Koreanizing Lovecraft (on a Budget)

I’m still thinking this over, since I first mentioned it last January.

Had an interesting talk on a couple of weekends ago with some of my Korean SF-fan friends about Lovecraft, the contents of which surprised me. I though ol’ H.P. was popular here, given that a large number of his works had been translated and published — in some cases, there are collections containing some of the same stories, worked over by different translators, put out by different publishers, even. But I was told that Lovecraft hasn’t really caught on in any appreciable way, which also makes it hard for anything built off his work to catch on here. (One example is Stross’ Laundry books, which I was told can’t really have a following here because most people can’t follow the Lovecraft references.)

While there’s been enough original Lovecraftian fiction written in Japanese to fill out a four-volume set in English translation (with more to spare, I’m guessing), I haven’t heard of any Korean authors writing Lovecraftian stories so far. (That doesn’t mean nobody has done it, mind you. I’d be overjoyed to hear about it, but I sure haven’t so far, and I have asked around!)

Indeed, two suggestions were made about “The Music of Jo Hyeja”:

1. That the whole “cosmic horror” deal might not make so much sense to a Korean audience; it’s an alien aesthetic here, apparently, and a little more unpacking might be necessary for that audience, and…
2. If the film could get shared around, it might provoke some interest in Lovecraft among Koreans.

This came on the tail end of my editing a long-ago story of mine, experimentally, from being a kind of Korean ghost story (where the ghost is of someone living, not someone dead) into a kind of twisted-up Lovecraftianized moment in Korean history. The fit was good, but I think the story needs one more pass before I send it out somewhere.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to go about making a feature-length film featuring Lovecraftian themes, but set in Korea and twining together the Lovecraftian, the cosmic horrific, and truly Korean cultural content. If you ask me, the optimal thing would be to set it in the 1920s, before the rigidity of post-colonial and post-Korean War politics set in, but also at the time when Lovecraft himself was writing. There’s an occupation to work into the story at that time, but it’s not nearly as brutal as what would come in the 1930s and 1940s; that means negative memories of the late Joseon could also continue to be harbored widely among the populace. There would likely still be some hanbok worn out deep in the countryside, and probably even some villages where nobody from outside has set foot in decades (villages, indeed, who may not yet have heard that Korea has been occupied); there’s Japanese scholars wandering the countryside too, poking around where they shouldn’t be  and in the process disturbing ancient tombs and monuments and forgotten temple ruins (cue spooky music); there’s access to Pyongyang, which I would serve as a wonderful Innsmouthian setting.

But shooting a film set in the 1920s takes money… a lot of money, which we don’t have. Indeed, shooting a film set in anytime other than the present day is a big budget-related issue. And what I’ve learned from our production of “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is that projects like this, even on a small budget, can suck you dry just in the basic expenses of equipment rentals, production, paying the actors, and feeding cast and crew during production. The key, then, is to eliminate (or at least minimize) unnecessary expenditures, especially when you know you’re not going to get support from outside. So a story set in the present is, apparently, the way to go.

I’m still thinking over plotline and themes at the moment, and so I’m working on a few shorter projects, including a script treatment of a famous Korean SF story, a couple of anthology projects, and more. I’m still considering whether another Lovecraftian film is the way to go, or whether something more hard-SFnal would be a better use of our time. Korean film is short of good SF narratives too, and I’d like for us to make a contribution to that genre as well.

But one thing did come up in my mind this morning was that I’m glad I’m not one of those who depends on the whole tentacle thing for Lovecraftian effect.

Because, after all, in a society where tentacled creatures are widely enjoyed (however occasionally) at the dinner table, such appendages are not necessarily likely to inspire a visceral sense of horror the way they seem to for Western Lovecraft fans. In fact, I’ve seen so many sea creatures that inspire such a reaction in me–but which Koreans around me see as no more than dinner options, albeit in some cases not-too-appealing ones; for example, I don’t know many young folks who often eat these critters:

–but they have seen them enough to be, well, less than shocked or horrified by the very sight of them, let alone some verbal description of them. And, you know, being served a dish of squirming tentacles from a freshly killed octopus? That’s not really weird here.

I think it’s safe to say the trappings of a Lovecraftian horror aesthetic would have to be built upon a somewhat different foundation over here… though that was always the case: the tentacles are window-dressing, or, well, cosmos-dressing, I suppose.

And, of course, you can make it work: think of the octopus-eating scene in Oldboy:

Still, I think we can do better in general, in searching for a deeper basis to an authentically Korean Lovecraftian aesthetic.

Lovecraft’s work was informed by a horror at the decline of great families and bloodlines; an undeniable racism; by his atheism and his sense of the universe as a cold, meaningless, uncaring place; by his sense of dislocation by modernity, by immigration, by changes in American culture and literature. Some of those changes–immigration, dislocation from rapid modernization, and changes in culture–map really well onto Korea. But are there other anxieties that would be exploitable by the would-be Korean-Lovecraftian?

