“Tastes of Horror” Well Go USA Poster
Director #1: Ahn Sang-hoon
Director #2: Yoon Eun-kyung
Director #3: Chae Yoo-joon
Director #4: Kim Yong-gyun
Director #5: Im Dae-woong
Cast: Lee Zoo-young, Kim Joo-ryoung, Shin Eun-soo, Kim Tae-hoon, Park Jin-a, Choi Soo-im
Running Time: 118 min.
By Paul Bramhall
The horror anthology is a production that’s been around for years, and in Asia there have been several takes on the format in the 21st century. The early 2000’s gave us the Three…Extremes multi-country anthologies, the late 2000’s gave us Thailand’s 4bia and its sequel, by the time it was the early 2010’s Hong Kong offered up the 2 Tales from the Dark anthologies, and in the 2020’s they’re still at it with the recent Tales from the Occult franchise. Korea has gotten in on the action too, with the Horror Stories trilogy that ran from 2012 to 2016, and more recently with 2021’s Ghost Mansion.
Continuing the trend, in 2023 Korea hopped back on the horror anthology bandwagon with Tastes of Horror. Taken from a webtoon of the same name which featured 19 horror stories, 10 of them were selected to be turned into short films by 5 directors, with each helming 2. Curiously the final released version only contains 6, with 4 entries – Tick Tock Tick Tock by Kim Yong-gyun, Delivery Complete by Im Dae-woong, Hey, Marmons by Ahn Sang-hoon, and Gold Tooth by Yoon Eun-kyung – missing in action. Likely due to length, with the 6 remaining making the runtime clock in at 118 minutes, only director Chae Yeo-joon gets both of his features in the final cut.
Interestingly Yeo-joon isn’t the most well-known director of the 5 (which I’d assumed would make sense to give the most screentime to), with that honour going to Kim Yong-gyun, who was responsible for directing the early K-wave classic Wanee and Junah in 2001, and The Sword With No Name in 2009. Yong-gyun has dabbled in the horror genre before with 2005’s The Red Shoes and 2013’s Killer Toon, so it’s somewhat ironic that his entry here, titled Resident-Only Fitness Center is the weakest of the 6. A slight piece of work involving a residential apartment buildings haunted gym, how so many glaring plot holes and nonsensical decisions can be squeezed into such a short timeframe is bewildering, but the entries main issue is that its main method of delivering scares is already 20+ years out of date.
If you’re really going to try and revive the long black haired vengeance seeking ghost in 2023 you better be ready to do something a little different with it than what’s been done before, however sitting on top of gym equipment or hovering around treadmills isn’t the way to do it. Director Im Dae-woong is the 2nd most well-known director to helm an entry, having directed the gnarly slice of mid-2000’s horror To Sir, With Love, Dae-woong comes with something of a speciality in helming entries in horror omnibuses. He’d direct an entry in the original Horror Stories in 2012, and similarly direct an episode in the more recent K-drama horror series Midnight Horror: Six Nights in 2022.
Here he crafts the longest entry of the 6 with Rehabilitation, which sees a patient who’s lost her legs wake up in a mysterious room seemingly with no injuries, a doctor explaining that she needs to reach level 3 in a set exercise regime otherwise she’ll become braindead. It’s an intriguing entry that leans as much into sci-fi elements as it does horror, bolstered by performances from Lee Zoo-young (Miss Baek, Believer) as the patient and Kim Joo-ryoung (Unlocked, Bluebeard) as the nurse, and the minimalist environment it takes place in lends itself well to the concept.
Also on the slight side is director Ahn Sang-hoon’s (Blind, Empire of Lust) Ding Dong Challenge which opens the omnibus. Similar to 2011’s White: The Melody of the Curse, the setting is the world of K-pop, with this time a group of friends hoping to make it into a record labels trainee program. Ding Dong is essentially the movie version of Tik Tok, which has one of the friends stumbling across a reel of the mysterious “wish witch”, a blurry clip of a girl dancing in a darkened room who, if you copy the same dance, will grant the viewers wish. For reasons the segment never bothers to explain, in typical Sadako style a viewing only results in the witch turning up in the same room as the person watching it, who then proceeds to tear out one of the eyes of the wish maker and kill them. That’s pretty much all there is too it, with its main reason for existing seemingly to show off a gruesome (done with practical effects) eyeball removal.
Yoon Eun-kyung (Hotel Lake, The Tenants), the only female director of the 5, fares slightly better with Prey. Telling the story of a student who’s relentlessly bullied by her mother and older sister for scoring low grades, when she begs God to help her improve, the ghostly apparition of a schoolgirl visits her and requests to be sacrificed 4 legged animals in exchange for her grades to improve. Effectively played by Shin Eun-soo (Homme Fatale, Illang: The Wolf Brigade), from initially stomping on a frog, her improved grades soon see her develop an appetite for murder that eventually sees more than animals becoming a target. A scathing tale of Korea’s ridiculously competitive education system, Eun-kyung keeps it short and sweet, giving the tale an impactful bite that will likely hit close to home for those who’ve experienced the system firsthand.
It’s Chae Yoo-joon who scored the double bill, a director who’s mostly known for working in Korea’s DTV action arena, helming the likes of 2019’s The Legendary Lighter, 2020’s Justice High, and 2021’s Shark: The Beginning (which actually received a Blu-ray release in the U.S.!). Yeo-joon crafts 2 distinctly different tales, with the first – Jackpot – focusing on a debt-ridden businessman, played by Kim Tae-hoon (The Man from Nowhere, Glass Garden), who hits the jackpot in a casino. Paranoid that everyone he encounters is after the bag of money he’s now lumbering around, the narrative strikes an effective balance of questioning how much of what we see is Tae-hoon’s perception versus reality, with a haunted hotel room thrown in for good measure. Ending on a particularly grizzly note, the entry is a standout thanks to taking a grittier approach, with the typical Korean thriller tropes effectively mixed in with a horror slant.
Yoo-joon also gets to close out proceedings with Gluttony, which plays out in the world of mukbang live streams. When an up-and-coming mukbang star is invited to join mukbang royalty on her stream, she has no idea it’s only to show her up as a fake, since she’s been editing her videos to disguise the fact she can’t eat everything she says she can. After a year of silence, the disgraced mukbang star returns, challenging the streamer who showed her up on a live stream to a multi-course eat off. Played by Park Jin-a (Night Flight, All Bark No Bite) and Choi Soo-im (A Man of Reason, Samjin Company English Class) respectively, the narrative goes in the direction you’d expect it to, however it still manages to entertain on the journey to the inevitable destination. A cynical look at the length’s influencers are willing to go to in order to achieve a level of online fame, Yoo-joon’s 2nd entry serves as a worthy close to the omnibus.
Overall Tastes of Horror feels like more of a bland appetiser than a hearty main course, suffering from the same fate that most horror anthologies seem destined for, in that the quality of each entry varies significantly. At the lower end of the scale both Ding Dong Challenge and Resident-Only Fitness Center register as instantly forgettable and even lazy in their execution, relying on the same horror tropes that were already outdated by the end of the 2000’s. On the other hand the likes of Jackpot and Prey make better use of the short film format, and while not necessarily scary, take the audience on an effective journey for the time that they’re on the screen. Ultimately though there’s nothing essential in Tastes of Horror, with even the best entries being watchable rather than must-see, feeling like something that each director put together in their spare time rather than a project that they really cared about.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5.5/10
