At a picnic a young woman offers a young man named Young-gul an orange juice. She then tells him the orange juice was poisoned and that they will both die. Young-gul survives.
He then tries to kill himself. He is obsessed with death.
A strange old man turns up in Young-gul’s seedy apartment and tries to sell Young-gul a book on the will. The old guy claims that he cannot die. When it’s put to the test it appears that the old guy might be right, in a way.
Young-gul gets a job with an archaeologist who collects skulls. He is trying to prove that Korans are descended from Genghis Khan’s Mongols. Young-gul finds a 2,000-year-old skeleton for him.
This is when Young-gul encounters the ghost. In Chinese and Japanese folklore ghosts are corporeal. They can even have sex. They can also fall in love. On the evidence of this movie that is true of Korean folklore as well. The ghost is a very attractive young woman. She wants to have sex with Young-gul. She wants his love. She also wants to eat his liver. Young-gul doesn’t know much about women. He wonders if all girls are like this.
Later Young-gul gets mixed up with the archaeologist’s daughter. She is obsessed with death as well. She is a virgin. The archaeologist offers to pay Young-gul to pop her cherry.
There’s also a cop investigating the headless corpse mystery. And strange masked guys stealing corpses.
There’s still more weirdness to come. And butterflies are important.
I have to confess that this is my first Korean movie and I also know nothing of Korean culture so I may be missing some cultural nuances in this movie. It’s not always easy to understand the humour of other cultures. It’s possible that quite a few scenes in this movie were being played for laughs. Or the movie might just be very crazy. It is very crazy, but maybe it’s supposed to be crazy in a funny way.
There are plenty of horror movie elements here but this does not feel like a horror movie. It feels like an art-house movie or an experimental film.
It’s a depressing movie obsessed with death. Maybe it’s supposed to be about the triumph of death over life, or the triumph of life over death.
I like weird movies but I did not find watching this movie to be an enjoyable experience.
It is however undeniably very very strange and morbidly fascinating. They don’t make movies like this any more. In fact sane people never did make movies like this.
This was a very low-budget movie. The special effects are laughably bad. I don’t mind bad special effects if they’re done in a fun way but in this case they’re just very very bad. It includes the worst skeletal transformation scene I have ever seen in a movie.
I have no idea what the director was trying to achieve in terms of tone. Despite all the weird goings-on it doesn’t really achieve an effectively creepy atmosphere but maybe Kim Ki-young was just aiming for morbid artiness.
It’s a movie that should tick all my boxes (I generally like arty horror) but somehow it just never grabs my interest. I don’t think I could honestly recommend it but it might just be a case of a movie that doesn’t work for me but might work for others so I’m hesitant to advise people to avoid it. It sure is weird.
Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death is available on Blu-Ray from Mondo Macabro.
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