By Veronica Sixsmith

Genocide. Enslavement. Exile.

The horrors of colonialism extend beyond the surplus of atrocities committed in its name. The suffering of the colonized does not end with political liberation, or even with the deaths of the original colonizers and oppressed people. Though the yoke of the colonizer may be removed, its weight can remain imprinted on the bones and psyches of subsequent generations. Whether by genes, by stories, or by silence, thought structures and behavior patterns can be passed down to descendants who find themselves plagued with the aches and fears and devastations of their ancestors. These descendants may have no memory or knowledge of the original colonial violation, yet experience recurrent and sometimes unconscious interruptions in the form of intrusive thoughts, inexplicable illnesses, and burdensome worries that are rooted in the pain of their ancestors.

The pernicious nature of colonialism and the generational trauma it begets are vividly depicted in director Jang Jae-hyun’s film Exhuma (2024). Its setting is a contemporary South Korea that is at once technologically advanced and culturally connected to its ancient traditions, including a frank acceptance of the supernatural. Central to its concerns is a very specific history: the Empire of Japan’s rule over Korea as a colony from 1910 to 1945.

Korea endured this colonial period fully aware that Imperial Japan’s goal was the eradication of Korean identity. Korean people were forced to abandon their family names for Japanese family names. Traditional Korean clothing, such as the hanbok, was outlawed, and men had their top-knots forcibly shorn. The use of the Korean language was forbidden, as was the practice of their native spiritual traditions. Tens of thousands of cultural artifacts were looted, and numerous historical locations destroyed. A persistent Korean nationalist resistance was suppressed by indiscriminate mass murder. During World War II, millions of Koreans were forced into labor in support of Japan’s war efforts, and thousands of Korean women were abducted and forced into brutal sexual slavery by Imperial Japan’s Armed Forces.

This painful historical backdrop provides the gravity for Exhuma’s two narrative arcs. The first arc begins with the family of Park Ji-yong (Kim Jae-cheol) in crisis. Ji-yong is an extremely wealthy Korean-American real estate developer whose parents, both Korean nationals, live with him in Los Angeles. His wheelchair-bound father is uncommunicative, alternating in mental state from catatonia to wild delirium. His mother wanders the house cradling a decanter of whiskey and dances alone at night. Ji-yong’s main concern, however, is his newborn son, who is hospitalized and under sedation. Though doctors cannot identify any medical issue with the baby, he has been crying in apparent pain and distress since birth.

At Ji-yong’s request, the young shaman Lee Hwa-Rim (Kim Go-eun) and her protege and assistant Yoon Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) travel from Korea to examine the child. Hwa-rim quickly ascertains that the child’s malady must be something that runs in Ji-yong’s family. Ji-yong confirms that his older brother committed suicide in a mental hospital. He himself now hears screaming when he closes his eyes, and is tormented by trembling hands and the sensation of being choked.

Hwa-rim says that while genetics are normally blamed in cases of “first-borns and tainted blood,” she and Bong-gil have detected a shadow pressing down on and tormenting the family. The shadow is cast by Ji-yong’s grandfather, Park Geun-hyun, “throwing a tantrum in his grave.” To save Ji-yong’s son from this haunting, Geun-hyun must be exhumed from his grave in Korea, and either cremated or reburied in a more auspicious location.

Feng shui expert and geomancer Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and funeral director Ko Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin) join Hwa-rim and Bong-gil as experts necessary for the exhumation ritual. The two are initially enthusiastic about the job because Ji-yong will be paying an enormous fee. Sang-deok’s attitude changes to horror, however, when the team arrives at Geun-hyun’s grave. Given the Park family’s great wealth, he expected the plot to be grand, pristine and in harmony with feng shui ideals. Instead, the grave is sited on harsh terrain at the peak of a remote and obscure mountain, nearly on the border with North Korea. The plain, shabby tombstone bears no name, and the soil is bitter. A group of foxes is observed near the grave, an ominous sign. Sang-deok is so disturbed by the gravesite that he refuses the job and walks away, angering his three colleagues. He reminds them that “messing with the wrong grave” is dangerous, potentially even fatal. The site is “vile,” a place where no human should ever be buried. Sang-deok is persuaded to continue with the job only after Hwa-rim assures him that the exhumation can be conducted safely in conjunction with a shamanic ritual. He is convinced, however, that Ji-yong is withholding critical information from the team.

