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A grave is already frightening.
Then Exhuma makes the grave Korean.
The people approaching it are not generic paranormal investigators carrying familiar horror-movie equipment. The story brings together shamans, a feng shui expert and a mortician to deal with an ancestral burial site. What emerges eventually reaches into Korea’s colonial history. The supernatural machinery and the historical machinery occupy the same soil.
Something important is happening there, and it reaches far beyond one successful Korean horror film.
For years, international filmmakers hoping to reach American audiences have received some version of the same advice: make the story universal.
Increasingly, genre cinema is offering a mischievous reply.
What if the thing that travels furthest is the thing that refuses to become generic?
Exhuma eventually grossed about $93.9 million worldwide, including roughly $2.3 million in North America. In South Korea, the Korean Film Council records nearly 11.9 million admissions.
American viewers did not need to grow up understanding Korean geomancy for the grave to feel dangerous.
That distinction matters.
Genre gives the audience a map. Culture changes the territory.
Horror has an extraordinary advantage when crossing borders.
The audience already understands some of its grammar.
Do not open that door.
Something is behind you.
The dead person may not be finished being dead.
The house knows something.
Run.
A filmmaker therefore possesses a familiar emotional architecture before the first culturally specific detail arrives. Fear becomes common ground. What happens inside that common ground can remain wonderfully local.
This may explain part of the current vitality of international horror movies and global genre cinema. The strongest examples are not necessarily inventing completely new genres. They are contaminating familiar genres with histories, rituals, anxieties and images that those genres did not previously contain.
The genre travels easily.
The culture makes it strange again.
That is a valuable inversion for filmmakers attempting to stand out on the US festival circuit.
A programmer watching hundreds or thousands of submissions probably does not suffer from a shortage of technically competent films. There are plenty of dark corridors. Plenty of drones over forests. Plenty of ominous bass frequencies announcing that something ominous is about to become even more ominous.
Technical competence has become easier to reproduce.
Specificity hasn’t.
A wooden man can be more useful than another monster
Consider Damian McCarthy’s Irish horror film Oddity.
Its premise includes a blind medium investigating her twin sister’s murder with the help of a disturbing wooden mannequin. The film had its world premiere in SXSW’s Midnighter section in 2024.
The wooden figure is useful to think about because its power is partly physical.
It occupies space.
It can simply sit there.
A computer-generated creature often announces its purpose through movement. An object can frighten us by refusing to explain whether it has a purpose at all. Put a human-shaped wooden figure in a room and suddenly empty space around it becomes active. Where the camera places it matters. How long the edit avoids returning to it matters. Whether its head appears to have changed position matters.
The object starts directing the audience’s attention without moving.
That is an old horror principle, of course. Yet local objects, beliefs and material traditions can give that principle a texture no generic creature design can automatically supply.
Folklore becomes especially powerful here when filmmakers resist treating it as a Wikipedia page with lighting.
The audience does not always need a lecture explaining the demon, ritual, curse or superstition before being permitted to fear it.
Sometimes incomplete understanding improves the encounter.
Children understand this instinctively. Someone tells them, “Don’t go near that tree after dark.”
They rarely reply, “Could you provide the complete mythological taxonomy first?”
Cinderella has apparently been insufficiently horrible
Then there is The Ugly Stepsister.
Emilie Blichfeldt took one of the most culturally exhausted fairy tales imaginable and shifted attention toward the stepsister, turning the pursuit of beauty into body horror. At its 2025 Sundance premiere, the festival’s own account described an audience responding with audible gasps and groans. Sundance programmer John Nein emphasized the film’s proximity to the harsher Grimm tradition and its use of the story to examine manufactured beauty and body image.
This is another route into modern genre.
The filmmaker does not necessarily need unknown mythology. Sometimes the interesting material is something audiences believe they already know.
Cinderella.
Beauty.
Marriage.
The desirable body.
Take the comforting cultural version apart and an old story can reveal the violence that adaptation has spent generations making polite.
That is why folklore should not be confused with decoration.
