It’s hard to think of a genre with higher highs and lower lows than found footage horror. The Blair Witch Project is one of the all-time great horror movies; The Pyramid is one of the worst. That said, found footage is a genre that I rarely give a chance to and never seek out. For so long now, it has been a way for studios to churn out ill-conceived, ultra-cheap horror. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy some terrible horror movies. You have no idea how much I miss drinking and watching bad horror with friends on a Saturday night. But found footage is a balancing act; just a little to one side and it becomes almost unwatchably dull. So imagine my surprise when I saw Murder Death Koreatown… and absolutely loved it. Except, well.
Shit.
Okay, let’s dig in.
What is MURDER DEATH KOREATOWN?
Murder Death Koreatown is a microbudget found footage horror movie that appears to be shot entirely on an iPhone. In it, an unemployed Los Angeles man witnesses the arrest of a young woman outside his apartment. The next day, he learns that she murdered her partner in their nearby home. He sees the crime scene, finds blood on the street, and as the picture of the killing becomes settled to the police, it becomes even murkier for him. Whose blood was on the sidewalk? How did she get to the alley? And who was the mysterious ‘third man’ she mentioned? Our unnamed lead, armed with a camera and free time, sets out to find answers.
Okay, but what is it about?
In a way, this feels like the definitive movie of the Qanon era. It just fundamentally gets the allure of conspiracies. The lead is unemployed, living a life that feels out of control. He’s dependent on his partner. And when he sees the murder, he latches on to it. He needs to feel like he’s doing something meaningful. His low self-esteem sends him careening and lashing out when challenged.
But with a cause? With a cause, he can do anything. He can put himself out there, for instance. He can contribute. Contribute to what, though?
Murder Death Koreatown gets that conspiracies capture people who need them. There are people who are drowning in chaos and need something firm to hold on to. They need to feel like someone, somewhere, is in control of it all. A conspiracy offers that, offers answers that have an internal consistency even as they veer further and further from a recognizable reality.
Why did you call it exploitative?
The central mystery the movie sets out to answer involves the murder of Tae Kyung Sung by his wife Mi-sun Yoo in LA’s Koreatown. This is apparently an actual murder. What’s more, the movie appears to use footage from the real neighborhood where the killing happened. He uses Tae Kyung Sung’s name and likeness. Is he actually interviewing real neighbors about a real murder for a fake movie? It’s impossible to say. There are no credits on the movie, no director named. At least some of actors look and feel like amateurs. But boy, it doesn’t feel great.
Also feeling less-than-great? Turns out the QAnon connection I mentioned above was even more apt a comparison than I thought. In 2019, a series of posts by “K Anon” began appearing on 4Chan’s /x/ board. Over seven months, the poster made a series of claims about the murder, the location, and the footage that would eventually become the film. It was pegged fairly early on as an ARG, or perhaps viral marketing. The story was gripping and eerie, at least until it devolved into what more clearly felt like marketing.
In the end, is that all it is? Just some edgelords trying to capitalize on a dead man? My favorite films tend to revel in empathy, and while Murder Death Koreatown has a lot of empathy for its protagonist, it has very little for the couple at the heart of the mystery, nor for the homeless, or the people of Koreatown. It shocks, certainly. But is that enough?
Is it a good movie?
There are times when it verges on being a truly great movie. Found footage, it turns out, is a phenomenal genre through which to tell stories about the rapid descent into a conspiratorial mindset. There are times when it is blunt, but found footage can be blunt, in the way that people are blunt sometimes. Good found footage understands that you are trading the craft of traditional cinematic language for the emotional immediacy of something like home video.
Strangely, there’s one truly terrible scene in the movie, a single moment where it breaks the found footage format completely. This scene was apparently only added for streaming audiences. I don’t totally understand why the director added it, but it completely breaks the reality of the film. It reminds you that, for all the queasy intensity of the first hour of the movie, it is just a film. And the movie rapidly goes downhill from there.
In the end, it devolves into a Blair Witch knock-off, but without the gut-wrenching terror. I was left sitting with… that? All this, for that? It felt wrong, somehow. That sense of wrongness was only compounded by learning the story behind the murder. What had felt tacky now felt deeply tasteless.
Perhaps this suggests a pitfall of making a movie so intimately tied to a descent into conspiracy: Unlike a movie, conspiracies don’t end. For most of them, there is never a moment when the curtain is pulled back, the truth laid bare. How could they? As they go on longer, the weight of internal contradictions warps the stories at their core, forces them to keep building up, keep inventing new connections. Like empire, the story can only grow by expanding.
For most adherents, the conspiracy is the point.
I can’t say how you should respond to knowing the sad story of Tae-Kyung Sung and Mi-sun Yoo. I can only tell you how I responded to it. But I can say that, even if you don’t share my distaste, you’ll likely share my dissatisfaction. A great conspiracy theory isn’t about answers. Answers can never satisfy the urge to go down the rabbit hole. And the movie’s brilliance lies in the downward slide, not the landing.