The geomancer is correct. The extent of Ji-yong’s knowledge about his family’s history is not established, but it is evident that he knows enough to understand that it must never be spoken of outside the family. He asks Sang-deok for absolute confidentiality, and bizarrely insists that the exhumed coffin not be opened, thus bypassing the customary practices of inspecting and reshrouding the bones. Instead, he wants the entire coffin to be cremated immediately, in defiance of his family’s wish for reburial. He pleads ignorance when asked what he’s hiding, yet assures his elderly aunt that he has shared information with Hwa-rim and her colleagues on a strictly “need to know” basis. The family’s dark secret is revealed when Ji-yong is briefly possessed by Geun-hyun’s angry, vengeful spirit. During Japanese colonial rule, Geun-hyun betrayed Korea and swore his loyalty to the Empire of Japan. In exchange for his treachery, he was rewarded with land holdings, great wealth, high military rank and a role in governing colonial Korea as a puppet of the Japanese Empire. The need for absolute secrecy is made obvious: enormous community stigma still attaches to those who collaborated with Imperial Japan in the brutal oppression of fellow Koreans. The family has continued to grow wealthy from the spoils of Geun-hyun’s treason, and revealing the family’s connection to wartime Japan could result in the Korean government seizing the family’s land obtained by that connection.

Although the living members of Ji-yong’s family were not involved in Geun-hyun’s actions, the public shame that would attach to the family should their history be known is an ongoing threat. As any survivor of generational trauma can attest, internalized shame and strictly enforced secrecy are intertwined, and over time may become as damaging as the original transgression. Survivors determined to break the cycle of inherited familial trauma are often blocked by other family members, for whom the thought of exposed secrets feels more unbearable than simply continuing to suffer. Exhuma reflects this reality in the words of Ji-yong’s mother, who pleads with him to abandon the plans to exhume Geun-hyun’s grave, even though it might save the life of her grandson. She ridicules Ji-yong’s apparent belief in superstitious practices, and says she doesn’t trust Hwa-rim. She questions whether Ji-yong’s elderly aunt in Korea will approve the exhumation. “This could get out of hand,” she says. “The baby will get better with time. Let’s pray together and seek treatments. We just have to live quietly away from everything.”

In Exhuma, the cost of this malignant shame is not limited to Ji-yong’s mother’s alcoholism, his brother’s madness, his son’s illness and his own psychological torment. Geun-hyun was aligned with Korea’s oppressors, but his family was not spared the generational damage suffered by his victims. Although Ji-yong’s infant son is ultimately saved by the emergency cremation of Geun-hyun’s coffin, relief from the family’s curse does not arrive until Ji-yong and his parents have paid with their lives.

Underlying the personal nature of familial trauma is the wholly impersonal nature of colonialism itself. In the aftermath of colonization, trauma is visited upon an entire people, leaving generations to suffer collectively from the actions of now unknown and long-dead oppressors. Exhuma points to this reality quite literally in its second arc, when a secret grave is discovered directly underneath Geun-hyun’s empty grave. The four protagonists are bemused when the second coffin is revealed to be interred vertically into the earth and wrapped in thick chains of barbed wire. More unnervingly, the coffin is far too large to contain a single human body. The team is shocked when they learn that the site of Geun-hyun’s grave was selected by a Buddhist monk who was Japanese. Their disturbed reaction to this news reflects the apprehension many Korean people feel to this day about the past experience of Japanese rule. Exhuma signals this tension from its opening scene, when a flight attendant addresses Hwa-rim in Japanese. Though Hwa-rim answers in fluent Japanese, she informs the attendant that she is Korean, thus firmly insisting that her true identity be differentiated and seen. The fear of violence rooted in the colonial past is exposed when Hwa-rim is warned against any interaction with a Japanese ghost: “they kill anything and everything just for being nearby.”

