The "return of the repressed" as metaphor for the colonized "other" in Epitaph

The struggle between Korea as a colonized nation and Japan as colonizer is wonderfully played out through the use of horror in Epitaph. Horror films harness that which is repressed in a given culture's collective consciousness-or unconsciousness-to produce its desired effects of fright and unease. What I mean is, something is perceived as scary when it emerges in a space that has attempted to forcibly erase it. Because the cult of modernity, and the work of colonization itself, aims to undo the "backwardness" of places that do not subscribe to identical notions of progress (Reddy), the blurred lines between life and death, and the return to life of bodies presumed dead in this film illustrate the struggle between Japan and Korea during the colonial period. Japanese "modernity's" goals to erase and "laissez mourir" (Foucault) the old Korea, and Korea's struggle to keep its own culture viable can be seen as a struggle between life and death, where colonization is the killing force of all that does not belong in a "modern" world. Backlash against colonial force in this film depicts the "return of the repressed," when that which is supposed to be dead comes back to "haunt" life. For example, Kim Dongwon's ghost comes back to possess his wife, and she sees herself as his dead self, the girl who committed suicide pulls Jung-Nam into the spirit world with her after she has been put away in the morgue, and Azuko has extremely vivid dreams about her mother and stepfather that infiltrate her life as survivor of the car
accident.
Death is necessarily for life in the sense of colonization. A new "better" life of a nation cannot be achieved without the death of the old and so-called outdated. But the line between life and death is not so clear cut, and colonization is a long battle between the conflicting lifeworlds of the oppressor and the repressed. Epitaph captures this ambiguity very well, its fetishization of death operating as a symbol of modernity's goal of letting all that is "other" die.