2024 • American
A grave in bad earth, a family curse with teeth and the sort of ancestral admin that very quickly gets out of hand. This week Folk ’n’ Hell heads to South Korea for Exhuma (2024), a film of geomancers, shamans, old money, poisoned land, angry dead relatives and one extremely large historical problem buried where nobody sensible would put it.
Andy, Dave and David begin with a film that looks, at first, like a sleek modern ghost story. A wealthy Korean family in America hires a team of ritual specialists to deal with a baby being tormented by an ancestor. The solution seems simple enough, if your definition of simple includes digging up grandad and moving him somewhere with better spiritual drainage. From there, Exhuma keeps lowering the spade. One coffin leads to another, one haunting gives way to something older and nastier, and the whole thing becomes tangled in Korean history, Japanese occupation, geomancy and national trauma.
The hosts are broadly impressed, even when the film’s mythology becomes a touch slippery. Dave Houghton enjoys it as a creepy, intriguing horror film, but is not convinced it lands as full-blooded folk horror. David Hall starts off thinking it absolutely does, then finds that certainty crumbling as the film shifts from family curse to giant samurai demon business. Andy, meanwhile, argues for the bigger folk-horror reading, seeing the land, the occupation and the symbolic wound in Korea as central to the film’s power. “This absolutely sits in FolknHell’s wheelhouse of a folk horror movie [but] it’s not a bullseye.” FolknHell host, David Hall What everyone agrees on is that Exhuma is a lot of film. At two and a quarter hours, it is long, dense and sometimes culturally opaque to three blokes without a working degree in Korean folklore. Yet it keeps moving, keeps escalating and keeps throwing up images and rituals odd enough to hold the attention. There are drums, pigs, graves, vomit, bad reflections, a human-headed snake that may or may not be explained, and a Scooby Doo crew of spiritual professionals who prove far more compelling than that nickname suggests.
It may not be a clean bullseye for Folk ’n’ Hell’s folk horror criteria, but it is firmly in the field, spade in hand, asking what happens when the dead, the land and history all decide they have unfinished business.
Exhuma begins with a wealthy Korean family in America whose newborn child appears to be suffering under the influence of an angry ancestor. A shamanic duo, a geomancer and a funeral specialist are brought in to identify the problem, which leads them to the grave of the family’s grandfather. His burial place is discovered to be spiritually poisoned, so the team exhume the coffin in the hope of relocating or cremating him and ending the curse.
That first exhumation only opens the lid on a deeper problem. The grandfather’s spirit is not the only presence attached to the site, and beneath his grave lies another coffin, older, stranger and much more dangerous. What begins as a family haunting becomes a story of occupation, buried violence and the land itself holding on to history.
The hosts are split, which is usually where Folk ’n’ Hell is most at home. Using their regular criteria, a threat of the land, a threat from an ancient or former time, and a threat tied to a discrete community, Exhuma proves slippery.
Dave Houghton is the most sceptical. For him, the film feels more like a straight horror story rooted in history than folk horror proper. The threat may come out of the earth and may be old, but the discrete community element does not quite hold. “I thought it was more of a horror film that had a basis in history rather than a folk horror film.” FolknHell host, Dave Houghton
David Hall begins at the opposite end, feeling early on that the family curse, burial customs and ritual specialists make it strongly folk horror. As the film expands into a broader national and historical conflict, though, that certainty fades.
Andy makes the strongest case for Exhuma as folk horror, or at least folklore horror. He reads the film through the land itself: poisoned burial sites, geomancy, the symbolic division of Korea, and an occupying force driven like a blade through the nation. The group do not fully agree, but they do agree that the film belongs in Folk ’n’ Hell territory. Not a bullseye, perhaps, but certainly close enough to leave muddy footprints.
- Bad land and worse burials The film is built around geomancy, burial sites and the idea that where a body rests can poison a family, a lineage or something much larger.
- Ancestry as unfinished business Exhuma treats the dead not as memory, but as active, demanding presences. Grandad is less a comforting family figure than an entire maypole of warning signs.
- Modern life, ancient belief Dave finds the collision of sleek hotels, wealthy families and old spiritual practices slightly jarring, while David likes that the film lets both worlds exist together without apology.
- Occupation, collaboration and tainted money The family’s wealth is tied to collaboration during the Japanese occupation of Korea, turning the haunting into something morally and historically stained.
- Ritual professionals under pressure The shaman, her partner, the geomancer and the funeral specialist might first look like fee-chasing ghost wranglers, but the hosts grow to admire their conviction, competence and survivability.
- Escalation by exhumation Every time the film seems to have found its monster, it digs a little deeper. The result is sometimes confusing, but rarely dull.
The scores are strong: Dave Houghton gives Exhuma an eight, praising it as a very enjoyable horror film even if he resists calling it full folk horror. David Hall lands on a seven, admiring the characters, ritual detail and global reach, while feeling the film could have been tighter. Andy also gives it a seven, impressed that a long, dense film kept him gripped even when he was not always sure he had the cultural tools to follow every reference. “Well worth your time.” FolknHell host, Dave Houghton
That gives Exhuma 22 out of 30, a properly respectable Folk ’n’ Hell score. The recommendation is clear: it is well worth watching, especially for anyone interested in horror that takes burial, belief, landscape and history seriously. It may not satisfy every folk horror criterion cleanly, but it earns its place in the conversation. Sometimes the field is Korean, the shovel is ceremonial, and the thing underneath is much bigger than expected.
How each host rated this film