sounds people could connect some sences and stories. Also these sound effects made people know which situation it is.
I focused on the time flows, actually the story concluded in thrid story which is 3days ago. However, second story which is 2days ago and first story finished in last story. The time mixed and twisted eachother and connected through the happenings and the objects.
Dongsu Jo
ReplyDeleteEpitaph has three stories that occur in a hospital in Japanese colonial era. The movie title in Korean is called, “ki-dam” which means “weird story“. The weird story make more sense because the movie ends with an implication that the ghost does not really exit but rather a kind of mental illness. I think the subject of three stories has to do with “wrong family love”.
First of all, the movie started with mother(director of hospital)’s wrong love, like an obsessive attachment about her daughter(Aoi). Aoi suicided with her lover, because of the arranged marriage with Jungnam. But her mother made her dead daughter’s soul marry with Jungnam so that Aoi couldn’t meet with her lover even after she’s dead. Everything was done without telling to Jungnam, this wasn’t just maternal love of mother but selfish greed. It shows mother’s greedy love that too much care about her daughter, even she is dead. Also mother killed herself because she missed her daughter so much. The mother didn't do anything that her daughter would really want. The second wrong love is Asako’s love for her stepfather. Asako loved her stepfather as a man and she envy her real mother and their relationship. In the car, Asako holds stepfather and gets into accident, killing 4 people without herself. This tragic accident would not have happed only if Asako wasn’t greedy wanting to have her stepfather all on her own. Asako’s wrong love for her stepfather ended the life of her family. The last one is a female doctor who lost her husband during the surgery. Longing for her husband wasn’t the problem, it seemed like she couldn’t let go of her husband. Her obsession toward her husband grew and made herself to become a serial killer with mental disorder. These wrong way of family love make “weird stories“ and tragic stories.
Andrew Song
ReplyDeleteI personally hate horror movie, but in the class, I found out that in this film sound was the main component to push reactions out of the audience. I think it was not that scary as i thought to be but it was the sound that makes me creep. The harsh shrieking sounds and some of the carnivalesque melodies that tried to enhance the suspense only detracted from it. The non diegetic sound which not only consisted of shrieking instruments and carnival sideshow melodies also consisted of piano clips that were meant to push the mood toward a sense of anxiety and we knows its the pop out part is coming. Some of the diegetic sounds such as the crying and the wind chimes were more effective in setting a more dramatic mood for the film, but I think the nondiegetic sound was definitely worked in this film.
Secondly, this movie, it deals with three different stories that eventually connect together under the theme of love. I found it to be still scary but with the stories, unlike other typical horror movies, The movie Epitah connects the horror part and melodramatic component together to enhance the theme of the movie.
Kelsey Savoy
ReplyDeleteThe Jung-Brother’s horror film, Epitaph, defies usual horror conventions and manages to create an extremely visually beautiful tale of human loss and grief. As an avid fan of horror, I was delightfully surprised by the film’s lack of an essential “big baddie” that basically kills everyone in sight for no apparent reason accept for a the sake of the film. The film’s plot almost creates a type of an anthology by interweaving three different stories that all intersect in some way. The three stories all illustrate human connection and how we are affected when our relationships are severed by death. This sense of loneliness is perpetuated throughout the film. When Jungnam is introduced at the beginning, he is almost never accompanied by anyone within the frame until an eerie schoolgirl figure is introduced. Jungnam is centered in the middle of the frame while he lectures making him seem small in comparison to the space around him continuing the theme that he is lonely even while he is in the room full of students.
Not only is this sense of loneliness prevalent but it is also the loss of identity that a person suffers when they lose a loved one. When Asako is plagued with the guilt from her parents’ deaths, she flashes back to a close up shot of her mother letting go of her previously held hand to rush to her new husband. This shot illustrates how her new stepfather threatens Asako’s identity as her mother’s daughter so she attaches herself to the new man. In the crash, Asako loses both of them totally forfeiting her identity. An extremely close up shot of her mother’s bloodstained hand now regripping Asako’s after the crash is what finally sets Asako free from her terrible hallucinations perpetuating that Asako has now regained her identity. Dr. Kaneda’s identity is most literally compromised as she develops an extreme case of multiple personality disorder. The film cleverly re-takes previous scenes that do not seem significant, such as the students discussing ghosts with a professor, and replays them almost exactly but with a change of character. The repetition of these scenes shows how Dr. Kaneda was almost living life twice as two people. From a historical perspective, the Korean identity was compromised during Japanese Colonial reign, the time period which the film is partly set. Koreans were forced to change their names to Japanese ones, and essentially forced to try to forget their Korean culture. This film in a most literal way illustrates how our sense of self is affected when part of it is taken away.
