Koreatown Ghost Story
2021 · 14m · USA
Directed by Minsun Park, Teddy Tenenbaum
Genres: dark comedy, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, humorous, tense
During Chuseok, a struggling young Korean-American woman visits family friend Mrs. Moon for acupuncture and is presented with a macabre ghost marriage proposal — marry Mrs. Moon's dead son in exchange for financial security.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Margaret Cho weaponizing acupuncture needles in a ghost-marriage horror — that is a sentence I cannot resist. ALTER puts out a lot of slick mid horror but this premise is genuinely strange.
Park and Tenenbaum operate in the diaspora-horror register that Bong Joon-ho's Mother first made legible to Western audiences, with Margaret Cho's casting providing a knowing tonal anchor. ALTER's 353K views suggest it executes the body horror with discipline.
353K views on ALTER with Margaret Cho and Lyrica Okano (Marvel's Runaways) selling a contained acupuncture-as-body-horror premise — ALTER as a venue tends to pick films that close cleanly, and the ghost-marriage hook is specific enough to lift it out of the genre pile. The needles-as-weapons inversion is craft, not gimmick.
Reviews
Koreatown Ghost Story is fifteen minutes of terror, and I loved it. This is one of the creepiest shorts of all the Panic Fest 2021 selections.
Margaret Cho is wickedly good as the creepy Mrs. Moon, a character symbolic of all Asian mothers who want nothing more than to see their children settled, pinning down a helpless Hannah in a macabre bargain.
Festivals
- Panic Fest 2021
- CAAMFest 2021