The ones that come to mind for me immediately are related to the universals of modern life in the industrialized world:

• The increasing multiracialization of Korea, which clashes with the race-based nationalism that dominated here for a long time. The divide between city and countryside is heightened by the fact that in some rural areas, you see a lot more “foreign” people, especially mail order brides and the children they have with their Korean husbands. Blood mixing and immigrants… that’s a very Lovecraftian anxiety, though one doesn’t want to demonize the immigrant. Meanwhile, one also does not want to characterize Koreans collectively as racist: plenty of Koreans aren’t; it’s the institutionalized racism (and its broad toleration) that deserves to be attacked publicly. What one wants is something horrifying that doesn’t discriminate between races, but which is nonetheless foreign and nonetheless relates to blood-admixture. Or something.
• The anxiety regarding foreign contagion. This is a powerful driver: a few years ago, there were mass protests in the streets of Seoul over the idea that American beef could be imported and sold in Korean supermarkets, causing an outbreak of sickness among Koreans. (Here’s the article I wrote about that.) Lovecraft’s “foreign” contagion tended to come from outer space, but Korea’s is as likely to come from some other nation.
• The sense of ancient history and forgotten, long-ago conspiracies. This stuff has universal appeal, but is especially useful for telling scary stories to a society that claims a five-thousand year history. Okay, but what about before that history started? What (not who) ruled the earth back then?
• I also think horror can very effectively work by exploiting anxieties the audience may not realize they had; for one thing, I find that even among young people, there’s a funny mixture of technophilia and of early-adoption of tech, and of technophobia. Young people seem quite ready to accept and repeat narratives featuring the evils of new technologies, clearly based in technophobic anxiety: everything from computer games to smart phones get labeled as dangerously addictive so often I’ve come to expect it. Perhaps the anxiety could invoke an ironic reversal of that fear: it’s the failure of those embraced-but-feared technologies (like, say, GPS navigation systems in cars) that leads to deaths, dooms, destructions.
• In Korea, I think the stresses of the work week for adults, and of study-related pressures for kids, also each offer their own cornucopia of horrors. Sometimes, the strain and pressures people seem to endure seem downright Lovecraftian in themselves. Just as with  William Browning Spencer’s Resumé With Monsters, I kind of feel like exploring the hidden, darkly Lovecraftian depths of wage slavery or of hakwonization of kids’ lives might be a way of Koreanizing Lovecraft. The guy who gets taken to the room salon by his boss, only to discover, drunkenly, that the call girls have webbed fingers (and here, I suppose, tentacles could still be creepy); the woman who starts working in a company and then discovers her boss is often making trips to the basement, and follows him down to discover horrifying things; the kid whose hakwon has, behind a locked door, a room for the veneration of Nyarlathotep or some similar god–unnamed, of course, but identifiable to those in the know–to whom sacrifices are made to ward off bad grades, at the cost of the childrens’ sanity. That hakwon example seems cheesy, but something a little better could probably work.
• There’s also the other particularly high stresses I observe within Korean culture, which seem to accumulate just in normal social actions. While I still have mixed feelings about Debitou Arudou’s discussion of “microaggression” towards foreigners in Japan (and its application to expats in the Korean context) — I think microaggressions are probably a human universal, and to some degree normative in any culture, meaning, we find people microaggressing against people of the same race, sex, age, and so on. But I find myself taken aback with how overt and socially accepted some kinds of microaggressions are between Koreans, compared to what I remember as being normative or socially acceptable from back in Canada. If you think it’s hard being overweight in Canada, try being overweight in Korea. (Especially if you’re a Korean woman.) Or, for an example I’ve seen drive people functionally crazy a few times, try being an unmarried woman at the age of thirty, with relatives and friends making you feel like a spinster constantly, with relatives constantly pestering you to marry, with your own personality warped to the point where you perceive younger women with boyfriends as actively harming you by taking away eligible marriage partners. Matchmaking, there’s a fair bit of the Lovecraftian underlying that in these parts, to be sure!

Comments are welcome! I’ll be pondering this more over the next few weeks as the time approaches for me to launch into a full-length feature film scriptwriting project.

Bonus: By chance, I ran across this post by Bryan Thao Worra about adapting both Steampunk and Lovecraftian literary sensibilities to a Laotian setting. Interesting stuff, though I am still curious about the cultural dimension. When I was in Lao, there seemed to be a strong mythology about nagas and other beings that could easily fit into a Lovecraftian vision of the world; Korea seems short on those, or at least the mythologies seem not to have much place in the popular imagination today.