Cursed Landmarks

What if a ghost is a recording instead of a soul? Shawn explains stone tape theory, the boy who plays around a nearly 400-year-old zelkova tree at Gyeonghuigung Palace, and the night in 2018 when twelve people on his ghost walk smelled something burning that had no source.

King Jeongjo is dead, his reforms are on life support, and the woman holding the throne is making moves that will shape Korean politics for the next century. This episode covers the regency of Queen Dowager Jeongsun, the brief window of slave emancipation and anti-discrimination reform, and the rise of the Andong Kim clan — the family that turned “marrying into the monarchy” into a full-contact governing strategy.

Justin Kyle from the Straight Chilling Podcast joins Joe and Shawn to walk through the history of Korean horror cinema decade by decade, from silent-era ghost films made under Japanese occupation to the shamanism boom of the 70s, the censorship dark ages of the 80s, and the golden ages that bookend the 60s and the 2010s. Along the way they make the case that Korean horror has been doing most of what people think is new for over sixty years, and argue about whether Train to Busan deserves any of its reputation.

Why do ghosts conveniently conform to the culture of the people seeing them? Korean folklore gives us the cheonyeo gwishin, Western traditions have their own recognizable specters, and decades of movies have taught us that ghosts should be translucent, vaporous, and obviously dead.

A brand-new free museum just opened under Insadong in Seoul, built on six years of archaeological excavation exposing the city as it looked right before the Japanese invasion of the 1590s burned it to the ground. Joe walked through it, found a genuinely compelling story buried inside video interviews with the archaeologists, and came back frustrated that the museum itself never bothers to tell you any of it.