Imperial Japan’s intrusion onto Korean land is starkly symbolized in a scene where a gravedigger is clearing out Geun-hyun’s exhumed grave and beheads what he initially believes to be a snake. What he has beheaded is revealed to be a Nure-onna, a supernatural creature from Japanese folklore with the body of a snake and the head of a woman. The incident proves catastrophic for both the individual worker and for Hwa-rim and her team, as it instigates a series of events that leads to the escape of Geun-hyun’s vengeful spirit from its coffin.

The four colleagues discover that the massive coffin contains an anima, a malevolent supernatural entity more substantial and more dangerous than a spirit or ghost. Animas, says Hwa-rim, are created when the soul of a human or animal evolves alongside an object. This anima was created when a fiery sword was ritualistically inserted into the body of a bloodthirsty, 16th-century samurai warrior and buried. The samurai can now take the form of a monstrous giant perhaps ten feet tall, or a massive f ireball that can traverse the sky. It begins to murder indiscriminately after escaping its coffin, nearly killing Bong-gil, and subsequently enslaving his spirit. The anima, in its own words, is “the embodiment of fear.”

Sang-deok connects the anima to a legend that Japanese colonizers had buried a series of iron spikes at critical locations around Korea, in order to neutralize the natural feng shui of Korea’s land and render it forever subject to Japanese aggression. The team concludes that the anima has been buried at the location of one such spike to guard it. Despite the extreme personal danger of encountering the anima again, Sang-deok insists that the spike must be removed from the earth because its danger is greater than the threat to any of their lives. It is the land of Korea itself that is threatened, the same land that all Koreans live on, the land that his own unborn grandchild will one day step foot on. Sang-deok’s understanding of feng shui underpins his belief that the lives of all Koreans, living and dead, are intimately connected to the nation’s earth and land. He will risk his life for the greater collective in order to free all of Korea from an actual demon of the past.

Close to death, Sang-deok realizes that the anima’s coffin was buried vertically not because the anima guards the spike, but because it is the very spike itself. Sang-deok ultimately defeats the anima with his knowledge of feng shui: he remembers that the metal and fire of the anima can be defeated by water and wood. Using his own blood, he wets the broken handle of a pickaxe and drives it into the body of the anima, destroying it.

Exhuma uses the polyvalent language of horror to delineate the form and danger of generational trauma: it can be, at various moments, a curse, a haunting, a possession, or a monster. It is ancient in origin, yet lethally present. It afflicts both mind and body. It is indiscriminate in its choice of victim, and indifferent to concepts of guilt or innocence. More subtly, Exhuma suggests that generational trauma is complicated. Its location isn’t squarely situated in the past, but exists in a present moment nonetheless shot through with echoes of the past, including ancient traditions and folklore. Feng shui and geomancy have been used to select gravesites for millennia, but are utilized in the construction of skyscrapers in contemporary, high-tech Seoul. Hwa-rim practices a shamanistic tradition believed to be over 4,000 years old, but conducts ancient rituals wearing Converse All-Stars.

Nor is everything inherited from the past — including ancestors — the source of trauma. Both Hwa-rim and Sang-deok speak with reverence about the elders who handed down the wisdom of their practices. Hwa-rim’s grandmother trained her in shamanism, but also continues to protect her in the present, as when her spirit stands between Hwa-rim and the raging anima, saving her life. The past is therefore not to be wholly rejected or welcomed, but carefully discerned.

Exhuma gives us a happy ending: having survived their ordeals, the four colleagues are reunited at the wedding of Sang-deok’s daughter. When the photographer calls for a large family group portrait, Sang-deok insists that the others join him. The final images are of our team smiling for the camera.

And yet, we are also shown that though months have passed, memories of their harrowing shared experience intrude to disrupt their ordinary lives. A vision of the anima sends Hwa-rim stumbling off-balance while conducting a ceremony. Yeong-geun is suddenly disturbed by the sight of a shrouded corpse, though he regularly handles the deceased.

Sang-deok’s conversation with a client is interrupted when fresh blood begins seeping through his shirt, signifying that the very blood that destroyed a monster has not stopped spilling from the wound it inflicted. In the end, there is hope in the suggestion that when the nature of a generational threat is understood, those experiencing it in the present can embrace the wisdom of the past to vanquish an embodiment of horror that has stalked a people through history. But there is also warning: trauma can be survived, and new joy discovered, yet perfect freedom from its scars and memories is not guaranteed.

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