Ng Hui Shin
ReplyDeleteThe use of lights and sound in this film makes it scary. Whenever a scary scene will occur, a sharp and sudden screeching sound plays in the background, which sort of prepares us for the scare. However, even though we know that the next scene will be scary, it still does not reduce much of the scariness, perhaps due to the suddenness and extreme close-ups shots of the images. The use of shadows to signify the presence of a supernatural occurrence also adds to the shroud of mystery surrounding the horror. By not directly showing us what the ‘ghosts’ do, we are left to imagine what goes on in the shadows. In a way, this makes the film even more mystifying and thus scary. The odd angle of shots also adds on the mystery of the film. For example, whenever Aoi’s mother was talking to Jung Nam, she is not facing the camera straight on. This is in contrast to Jung Nam, who always faces the camera straight on, or where there are close-ups of his ‘facial expression’. Rather, she was shot from the side or slightly from the back. This makes us wonder if something more is going on, or whether she is hiding any secrets.
The use of the hospital hallway and partitions also appear to signify passages or spaces of death, where the ghostly hauntings mostly appear along the hallway, or through partitions. Also, snow appears to be the signal for ghostly happenings. Perhaps it was also used to show a starker contrast with the dark red of the blood, thus further adding to the visual gore aspect. Perhaps it was also used to symbolise purity and goodness, where the good of the victims appear to be contrasted with the ‘bad’ of the ghosts who kill people.
Donghee Kim
ReplyDeleteUnlike any other common horror genre, “Epitaph” has visualized very poetic, aesthetic cinematography throughout the movie. The directors have divided a three different stories as a flashback in 1942 under Japanese occupation, specifically at Anseng Hospital. In the first story, the main character Jung nam was about to get arranged married with hospital director’s daughter. However, this daughter turned out to be a ghost. Surreal scenes of their “honeymoon” were emotionally drawn out along with melancholic beauty. During this first story, snails are used in order to symbolize the eternity. This “eternal love” added with the mother’s guilt provide tragic side of plot. Second story involves Asako, a girl who survived from the car accident where her mother and the stepfather were killed and Soo-in, her doctor. They share their own trauma together and become companions to each other. We could observe loss and gain of companions. Last episode tries to shows how supernatural forces or souls are part of us or within us and that how lonely it would be without them as In-young mentioned in the movie as Dong-won. Because this is the horror movie it does have the effect of sound, still shots of camera, flickering lights, and blood were used to elevate the mood of the movie.
However, the purpose of this movie is what makes it special; it does not try to scare the viewers. Although it was really confusing to understand the whole movie with flow, I think that the main theme of this movie was well directed. This movie's emotional connections in time and space between life and death, demonstrate whole experiences or occasions we go through in our lives.
Joan Kim
ReplyDeleteBlack and white silent brain surgery.
What a perfect way to start off a horror movie... I automatically looked at the corner of the screen and then away... The fact that it was silent made it worse because I watch scary movies with my ears... The music usually gives me the cue to look at the screen or look down. Fortunately, the black and white silent brain surgery ended after a minute or two.
As I mentioned above, I watch scary movies with my ears. Because I make short film/vlogs on my spare time, I know and understand the importance of soundtracks. However, I appreciate it most when I am watching horror movies for the cues. The soundtracks in this film was on point -I knew when it was okay to watch and I knew when I should expect a scare. The sound accentuates every frightening image.
I hate the feeling after watching scary movies. Can I walk to the bathroom by myself? Can I sleep with the lights off? Although most scary movies end up being very stupid, the thrill still haunts me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed having to THINK about this film. No matter how dark the eerie hallways were or how creepy the sounds were, I was surprised at how I watched most of the film -it was because of the thinking I had to do. The movie went back and forth with some scenes and there were so many random stories that I questioned; I had to watch in order to figure out the riddle.
