10 Best & 10 Worst Horror Movies Of 2016
3. The Wailing
The K-Horror subgenre has dished out some mighty fine films in recent years and auteur Na Hong-jin’s latest offering The Wailing looks set to join the exalted ranks of fellow critically acclaimed South Korean horrors like Kim Jee-woon’s seminal A Tale of Two Sisters and Park Chan-wook’s lusty vampire flick Thirst.
The movie is set in a small, rural South Korean village that is rocked when the arrival of a mysterious Japanese man coincides with the spread of an illness that infects its victims with violent, murderous intent. Hapless local cop Jong-goo scrambles to discover the root of the disease, even more so invested when his young daughter falls sick too.
Mixing elements of murder mystery cop movie with the kind of unsettling Asian horror conventions we’ve come to know and love in recent years, The Wailing also cleverly blends Western religious superstition with Korean shamanistic folklore and results in a genuinely scary supernatural affair. If you need any more convincing of its brilliance, its 98% Rotten Tomatoes score should do nicely.