Yokai and Other Monsters: From Asian Folklore to Cinema | Out of Competition | Online
South Korea, 1969 / remastered 2025, 90’, Korean
Directed by: Shin Sang-ok
Screenplay: Gwak Il-ro
Cinematography (color): Choi Seung-woo
Editing: O Seong-hwan
Art Direction: Chung Woo-taek
Music: Jeong Yoon-joo
Producers: Shin Sang-ok, Kim Han-geuk
Cast: Shin Young-kyun (General Kim Won-rang), Kim Ji-su (Yeohwa), Kim Hye-jeong (Queen Jinseong)
Date of First Release in Territory: March 8th, 1969
The 1969 period horror film A Thousand Year Old Fox is set in the 9th century, during one of the few times in Korean history when the nation’s supreme ruler was female. It is Queen Jinseong herself who sets the story in motion, when she forcibly seduces General Kim Won-rang upon his triumphant return from battle – and banishes the general’s wife from the capital, for good measure. The wife, Yeohwa, and her baby are forced to set off to the hinterlands, where they are attacked by bandits. Fleeing them, she throws herself into a lake.
If this were a traditional Korean horror film, after drowning in the lake Yeohwa would return as a ghost to terrify and haunt the conscience of those people responsible for her death. But instead, the hate she feels for her attackers, and her desperate craving for revenge, attract a fox spirit that has been imprisoned in the lake by the previous king (Queen Jinseong’s father). Just before death takes her, Yeohwa accepts the fox into her heart. The end result is that she emerges from the lake miraculously alive, but having been turned into something half-human, half-monster.
The mid-to-late 1960s was an era in which the South Korean film industry was continually seeking out new genres to appeal to audiences. Throughout his career, producer/director Shin Sang-ok proved to be quite effective in expanding the borders of genre cinema, and in 1969 he brought the ages-old myth of the fox spirit (in Chinese, huli jing) to Korean film.
According to legend, if a fox lives for a thousand years it turns into a gumiho. The term cheonnyeonho (thousand-year old fox) rather than gumiho (nine-tailed fox) is used in this film, nonetheless, this work is considered to be the starting point for the gumiho character in Korean film. Given the sustained popularity of the nine-tailed-fox in subsequent decades, particularly in Korean TV dramas, Shin’s instincts seem to have been right.
Some viewers might be disappointed to discover that we never actually see the fox, or any of its tails, in this film. The fox spirit in this story had its bones ground to dust decades earlier by Queen Jinseong’s father, such that all that remains of it is its power (and evil intent) that can inhabit a human body. But in the old folk tales as well, fox spirits rarely appear in their original form, and the fear they provoke comes more from their ability to assume various shapes and disguise their menace even from their loved ones. In that sense, this film’s core spectacle is provided by actress Kim Ji-su, whose depiction of the gentle Yeohwa is interspersed with scenes in which she wreaks havoc, and a callous evil fills her eyes.
For its time, A Thousand Year Old Fox was a commercially ambitious film with production values that set it apart from other lower-budget horror movies. Its attempts at special effects and eerie sound design may come across as somewhat crude (or charming?) to today’s viewers, but its cinematography and lighting – given particular vibrancy in the Korean Film Archive’s new digital remastering – leave a stronger impression. More than anything, director Shin Sang-ok knows how to tell a compelling story. In the year of its release it was a solid box office hit, and in 1970, this work won Shin a directing award at the 3rd Sitges Film Festival in Catalonia. Now, more than 50 years later, it may not be particularly frightening, but it still makes for absorbing viewing.
Shin Sang-ok
Shin Sang-ok (1926-2006) directed a string of hits starring his wife Choi Eun-hee in the late fifties. By the sixties, he was heading Korea’s largest film company and producing works that would become classics of Korean cinema. However in the seventies he fell out of favor with the government and his career faded. Then in a bizarre incident in 1978, he and his wife were kidnapped in Hong Kong and brought to North Korea. After spending several years there making films, the couple defected and eventually made their return to Seoul.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1955 – Dream
1958 – A Flower in Hell
1959 – Confession of a Female University Student
1960 – Madam White Snake
1961 – Sung Choon-hyang
1961 – The Houseguest and My Mother
1961 – The Evergreen
1964 – Red Muffler
1969 – A Thousand Year Old Fox
1985 – Pulgasari
1990 – Mayumi