Hyungwoo Kim
ReplyDelete“Epitaph” is an omnibus movie. This movie looks like progressing different story but eventually connected as one. I think it is kind of weird. “Epitaph” is horror movie but love, mother’s instinctive love and sympathy reflects in horror genre as complexly. It is not a same as other omnibus style movie because “Epitaph” combined each episode to one smoothly than staccato. This movie can separate as 3 big episodes and I can felt different feeling. This movie is little bit different with others because this movie is not only focused on horror but also strange background as horror movie that is Japanese colonial period. Some people can say there is nothing need at horror movie but materials touched sensitivity and story-unfolding method is unique.
Every episodes made well and director painstakingly and classy. Music and movie also matched well. So “Epitaph” is little bit sensibility and beauty as horror genre movie. Of course, I was freak out at second episode that is mother ghost but generally movie filled with emotional that is other horror movie can’t follow. I am still confusing about hospital owner’s daughter and medical school student’s marriage of convenience. Personally, third episode’s reversal was kind similar as “Six Sense”. But, most counterphobic episode was second episode’s mother ghost and also I felt sympathy, sorrowful and sad.
The material of love in movie, usually be expressed as beautiful, but I never thought love is well matched with horror. “Epitaph” showed to me shocked moments using love with horror.
This movie tried to hard to be a horror film when there was very little horror to it. The constant jumps and shifts in time made the movie far to confusing to follow and be afraid of. The jumps in time also did not help with the double twist about the killer imagining her husband imagining her doing the killing when in reality it was her doing it her self. It was hard to connect that the dead perfect woman was in fact the main characters finance. And the sub-story of the little girl just felt like it didn't fit. It was as if this were 3 movies in one but there was not any clear connection, nor disconnection between them. This all led to a confusing story.
ReplyDeleteSome good things for the horror type film that it wanted to be was the sound track. It had the very familiar sounds that we know from normal horror movies that would lead up to the big scare. It would help to bring a sense of urgency and anticipation to it. The music along with some of the track shots helped a lot with the anticipation which horror films are all about.
Fang-chieh Lien
ReplyDeleteWhen I was watching “Epitaph,” I could barely open my eyes because of the unpleasant sound in the film. There are many kinds of sounds that add an element of suspense. The bell and drum sounds signify that something is going to happen, and the eerie, grating sound creates a feeling of avoiding. Also, I found that there are many scenes are actually silent; what we can hear are just the breaths of the characters. Since those scenes are already tense enough, no artificial sound is needed. With many combinations of these sounds, the directors successfully constructed the creepy atmosphere of this film. In addition, I believe that snails, which we’ve seen many times in the film, also help create the sticky, creepy feeling.
The flow of this film makes me a bit confused when watching. In this film, we can see something like “3 days ago” and “four days ago.” However, when I got home and had some time to think through the film again, I found that this way of editing actually helps build up the emotions for three different stories because each story flows smoothly without being interrupted. Although this is indeed a horror movie, the stories are in fact very moving. I totally agree that this is not a conventional horror movie. I almost cried when Asako remembered that her mother told her that it was not her fault, so she can finally leave this world with peace of mind. And things became really clear that Asako’s mother was never trying to scare Asako in the hospital; she was just worried about her daughter and wanted to comb her daughter’s hair. Therefore, the key motif in this film seems to be love: the unconditional love Asako’s mother gave her and the unbending love between In-young and Dong-won, the doctors.
Epitaph is most noted with settings of two different time zones and three different stories. Such non-linear narrative structure with three episodes provides ambivalence for the audience in understanding the film, however, the episodes of different background-setting and protagonists are inter-related in that they all take place in Anseng Hospital. Distinctive feature of setting two different time zones, the year of 1979 when old Jungnam works as a director of Anseng hospital and his reminiscence of the colonial period in 1942 when he works as a medical intern. Unlike dominant notion of being a doctor, which provides an insight of stability and success, his life as a doctor continually generates an isolation and loneliness. Such aspect reflects the state of emotions, especially “loneliness” through an empty room and a scene where Dongwon finds out that Inyoung has no shadow. Portrayal of Inyoung as a shadowless protagonist provides a sense of horror and identifies her as a ghot, however, it greatly contributes to generating a sense of sorrow and loneliness through dualism. Such dual expression is also well reflected in the scene where Jungnam falls in love with a corpse in autopsy. Autopsy is dominantly distinct as a space of horror and death, however, it transforms to that of love, which illustrates a dramatic effect in that he finally gets to meet his fiancé that he never met and falls in love with her.
