It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Day Five of the 2026 Easter Zombie Movie Marathon takes us to South Korea with writer/director Na Hong-jin’s 2016 masterpiece, The Wailing. To be honest, I went into this film blind, only knowing that it showed up on some lists of disturbing zombie films, and I can conclusively say this is not really a zombie film. There is one zombie that appears for a short sequence partway through the film, but it is serving as a diversion so the main antagonist can escape a group of men hunting him.
I also did not know that the film is nearly three hours long. We were just lucky that we got an early start.
Spoilers ahoy!
The story sounds fairly simple. A Japanese stranger (Jun Kunimura) moves into the village of Gokseong in the mountains of South Korea, and shortly thereafter a strange infection breaks out, causing villagers to go insane and violently murder their families. The daughter of police officer Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), falls ill and Jong-goo does everything in his power to save her life, including confronting the Japanese man with a Japanese-speaking deacon, Yang I-sam (Kim Do-yoon), and then paying a shaman named Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min) to perform a death-hex ritual after his daughter, Hyo-jin (Kim Hwan-hee) stabs their neighbor. This doesn’t work and Jong-goo tries to kill the Japanese man himself.
Meanwhile, Il-gwang is confronted by a mysterious woman in white called Moo-myeong (Chun Woo-hee), and calls Jong-goo to tell him that she is the real demon and the Japanese man is another shaman. Jong-goo, not knowing who or what to believe fails to follow Moo-myeong’s instructions and Hyo-jin murders her mother and grandmother before being killed in self-defense by Jong-goo. It turns out that the shaman and the Japanese man are in cahoots and have teamed up to feed off the life forces and desperate cash payments of many families in the village.
Yeah, that’s not that simple, I guess. Even though I streamlined that breakdown quite a bit, there’s still a lot more going on and I’m connecting a lot of dots that aren’t clear on an initial viewing. Honestly, if I hadn’t watched some video essays breaking down the narrative after watching the film, I wouldn’t have made some of those more spoilery connections.
The Wailing is a film that refuses to hold your hand and spell everything out. Although if careful attention is paid, you should probably have a decent idea of what is going on by the time the credits roll. I would not advise drinking or smoking anything beforehand. This movie will fuck you up more than any substance one might feel like abusing.
Officer Jong-goo is not your typical protagonist for a story like this. He’s a bumbling dork, always late for work, and seemingly barely aware of what’s going on around him. Because of this, the first portion of the film plays almost like a comedy of errors, until Jong-goo is confronted with his first extremely disturbing crime scene. A man with a horrible rash all over his body has brutally murdered and mutilated his entire family and sits in a daze, handcuffed on his porch while the police inspect the home.
By the time the film wraps, Jong-goo is tortured, violent, and disturbed. He’s no longer a comical figure and instead becomes a tragic victim, echoing the dazed man at the first crime scene.
Na Hong-jin’s direction is masterful and works wonders with Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo’s vision and Sun-Min Kim’s editorial hand. Moments flow into one another with an almost dreamlike quality, informing and repositioning each previous scene as new information is revealed. Reoccurring images of the Japanese man, his eyes glowing red, feasting on a dead deer blend dream logic with rumors, making the viewer question whether or not the Japanese man is actually a demon or is just being characterized as such by the locals.
Spoiler alert. He’s a demon.
While not technically a zombie movie, I highly recommend setting aside a few hours and digging into the nihilistic tragedy of The Wailing.