White: Melody of Death (non-spoiler) Review

Native Title: 화이트: 저주의 멜로디
Release Date: June 9, 2011
Director: Kim Sun
Writer: Kim Gok
Genre: Horror
Starring: Ham Eun Jung, Hwang Woo Seul. Rest of the cast can be found here.

I have a soft spot for teen slasher films. I’ve been into horror and spooky stuff since I can remember, but around middle school/high school is when I started to get into it more, and those teen slasher movies were it. They are fun, exciting, the right level of gore and campiness and I was living through one of the best times for it. Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty…all premiered when I was a teen. While White: Melody of Death didn’t have the same punch as its Western counterpoints (I’m assuming because of the target audience) it did have some of those same fun elements.

I’ve had this on my list to watch for a really long time - actually most of the movies and dramas I’m going to be talking about in the next couple of months have been on my radar for a while - so it was nice to finally have an excuse to pick this one up now. I knew very little going into the film. I knew that it was about kpop. I knew that Junho had a slight cameo and that it starred the girl from T-ara and that it had this mysterious Ring-vibe to it. But that’s it.

White: Melody of Death is about a kpop group, the Pink Dolls, who are at the brink of dissolving. They are consistently losing on music shows, and only really have one more shot before they will disband. The main leader, Eun Ju (played by T-ara member Ham Eun Jung), finds a video in their new rehearsal space while cleaning up. It’s a grainy recording of a group performing an unfamiliar song. Her manager gets ahold of the tape and decides to use the song for their group, which skyrockets the group into stardom quickly. That’s when the problems start to happen.

One of the parts I liked most about the film was how they used the popularity and the craziness of fans to heighten some of the clips. The horrors and negative aspects of that business were brought up in the film. There were constant portrayals of the fans going nuts, screaming, and trying to grab at the girls - as well as being caught up in their own fandom to not realize the severity of what was going on or to really pick up the danger that the girls were being put in. The juxtaposition of the crazy fans who don’t care about their safety, and the knowledge of what the girls went through to get there was interesting. The constant pressure of the girls to keep going even after things started to go bad added to the real-life horror side of the movie.

I think that at parts the movie was hazy in its execution of this comparison, though. It would have been nicer if they had leaned into the ugly side of the industry a bit more. A lot of it was rushed or we just didn’t get to see it because the entity had to be present again. Issues they bring up such as jealousy, plastic surgery, and just general deception because of the nature of competition were lightly touched on and kind of glossed over and so it never came across as a good enough conflict, or just entirely unresolved. It created a lot of muddling and confusion to the storyline towards the end. You see where they were going, but those problems and pacing throws it off.

I do like what the movie was trying to do, even if they didn’t necessarily get there. If you are a kpop fan already, these parts tend to be more forgivable since you are already in the know of the problems in that industry and understand why it’s there, but if you go in as just a horror fan the context might get lost. In the end, the general horror audience wasn’t its target audience. With the Eun Jung (an actual well-known kpop idol) starring and cameos from other idols, the audience for it was a young kpop audience.

All-in-all I enjoyed the movie for what it was. It was fun, I enjoyed it as someone who spends a lot of time looking into the kpop world, and it wasn’t a bad way to spend a Friday night.

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