K-drama midseason recap: Dark Hole – horror series continues to struggle with muddled concepts
- This South Korean horror series leans on the zombie genre, but is full of plot and character inconsistencies
- Characters are bitten or inhale smoke to become infected, but lead characters seem to be affected differently from lesser players
This article contains spoilers.
Horror is an elastic genre that can be bent and twisted to take on any form, and unbridled imaginations can haunt us in ever changing ways with different representations of the myriad things we fear. Rules in horror, such as they are, are made to be broken. But, among all the screams and bloodletting and nightmares, there is one mandate that horror generally must stick to: be consistent.
Zombies exploded onto the Korean film scene in 2016 through the global hit Train to Busan and then spread to the small screen through Netflix’s Kingdom . The K-zombie trend is beloved around the world, but the truth is, before the release of these films and series, studios and their marketing teams were adamant that their creatures were not zombies. Audiences felt differently.
Five years into the trend, zombie denialism has birthed new creatures with zombie elements, such as some of the monsters in Sweet Home . The OCN series Dark Hole has also put forward its own kind of monsters – humans that grow deranged after inhaling a sentient black smoke that has emerged from a mysterious dark hole in a mountain forest.
These humans go berserk, veiny blue lines appear over their bodies, and they go around biting other humans. Victims with bite marks who don’t immediately succumb to their wounds do get infected and eventually turn. They also move around in the trademark mad staggering dash, arms flailing forward, spittle flying out of their gaping jaws.