The Epitaph

The film Epitaph (Gidam) is one of the famous horror films in South Korea, which includes the backgrounds of 1942 (Japanese colonial era), filmed by Jeong Beom-sik in 2007. The two terms I could find while watching this film was the “han” and the “past-love story”. In the film, audience could easily see that the setting of this film was colonial periods. For example, the characters used the Japanese name, Japanese (Chinese) characters on the signboards at the streets, etc.

In this film, we could see that the director Jeong used the methods of “fade-out” with some scenes. In the beginning of the film, the screen shows the pictures of the house where no one is staying after Jeong-nam’s daughter leave. Also, at the end of the film, the screen shows the places where Jeong-nam has been in the past, where no one is staying. The ‘fade-out’ scene not only shown within the pictures of the places (house), but also with the scene where Dong Won found out the fact that In-young does not have the shadow. With Dong-Won’s narration, the screen shows In-young and Dong Won staying together but as the screen goes, In-young’s body fade out and soon disappeard. 

As the genre of this film was the horror, I could see that director Jeong focused on the visual and the sounds effects while he filmed it. To be honest, I could not give my attention to the screen so I focused on the sounds effects on an impulse.

According to some psychologists, the sounds effects create the sensation of fear to the audiences’ more than visual images. Orchestra music is the most characteristic type of psychological horror film music. Since the orchestra music is common in horror films, director Jeong also used the orchestral music in this film. By just hearing the background sounds (sounds effect) I could able to guess whether the scene is in happy (bright) moods or sad (horror) moods. I could easily hear that the sounds turns loudly whenever the screen shows the scene with the ‘tragic’ and ‘horrible’ scenes. As the powerful orchestra music works well when it needs to convey emotions and set a certain moods, the director Jeong used the tone of the sounds effects a lot in this film.