Abstract

This article examines the contemporary trend in Korean horror cinema in depicting syncretic and cultic religious groups and their involvement in a corporate and political conspiracy. In light of recent real-life scandals involving syncretic new religious movements, and amplified by dramatic social changes, polarizing politics, social media algorithms, and the prevalence of disinformation in the contemporary information age, the Korean syncretic panic and its related tropes are examined in relation to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and the contemporary iteration of Qanon. While the Korean syncretic panic is analyzed to be influenced by similar social changes as other moral panics, it also conveys a uniquely Korean unease with the collateral impacts of modernization and religion’s place within contemporary Korea. The horror films of the Korean syncretic panic articulate this pervasive and growing unease with syncretic and new religious movements by adapting the spatial associations of Korean shamanic horror. In this adaptation the once clear dichotomy of rural (premodern) and urban (modern) is blended, thereby creating a palimpsestic milieu which calls into question modernization’s homogeneity of time, space, history, and belief.