A filmmaker who adds a regional demon to an otherwise interchangeable American-style horror screenplay has achieved localization.
A filmmaker who asks what their culture specifically fears, suppresses, inherits, worships, jokes about or refuses to discuss has something considerably more difficult to imitate.
The monster is almost secondary.
The real export is the logic that created the monster.
This is where “universal” becomes dangerous advice
Universality sounds generous. In practice, young filmmakers sometimes hear it as subtraction.
Remove the reference outsiders might miss.
Simplify the ritual.
Neutralize the location.
Explain the belief.
Make the character behave in a way an American audience will immediately recognize.
After enough of these decisions, the film becomes wonderfully accessible and strangely difficult to remember.
Genre filmmakers should be particularly suspicious of this process because unfamiliarity is one of their assets.
Horror needs uncertainty. Science fiction needs discovery. Thrillers need incomplete information. Fantasy needs rules that initially exceed our knowledge.
Cross-cultural difference can contribute naturally to all four.
The filmmaker’s job is clarity of dramatic experience, not total cultural explanation.
An American viewer may know nothing about a particular funeral practice while perfectly understanding that a character has violated something sacred.
That is enough to continue watching.
Understanding can arrive later.
Or remain incomplete.
Festivals are unusually good laboratories for this
The festival audience accepts a certain amount of risk before entering the room.
That changes the contract.
A theatrical distributor may worry about whether an unfamiliar mythology can be sold in thirty seconds. A festival programmer can ask a different question: does this film give the audience an experience unavailable elsewhere in the program?
Genre helps answer it because reactions become wonderfully physical.
Laughter.
Silence.
A collective recoil.
The peculiar noise an audience makes when 200 people realize what the character is about to do half a second before she does it.
At Sundance, The Ugly Stepsister produced exactly that kind of bodily response. Oddity entered SXSW through its Midnighter program. These films did not arrive in American festival spaces after sanding away their peculiarities.
Their peculiarities gave programmers something to program.
That difference is worth remembering.
The opportunity is larger than horror
Science fiction may be even more interesting.
Technology is never culturally neutral once people begin living with it.
A surveillance story made in one political system carries different anxieties from one made in another. Artificial intelligence can collide with religion, caste, family obligation, labor, language or ideas of the soul. Climate science fiction emerging from an island threatened by rising seas begins from another emotional coordinate than a climate story conceived in a comfortable inland suburb.
The spaceship can be universal.
Who gets a seat on it will not be.
This is where global sci-fi cinema can become genuinely disruptive: familiar speculative machinery carrying social assumptions American audiences have rarely been asked to inhabit.
The same principle reaches thrillers, fantasy, action and dark comedy.
Genre provides recognizability without requiring sameness.
So what should the international genre filmmaker protect?
Probably the detail someone tells you Americans won’t understand.
Examine it carefully first.
Is it genuinely confusing because the screenplay has failed to provide dramatic context? Fix it.
Is it merely unfamiliar?
That is different.
Protect the grandmother’s warning that sounds ridiculous until minute 47. Protect the burial practice. Protect the regional architecture that gives your ghost nowhere familiar to hide. Protect the joke whose translation needs ingenuity. Protect the local superstition the sophisticated protagonist pretends not to believe. Protect the monster whose rules come from a childhood story people in your town heard and people in Los Angeles probably didn’t.
Then make the filmmaking precise enough that an outsider can feel the consequence before fully understanding the explanation.
Exhuma did not require international audiences to become experts in Korean burial culture before buying a ticket. Its worldwide gross suggests that considerable numbers followed the film into culturally specific territory.
That may be the more interesting lesson behind the new wave of international genre cinema.
For decades, filmmakers outside Hollywood were encouraged to learn Hollywood’s genre language if they wanted to travel.
They learned it.
Now some of the most interesting ones are answering in their own accent.
And somewhere on the festival circuit, a programmer who has already watched twelve competent monsters today may finally sit forward because the thirteenth comes from a place they have never been—and obeys rules they do not yet understand.
