Who Severed the Tiger’s Spine?: Traumas of Occupation and Partition in Exhuma
Soohee Kang / University of Texas at Austin
In March 2024, the supernatural horror film Exhuma (파묘, Jang Jae-Hyun, 2024) surpassed ten million ticket sales, becoming the first Korean occult genre film to join the “Ten Million Club.”[1] The plot begins with young but renowned shaman Hwa-Rim (Kim Go-Eun) being hired by ultra-wealthy Park Ji-Yong to identify his newborn son’s illness. Determining the cause as an ancestor’s curse, she assembles a team that will relocate the grave of Park’s grandfather to appease his spirit. Hwa-Rim, her protégé Bong-Gil (Lee Do-Hyun), feng shui master Sang-Duk (Choi Min-Sik), and mortician Young-Geun (Yoo Hae-Jin) successfully excavate the coffin, but the vengeful spirit escapes and kills his own offspring one by one. The team exorcises the spirit before it harms the baby, but soon discovers another problem — another coffin buried vertically underneath Park’s, tied to a more sinister conspiracy that concerns the entire Korean peninsula.
The film, which explicitly deals with histories of imperial Japanese occupation through the lens of traditional Korean beliefs, has resonated with Korean audiences who share the collective cultural memory of colonialism. An opinion piece published in Hankyoreh even described the film as a salpuri gut (살풀이굿), a shamanic ritual in which spiteful energy is vanquished.
In addition to the trauma of occupation, this essay also explores another wound that is absent from the film’s surface but can nevertheless be inferred: the trauma of partition. I argue that just as the second coffin was buried right below the first, the reality of being divided by superpowers is inextricably linked to the memory of losing sovereignty.
The second half of Exhuma reveals an imperial Japanese plot to plant enchanted iron spikes throughout the Korean peninsula. The strategic placement of the spikes would disrupt the country’s life force. The standing coffin contains a seven-foot-tall oni, who had been a feudal Japanese general in life. A Japanese shaman dubbed “The Fox” had bound his spirit to the spike so that it could act as a guardian.
The crucial clue that allows the team to piece this plot together is a sentence uttered by Park Ji-Yong while possessed by the spirit of his grandfather: “The fox has severed the tiger’s spine.” Both within and outside the logic of the film, the Korean peninsula is imagined as a Siberian tiger. One of the earliest depictions of the peninsula as a tiger was made by artist Ahn Jung-Sik in the inaugural issue of the 1908 magazine Boy (소년), published by then-eighteen-year-old historian Choi Nam-Sun.[2] This powerful image directly contested a 1903 image of the peninsula as a cowering rabbit, purported by Tokyo Imperial University professor and geologist Bunjiro Goto.
According to Choi and Ahn’s allegory, the Baekdu-daegan Mountain Range forms the tiger’s spine, running along the east coast. In Exhuma, the iron spike guarded by the oni is planted in the exact location that would stop the flow of life force from head to toe right in the middle. Thus, the destruction of the spike at the climax of the film can be read as an unrooting of imperial Japanese influence, as well as of resentment and trauma surrounding the occupation.
When Sang-Duk first voices his theory about the conspiracy to the team, the more down-to-earth Young-Geun challenges him. “Do you still believe in that sort of thing?” he asks. “The iron spikes at Buddhist temples, they’re actually all for surveying land!” What Young-Geun doesn’t recognize, but many Korean audience members will, is that surveying, measuring, and bureaucratically documenting Korean land was also an important aspect of colonial exploitation. For instance, the Land Survey Project (1910–1918) aimed to establish modern land ownership in Korea and to secure taxes.
Thus, the film hints at non-spiritual ways to exert control over foreign land. Interestingly, the most prominent example of this — the Military Demarcation Line — is absent from Exhuma at first glance.
The MDL, previously the 38th parallel line, is a 248km long boundary that marks the border between North and South Korea. For many Koreans, it is a “mnemonic scar of war” and holds symbolic weight as a “national trauma” (Kim 2014, 383). Korean independence and the drawing of the 38th parallel by the United States and the Soviet Union happened in the same year, 1945. During WWII, the Allies had agreed that “since Korea would not be capable of self-government after liberation, a four-power trusteeship would best serve the interests of world peace” (Maltray 1981, 148). Thus, colonial occupation and Korean partition are not only temporally and causally related but also similarly involve the loss of sovereignty to more powerful countries.
The only allusion to the MDL occurs when the team visits the Park grave for the first time, and Sang-Duk remarks, “I can even see North Korea from here.” However, representations of the United States in the film have the potential to be read as commentary on the superpower, which played a crucial role in dividing Korea and still holds considerable political and economic influence over the country.
The film opens with Hwa-Rim and Bong-Gil on a plane to Los Angeles, where Park Ji-Yong lives. His immediate family members are all American citizens and even his mother speaks English fluently. In the Los Angeles sequence, the city, specifically Beverly Hills, is represented as a paradise in contrast with Korea, which is weighed down by traumatic memories. For instance, Hwa-Rim describes the Parks as “those who always live in the light and only look at the bright side” in her internal monologue. This voice-over is paired with images of palm trees and beaches bathed in sunlight. In contrast, most scenes filmed in Korea feature cloudy or rainy weather, if not set in the middle of the night.