ReplyDeleteAs previously discussed, the motif of loneliness is significantly amplified through various techniques of cinematography. A long shot that portrays Inyoung as shadowless crucially contributes to creating a greater sense of horror a critical threat is imminent, but unseen. Furthermore, slow zooms into the darkness, and tight shots and close-ups of a dead bird and the body of Aoi not only create a simultaneous tension and build up the suspense, but also functions as a metaphor. It is clearly visible that stimulation of sound effects through amplified footsteps and loud breathing noise was effective in portraying the state of emotions and the dominant motif. In addition, the symbolic expression through particular objects such as snails and butterfly enhances the sense of loneliness. Snails illustrate an inevitable relationship between the living and dead, Jungnam and Aoi. Aoi was dead before the marriage, but their bond perpetually continued through the ghost marriage. Another symbol butterfly signifies death in that Inyoung kills innocent people such as soldiers and nurse Choi. As well reflected in the phrase, “I would like to believe in the souls”, loneliness and nostalgia remain a crucial recurring motives throughout the film.
YoonJu Bae
ReplyDeleteEpitaph is unique in that the movie is divided into three stories. This plot format could be advantageous in providing different storyline with various mood and camera effects. All three stories take place in the Anseng Hospital. The facilities in the hospital are shown in dim or dark lights, and the darkness itself gives the tension to the movie. The first story about the living and the dead's soul marriage, there are a few sudden frightening scenes such as the ghost popping out of the drawer, which is similar to the other horror films of today. Nevertheless, the movie did not just focus on the classic scares. The visuals of the living and the dead's soul marriage scenes were very beautiful and touching that were not usually seen in the horror films. The snails shown on the dead bride's body symbolizes the love that even death cannot break apart. The snail's hermaphrodite feature could also be the meaning of the two being together whether one is living or dead. Another interpretation of the snail symbolism is that, the snail in Japan represents a ghost of resentment.
The second story about a girl having illusions due to the guilt of killing her mother in a car accident has many scenes of scary visual and audio effects. The ticking sounds made by the mother ghost made all the viewers get goosebumps. Also, the monotonous piano sound in the background builds the suspense and tension. The third story is rather like a mystery than a horror. This last story is very complicated compared to the other two, and due to many reversals to the story, it was a little hard to grasp and understand the plot line. The killing of the Japanese soldier was not just random, but it was due to the revenge to the Japanese soldier patient that killed her husband during the surgery. The usage of the butterfly hairpin as a killing instrument was interesting. It could be a hint to the viewers in advance that the real living serial killer is a female doctor Inyoung, not her husband. Overall, the movie was not boring and it was different from other horror films in that there are love stories involved throughout the storyline.
Joanna Han
ReplyDelete“Epitaph” is an eerie but beautifully shot film set during the Japanese Imperial Period of Korea. Although within the horror film genre, “Epitaph” rises above its mainstream counterparts through its stunningly memorable cinematography. One scene that particularly comes to mind when discussing the beauty of this film was when Aoi is seen underneath the frozen river as a single red rose petal gently lays to rest on the ice. The sudden cracking of the river creates a hauntingly ominous effect emphasizing the importance of Aoi throughout the film. To be honest, the background stories of the characters, such as Asako and her naïve love for her step-father, were so visually and aesthetically alluring that I forgot I was even watching a horror film.
However, where the film superseded in cinematography, it lacked in plot and character development. With its predictable plot twists, such as the multiple identity disorder in the nurse serial killer, and its easily anticipated “scare” and “shock” moments, there were for lack of a better word, some very corny moments in the film. One such example is when Dr. Kim realizes that his wife, In-Yeong, doesn’t have a shadow. The dramatic close-up on his face in combination with the overly intense music created a rather ridiculous scene that felt like watching some cheesy daytime soap opera. As a viewer, it was hard not to laugh. In these ways, “Epitaph” and its stunning cinematography is a unique film in that it defies the stereotypes of the quality of the horror genre, but at the same time keeps true to them through its predictability.
