Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.

This week got derailed by some personal matters so I only got one more episode of Oh No! Here Comes Trouble! recapped, taking me up to episode 7. It’s also why I’m a day late and only going to review one show.

But it’s a good one! This week I finished:

Revenant – 악귀 – 2023 Pictured

A recently aired Korean modern horror thriller with 12 episodes.

After the father she never knew dies, a young woman gets pulled into the supernatural world, along with a professor of folklore and a young cop.

As a warning, if you are sensitive about suicide, it’s a fundamental part of the story and you may want to skip or be careful in your watching. 

Another “everyone says it’s good and it is!” review from me. The show belongs in the ghost stories/occult bucket of the horror genre and it gets big points for the richness and depth of the lore. There are all kinds of rituals and items and different kinds of ghosts and everything has a story. At the same time, the plot kept moving without getting trapped in these details. There were times I didn’t quite understand what was happening, but I wanted to keep going. 

We start out in the very realistic world of modern Korea, except that there are ghosts everywhere. The average person can’t see them, but due to various circumstances, people can become aware of them. The way they work and influence people is realistic, making it feel like a real-world possibility for ghosts to exist. Our leads discovery of them and frantic fear as she realizes they are all around her even when she isn’t seeing them is deliciously creepy.

The horror of the ghosts is carefully built up instead of relying on cheap scares. I love it when banal, average, everyday moments of life can be turned into horrible portents of doom, and this show does that very well. The ghosts’ designs are interesting and creepy too, and they do a good job of not revealing so much of them that they lose their impact. 

They also seem to draw heavily on horrifying parts of Korean history and folklore. It feels like a lot of it is based on true stories, but as I know very little and Korean history and basically nothing about Korean folklore, I can’t be sure. The past was really cruel and awful though, so I can believe it’s true and it makes me curious to know more.

Even if you’ve only watched Western horror, the characters are familiar. Our folklore professor could easily be a catholic priest dealing with a case of possession. That doesn’t mean they are boring though, and they are well-acted by familiar actors who are always a delight on screen. Several of them get to indulge in primal screams.

This is another one of those shows I can easily recommend to anyone who likes horror/thrillers from any country.