Further, when the escaped spirit of the Park ancestor visits the family’s LA mansion, it remarks: “This land flows with milk and honey.” If this land flows with milk and honey, what about that land, Korea? The Korea that Park knew in life was stripped of its natural and human resources by imperial Japan (though he probably contributed to this himself). Directly after independence, the Korean War devastated the peninsula. Although South Korea’s economy grew exponentially in the decades after the war, the shadow of occupation and partition still hangs over contemporary politics, often becoming topics of hot debate.
In short, Los Angeles in Exhuma plays a symbolic version of itself that stands for American prosperity. The physical distance between the two countries ensures that Americans, especially immigrated national traitors, can live comfortably in the “sunlight” even with their ancestors’ heavy involvement in Korea’s situation.
One’s inescapable bloodline is a prominent theme in Exhuma. On the one hand, Park Ji-Yong’s infant son suffers for the crimes of his ancestors. On the other, Sang-Duk’s unborn grandchild renews his will to live as he is succumbing to wounds inflicted by the oni.
The last scene takes place at a wedding ceremony in which Sang-Duk’s daughter marries a German man. Although Sang-Duk had seemed skeptical of his “blond-haired, blue-eyed” son-in-law and his daughter’s premarital pregnancy, he cannot hide his happiness at the wedding. At first glance, the physical appearance of the German husband may seem like a reference to Nazi Germany, another country that committed war crimes before and during World War II alongside imperial Japan. However, the connection between the two nations holds another significance. In the words of Georg Lechner, director of the Goethe Institut (German Cultural Center) in Korea from 1978 to 1981, they share the “fateful common denominator” of partition.
Although the partitions of Germany and Korea stemmed from very different political contexts, they both happened through the decisions of outside forces. When Germany was reunified in 1990, many news outlets and public figures expressed hope that Korea might achieve the same and sought to learn from this event. For instance, at the 1990 InterAction Council of Former Heads of State and Government summit, Prime Minister Kang Young-Hoon officially asked former West German PM Helmut Schmidt for advice on how to achieve reunification.
Both Sang-Duk’s daughter and her husband have been indirectly wounded by the partition of their respective countries. They are not free from the collective memories they share with their ancestors, just as the Park baby cannot escape his bloodline. In this light, the newlyweds’ unborn child perhaps stands for a reconciliation of two different yet similar things, whether they be nations, histories, or cultures. The film ends with a strong longing for future generations to grow up on land free from the traumas of occupation and partition. This dream may be impossible to fulfill, but the characters still strive toward it.
Image Credits:
- A poster for Exhuma, designed to hint at the silhouette of the Korean Peninsula
- Hwa-Rim performs a gut in the first act of Exhuma
- The Korean Peninsula as a rabbit and as a tiger
- Sunny Beverly Hills, or the “bright” side of the world (author’s screen grab)
- A 1990 newspaper headline reads, “The Reunification of the Korean Peninsula Should Learn From Germany”
Chosun Ilbo. “The Reunification of the Korean Peninsula Should Learn From Germany.” Chosun Ilbo, 24 May 1990.
Jeon, Beom-Sun. “A Bone Has No Color.” Hankyoreh, 25 Apr. 2024, www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion/column/1138191.html
Jung, Seung-An. “A Collective Representation of Rabbits and Tigers Surrounding the Korean Peninsula.” Sisa News, 17 Apr. 2018, www.sisa-news.com/news/article.html?no=112164
Kim, In-Hye. “From the Tip of His Brush, the Korean Peninsula Emerged a Tiger.” Chosun Ilbo, 2 Mar. 2024, www.chosun.com/national/weekend/2024/03/02/YSLW5ITYS5A5NMEO3ZLF5DZ5X4/
Kim, So-Young. “‘Exhuma’ Surpasses Ten Million Admissions… The First Ten Million Film of the Year.” DongA Ilbo, 24 Mar. 2024, www.donga.com/news/Culture/article/all/20240324/124124952/2
Kim, Suk-Young. DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border. Columbia University Press, 2014.
Lechner, Georg. “Cultural Activities and Social Policy.” Goethe Institut Korea, July 2018, www.goethe.de/ins/kr/ko/uun/50j/21318310.html.
Matray, James I. “Captive of the Cold War: the decision to divide Korea at the 38th Parallel.” Pacific Historical Review 50.2 (1981): 145-168.
Yeh, Ji-Sook. “The Land Survey Project.” Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0059218. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.
Footnotes:- The Korean press measures a film’s success by the number of admissions. Ten million admissions, roughly equal to one-fifth of South Korea’s population, has become a marker of achievement for commercial movies. Previous Korean films to join the “Ten Million Club” include The King and the Clown (2005), The Admiral: Roaring Currents (2014), and Parasite (2019). [↩]
- Choi Nam-Sun defected in 1935 and spent the rest of colonial rule advocating for pro-imperial historical theory and encouraging the enlistment of Korean students as soldiers in the Japanese army. He is officially listed as a pro-Japanese Collaborator (친일반민족행위자) in The Encyclopedia of Pro-Japanese Collaborators (2009). [↩]