Ja Hyun Kim
ReplyDeleteEpitaph was one of very few scary movies that I have watched in my whole life. Personally I despise watching scary movies for I cannot withstand scary scenes and sound effects. So I had to force myself to stick through the whole movie. I could not watch almost half of the movie so I am still confused about the connections between three different stories. However, continual appearance of snails during the first story was notable. The scenes where they marry, have sex and have babies seemed very unreal. This unreal love between dead and alive is expressed through snails. Snails are hermaphrodites, meaning that they have both female and male reproductive organ. Appearance of snails was a symbolical way of signifying the marriage of dead and alive and them becoming one.
Throughout the movie, it implied that love is eternal and death cannot separate two sincere lovers. The first story was about the marriage between dead and alive. The second story was about the love of mother who protected her daughter. The last story was about the love of wife who thought that her husband was alive and that he was with her even after his death. The main theme I found in epitaph was nothing is what it seems because there were a lot of secrets hidden within the souls of deceased. May be this is why many of the scenes seemed very fanciful and stories seemed tangled up and hard to understand.
Epitaph was released in 2007 and was directed by Sik Jung and Beom-sik Jung. The reoccurring theme of the movie seems to be dead spirits who never depart from their loved ones, and one involves man whose wife died and continues to stay around him. Although the twist about the husband actually being the dead one sounds like an intriguing concept, I felt like the film did a poor job on its execution. The Jung brothers’ did a better job portraying Jung-Nam’s ghost wife appearing in and out the background of sequence when he visits his daughter, but during almost the whole section of the husband story, the character is seen interacting alone with his wife on benches, in the living room, and in the forest, which makes it hard to doubt what is real or not. Another film with similar twists like David Fincher’s Fight Club, or Jay Chou’s Secret (which was also released in 2007), hid away multiple subtle hints through what appeared to be normal interactions with people in the film. One scene in Epitaph shows the husband interacting with the students with little or no hints, and it is included in the montage sequence during the reveal. A better scene is done with the general officer later on near the reveal, but feels a little too late by then.
ReplyDeletebut I had an issue with what unsatisfying unanswered questions are left at the end. Not that unanswered questions are a problem in any film, but the ones left in Epitaph seemed “on-the-surface,” like what was the girl doing in the bus, rather than more compelling questions, such as in Ringu when we ask why Sadako wishes spread her curse to others. Part of this may also be due to the seemingly linked stories that are really only related in that they happened to end up in the same hospital. I feel like this disjunction also may possibly be a byproduct of two directors. The film is considered horror, but I am confused on what the film was trying to be at all with the not so unjust deaths of loved ones, and clash of typical eerie screeches plus dramatic orchestral music.
The epitaph is a horror movie with several different stories. A story line of this movie was unfamiliar to me. New story came up unexpected, ending the other one. At first it was hard to notice starting point of new story and also couldn’t understand what is going on.
ReplyDeleteAll events were occurred in a hospital (anyeong? I don’t remember what it was called.) It might have more than three stories, but there were three stories that I noticed. One is the story about a medical student who fell in love with dead body, which was actually one, who was going to marry with him. Even though they couldn’t marry in real life, dead body’s mother secretly held wedding between him and dead women’s soul. The ceremony eventually didn’t let him have healthy relationship with his wife until he died. The second story is of a girl who lost her mom and stepfather. She was in love with her stepfather and her jealousy led to car accident and only survived. She suffered from nightmares, seeing a mother ghost. At last, both the girl suddenly died and also doctor who took care of her died from car accident. Her ghost was in a car, saying something like I love you, doctor. I thought this ending is weird. The third story is about a doctor who lost husband during a surgery and denied his death. This was most confused one among three of them. Still quite don’t understand.
Overall, personally, this horror movie also seemed more like a love story, having sad ending than scary movie. Although it wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be, the story line was impressive.
