1970-1980년대 한국 사극 공포영화의 서사관습과 의미구조

Abstract

Horror films dealing with the legendary past in the late 1960s continued the narrative custom of the radio broadcast 〈Samchonri according to the legend〉, while strengthening the visual image and highlighting sensational elements to establish a unique narrative convention. Many horror films about virgin ghosts projected the desires of those who had fallen out of Korean society's obsession with modernization. In the narrative of the virgin ghost, women's desires were thoroughly symbolized within the norms of the patriarchal system, and the story unfolded faithfully to the logic of the phallic system. The virgin ghost narrators conjured and resolved the plight of the poor and the persecuted by satisfying their phallic desires. Through this, these narratives visualized the passions of the social class that were structurally alienated even though they were called as industrial forces of modernization. Such narratives comforted the emotions of the lower classes who constituted the bottom of the capitalist system, and the local people who lived marginalized lives driven by developmentalism, and performed a function of adjusting them to accept the reality of progress in capitalization and class change. The Confucian ethical narratives, which unfolded the narrative of resentment and revenge under the conventional ethics, induced a nostalgic sentiment that healed the fatigue of modernization, while consolidating the superiority of modernity by reinforcing the sense of distance from the time in the film. On the other hand, the female sexuality represented by the ghost in the type of narrative that subverted good and evil exposed the imperfection of the world by acutely igniting the blind spots of a hierarchical society and patriarchal ethics that could not provide a rational and satisfactory answer. Here, the legendary time had been transformed into a metaphorical space that exposed the contradictions of irrational patriarchal ethics that continued across the past and present and displayed the fear of modernity, which was represented by an endless burst of desire. In the 1980s, horror films set in the legendary past had been transformed into a fantasy space that reflected the anxieties of the time, almost independent of the historical past. The legendary space of horror films in the 1980s stimulated the desires suppressed by ideology by witchcrafting and temporalizing the surplus desires outside the system that clearly exist but remain unknown. However, horror films in the 1980s performed a dual function of discharging the condensed energy of individual desires by awakening fear and awareness of such desires.