First object that I carefully looked and considered was a snail which appeared from beginning to an end. A snail represents the distorted love in this movie. In fact, a snail is a hermaphrodite which is bisexual itself. Throughout the all of the omnibuses in the movie, one thing those are sharing is the distorted loves taking driven other side to be a death in order to be together endlessly. First, a leader of a hospital forcefully brings Jung-nam and Aoi together through the soul marriage. Therefore, Aoi takes Jungnam’s life away to being together in real at the end of cinema. Second, the target of Asako’s distorted love changes from Kioko to a doctor, who promises her that he will be at her side after he makes his rounds. Third, Dr. Kaneda has multiple characteristics so that she believes that her dead husband still living in her body. At the scene of the head of hospital weeps and mourns at the soul marriage of Jungnam and Aoi, she crouches back as similar to a snail. Also, Jungnam’s distorted face because of the backlight metaphors the distorted ratio of the face and body as like as a snail. Furthermore, at the end of cinema, a tremendous amount of snails crawl around the hospital due to the fact that all of the couples to be together without any doubt of it.
ReplyDeleteIn this film, the supply of electricity consistently prevents to be flow so that blackout occurs and keep blinking. The hospital is a place where the life and death co-exists. To me, seems like the blinking light and blackout emphasize and exaggerate the significance of a hospital. At the scene of Asako firstly appears at the beginning of the second omnibus, blinking light tells that Asako continuously crossing from existence to a death in back and forth. In addition to this, people who closely shot at the scene of getting a candle light from one to another while blacking out in hospital encounter the tragedy with the unwanted death at the end.
Hannah Choi
Laura Markou
ReplyDeleteThe film Epitaph was rather confusing for me to follow in the beginning as I found myself trying to piece the timeline together more than anything else. As time went on however, I began to see that all the stories were somehow intertwined with the hospital showing elements of love, guilt, and death through cinematography.
Music's was heavily used to intensify emotion in scenes throughout the film for each story part. Slower music was used when there was realization or understanding while quicker speed was used to built up thrill. An example would be of the scene where Inyoung realizes that she is the one who has been murdering people there is no sound but music to show how it was her all along.
There was also quite visual with use of color, objects, and texture to go along with each story. An example of such would be the story of Jungnam and his supposed life with his dead fiancee. There were sliding doors to show each life stage as it opened to show them. There was also this shot of the tree drawing on a door. The pink flowers fell from the door as if it were real perhaps symbolizing love.
All in all I viewed the film Epitaph as being quite confusing in the beginning but in the end it seemed to come together a little bit.
Ha Rin Chung
ReplyDeleteEpitaph
Today we’ve watched a horror movie called the “Epitaph”. Although I rarely watch horror movies due to their contents that frightens me and affects my daily life, I found this particular movie less terrifying compared to other Asian horror movies. Unlike other horror movies, Epitaph intends to portray one man’s loneliness. As the movie storyline developed, not only the story of Dr. Jung nam, but also the story of the dead patients in the hospital that he used to work in the past was told.
Since there were several different stories of different people were being told and there wasn’t enough explanation to it, I had hard time understanding the real message the director was trying to convey. ‘
The movie used sound effects to create and intensify the atmosphere and create tension. Every time the sound of big footsteps, an ear-piercing scream, and an instrument playing high notes were heard, which reflected that something was going to pop up soon. Then the character’s loud panting voice in the background portrayed fear.
In terms of techniques used, long takes and long shots of scenes accelerated the audience’s tension. The empty table and chairs in the very first scene, blinking lights, and close-up shots of the faces of ghosts and people were the attempts to draw the audiences into the movie.
Even though I was not able to keep up with the intention of the movie because of the confusing storyline, it was interesting enough to watch the little details of the movie and the unique techniques that this movie used. In my personal opinion, I think this movie is one of the well-made movies that attained completeness of artistic achievement.
(Ju Hyun Lee)
ReplyDeleteThe movie "Epitaph" is sort of horror movie but not completely horror genre because of film's artistic approach to individual's emotions and feelings. The overall theme of this movie was loneliness and love, which caused almost all the characters in the movie to have side effect to each other's relationships. The movie is divided into three different stories to illustrate different but necessary narratives to have connections to one another that develop the main subject of the movie, which is the horror followed by love and loneliness. However, it was interesting to see the horror movie being very poetic, beautiful, and sentimental that actually did not really help to concentrate on the horror part of the movie. The transition of the movie was not that smooth to begin with, but at the same time, I feel like the directors focused too much on the artistic part, like using so many metaphors(mirror, snail, picture, beautiful hairpin, shadow, etc) to foreshadow so many different things like danger, love, death, loneliness, etc.
The magnificent style of the music help the movie to feel more horrific though it only helped momentarily through out the movie when the scary scene is about to happen. The directors used these kind of musics to build psychological and emotional sensations to help the viewers to perceive the overall theme of the movie which is love, death, revenge, loneliness, sadness, and madness.
I feel like the movie itself was not that bad overall, although the movie was too emotional and artistic to be a horror film.
Katharine Allis
ReplyDeleteThe film "Epitaph" jumps between the 1970s and 1940s, focusing primarily on the events in the 1940s. However the sequence of events is somewhat confusing and was difficult for me to follow. The hospital obviously had multiple hauntings going on, but the scene cuts were very abrupt and sometimes left little resolution to the three separate story lines. Obviously a dead woman's soul being married to the main character had the biggest effect on him, however it was a bit unclear to me how the other two stories really impacted him, other than that they happened at the same hospital.
Each different storyline seemed to have it's own symbol throughout. When the main character has his soul married, snails re-appear frequently. In the little girls car crash story snow is the theme, and in the husband wife story the butterfly makes many appearances. The main link between all the stories is the hospital. At the end when the hospital is being torn down, we see what could be the ghost of those who died or were involved in the hauntings there apparently passing on along with the hospitals demolition. The main character too passes away on the same day of the demolition.
"Epitaph" makes me reconsider being a doctor. The biggest fear that I have had of being a doctor is that the profession sucks the life out of you because of physical and emotional exhaustion. This is what Epitaph does through certain symbols.
ReplyDeleteThe symbol that most struck me in this movie was the snail. When the young student is putting away the body of his future wife, a snail is seen coming out of a vial. The snail is in the foreground while the young students is blurred out in the background. The directors want us to see the struggle of the snail coming out of the vial, expectedly to search for sustenance. In the same way, the dead in this hospital are also looking for sustenance in the form of emotional help. The same snail is found on the chamber of the young student's supposed wife. It is slowly crawling across the chamber's wooden panel. Shortly after, the chamber opens and brings the young student into the world of the dead. In this way, it is evident that the dead wife has latched on to the young student like the snail and will feed off of him emotionally. After this, the water that falls out of the chamber shows his reflection. In that reflection, we see that the dead wife is right behind the young student as if she has latched on to his body. She has grabbed hold of the young student's body and will not leave for the rest of his life. A snail will only leave a plant once it is done feeding and if one notices a plant that a snail has consumed, one can see a hole on the leaf. In the same way, the dead wife will not leave the young student until his death as seen at the end of the movie. She has carved out a hole in the life of the young student as his life is devoid of happiness. The dead wife has sucked everything out of him.
The snail also has an appearance on the movie's poster as a snail is seen sliding across the neck of a woman. It is not discernible who the woman is but maybe that is the point as it can affect anyone. The neck of the woman seems to be unnaturally long as well which maybe says that snails (or traumatic medical experiences) will suck the life out of those who are more susceptible and more easily affected by the trauma. The snails entrails are blood instead of slime which indicates that life has been literally sucked out in the form of blood. This is true as the people in the movie that are most affected are people who can be seen as the most susceptible: the doctor whose brother died in the well and committed suicide after a patient of his died due to losing her mom; the doctor who lost her husband from a patient murdering him.
Medicine is a traumatic career at times and will expose the person to grotesque and emotionally distressful situations. There is a thin line between getting too involved in a patient and being distant from the patient and Epitaph explains the dangers of the former.
Jihye Park
ReplyDeleteI watched this movie few years ago even though I don’t like horror movies. I remember I was scared by some of the horror scenes and creepy sounds throughout the movie, and as I watched this movie again today, the sound effect was still very scary and made me nervous. I think the sound effect is one of the major factor in the horror movies since the sound creates the background and plays an important role for the atmosphere. The effect of sound is enormous, that if the scary scene or creepy ghost scene without the sound wouldn’t have the same effect without the sound. In this movie, footsteps, person’s creepy voice, background music (I think it’s Korean instrument. Korean flute?) all create tensed mood of the scenes and expresses the feelings of the characters.
The story of the movie is unique. Three different, but somewhat related stories appear in the movie. All three small stories have similarities in that they all are sad love story. Also, the three sad love stories involve the ghost, which makes this movie creepier. However, I had difficulties connecting all three different stories. They were three pieces in the movie but I didn’t see the connection between those three besides the three stories take place at Ansaeng Hospital. But considering this movie as an omnibus movie, I think this horror sad love story movie has a distinctive storyline dealing with soul, body and love.
The movie "Epitaph" was a korean horror film that deals with three different plot summary in one film. This movie deals with three unlike stories that is not connected to one another but shares three common themes of love, guilt, and death. In this response paper, I wanted to talk about the camera lightening and some mysterious story portrayed in the third story. In terms of camera effect, I really liked the traditional and colorful image portrayed in this film. But I thought the camera lightening was little blurry compare to other scary movie. I wished the color of the movie could be little more vivid so that it portrays better image of the scene. I also think that this blurriness is purposely filmed in order to mimic the traditional film in 1940s. In terms of the story line, the third story about Inyoung and Dongwon captured my sight. It was the most mysterious story, a story about a married couple who are both doctor, Inyoung and Dongwon. Not only it deals with the couple, but a serial killer who killed three people, Japanese soldier, Korean soldier, and a nurse at Anseng hospital. In this movie, I want to point out the shadow of the Inyoung in the third story. The fact that Dongwon do not see his wife's shadow is a mystery in this story. This not existing shadow gives the clue to the audience that she is not a human or having a mental disorder. It is revealed that she was a serial killer and also killed her husband who constantly stopped her from killing people. The shadow portrays her own imagination of metal guilt. She believes that she is haunted by her dead husband by looking in his view.
ReplyDeleteBefore watching the movie, Epitaph, I was sick of typical repertorial storyline of the korean horror film. I always thought that Korean horror movies focus on the scariness of the film, not the storyline of the film. But Epitaph showed a developed horror movie which contains historical reference that deals with trouble between Japan and Korea but also a outstanding storyline that deals with combined themes of love, guilt, and death. I think this movie has opened up a possibilities for Korean film industry to further develop.
Melody Chi
ReplyDelete7-22-13
Korean Cinema
YISS, Summer 2013
Prof. Steven Chung
Movie Response #3: Epitaph
One theme of Epitaph that becomes obvious through the use of framing and camera POV is voyeurism. Not only is the audience initially being encouraged to spy on the film’s various characters’ lives and secret inner feelings, these voyeuristic tendencies are then consistently being indulged. For example, when the doctor and nurses are attempting to resuscitate Asako after she suddenly goes into cardiac arrest, the camera’s viewpoint is such that we, the audience, appear to be peering into the scene through a crack between the room’s sliding wooden doors. The shot is framed on both sides by sections of the sliding doors, which are reminiscent of stage curtains in that they are being used to block out other areas of a scene to draw the audience’s focus to the action in the center of the frame (between these two “curtains”).
This voyeuristic atmosphere evokes a sense that the events are a secret that should not be revealed, or more specifically, that they belong in a world separate from the natural, normal world. This idea is further expressed by the fact that the elderly father (who was the young doctor at the hospital in the past storyline) never actually tells anyone (even his wives or daughters) what happened in his past at the hospital. In fact, even at the end of the movie, he still has no idea at all why the spirits/curses chose to haunt him, or why they decided to kill all of his family members before ultimately targeting him. This underscores the separation between the supernatural and natural world; the supernatural world is inscrutable and does not follow natural rules. In addition, as the elderly father states in the beginning of the movie when he visits the abandoned hospital after finding out it is scheduled to be demolished, the supernatural world that exists only within the location of the hospital should not be revisited or allowed to merge with the outside world. However, these voyeuristic scenes signal the unstoppable and terrible merging of the supernatural and natural world. For instance, the protagonist's life is shown as a succeeding series of rooms, in which major events (such as getting married and having a child) are represented in scenes that are only seconds long. We see each room by looking through a series of wooden doors that open for the audience's viewing as the protagonist's life progresses. Thus, similar to how we voyeuristically observe the attempt to resuscitate Asako from a viewpoint of a crack between two sliding doors, we then spy the protagonist's life by opening the doors to the rooms that portray important scenes from his life. Basically, although the scenes that are portrayed are extremely natural and commonplace, the unnaturally quick progression of the scenes and the sense we get that the action is staged and "off" in some way give us a sense that the supernatural has invaded the protagonist's life. This atmosphere foreshadows the supernatural's subsequent overtaking of the hospital and the protagonist's life.
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