It’s hard to believe that it has been a decade since this movie came out. This will be my second time watching this great movie. The Wailing will likely be held as one of the most popular Korean horror movies within the previous decade, right next to Train to Busan, if Reddit is anything to go by. The Wailing, personally to me, is the more “scary” of the two and more of the traditional type of horror I like to see more of. The problem with supernatural types of horror movies is that if not done correctly, it can feel very cringy and put a lot of viewers off. Once in a while, though, a movie comes out that does so many things correctly that it can even be enjoyed by fans of all types, not just horror or the supernatural types.

The Wailing, unfortunately for some, requires some thinking afterwards if one is to interpret the many different signals that are thrown in the movie. But fortunately, in my opinion, the movie can also be enjoyed from start to finish, without really requiring that type of devotion. I think it’s one of the many reasons why the movie achieved such huge success. For those that want to just move on afterwards, they are free to do so. Yes, some things might be questioned, but I don’t believe it’s anything that will trip them up too badly. For those who really like to dissect a movie, well, let’s just say this movie is perfect for that.

So, in the end, we see the cop lose faith by not trusting the lady guardian. As a result, he’s gotten both himself and his wife and mom killed. But how? During his conversation with her, the possessed daughter was already murdering her mom and grandma. When the cop arrives, we see that the wife is barely alive. Are we to believe that if he had actually listened for the third rooster cry, somehow the wife and his mom would have survived the brutal stabbing wounds? There was a ton of blood in the house. I also have to assume that the demon was playing tricks with the cop into making him see things, such as the clothes the guardian was wearing along with the hair clip of her daughter. At the same time this was happening, the deacon was confronting the demon in the cave. I’m not sure how, if any, his part played in ensuring that the cop’s family would survive if he had kept his faith by not returning to his home. I doubt the deacon would have been able to overpower the demon and kill it, as he was injured himself after having half his face bitten off.

As to the female guardian, what’s her deal? Why was she acting so weird on the side of the road during her first encounter with the cop, throwing rocks and just acting so strangely? It led one to believe that she has mental issues. Afterward, we see her acting completely differently. Maybe this is some Korean folklore that I’m not familiar with? The incident she had with the Korean shaman towards the end was also a bit telling. She prevented him from going inside the cop’s house, but she did it quite violently when she made him puke blood and vomit. The shaman at this point was likely tainted, and no doubt she knew this, but why did she get so violent with him? Maybe she’s not as benevolent as we’d like to think, and there’s something more to her than what we see?

As to the Korean shaman…Initially, I had wanted to believe that he was the demon’s partner in crime right from the very beginning. However, I don’t think that was it afterward. The biggest turning point was when the cop interrupted the death hex ritual the Korean shaman was performing. He made it absolutely clear that he is not to be interrupted once he begins. I believe he was actually having success with his battle with the demon, but the demon played his tricks and made both the wife and the cop interrupt the ritual because of the pain they saw their daughter was in. He can hardly be blamed because he himself saw a patient in the hospital also succumbing to the same twisting of body parts and eventually croaking blood and dying a horrible death. Because the ritual was stopped, it can be said that the demon has now somehow found a way inside the Korean shaman and owns him thereafter. He attempted to pray to Buddha at his home, but it was useless, as I think the demon’s taint on him was too strong. There was a scene where he was changing his clothes, and we briefly saw that when he stripped his pants, he was wearing the same type of white underwear that the Japanese man was also wearing. This was before the death hex ritual and why I initially had thought he was in it from the beginning. But then the scene when he was driving in his car at night to go to the cops house, when things were splatting against his windshield, disproved that theory. Maybe the demon still had to trick him into believing that the female guardian was the true evil demon instead of the Japanese shaman?

So on to the demon itself. That last scene in the cave was truly something scary. The other chilling part was when the Korean shaman explained that the demon doesn’t really target specific individuals. This might be different folklore than for the explanation of the devil in the West, which I believe main targets individuals with lack of faith, sinners and people who are typically more gullible and easily seduced. In the movie, it’s explained that the demon just casts the bait in the ocean and seeing who bites. The cops daughter, unfortunately, took the bait. We see in the very beginning scene of the Japanese shaman fishing and hooking a worm as bait. I thought that was very chilling afterwards. However, the female guardian contradicted that explanation by saying to the cop that his daughter is suffering because of his sins. Here is where it gets a bit confusing. We see during the zombie fight sequence that the Japanese shaman was able to escape the first cliff fall and was on the run. However, we then see later that he caught the female guardian spying on him and gave chase. During their escape in the car, we then see that, in a strange twist of fate, they accidentally hit the Japanese man as he was falling from the mountain and believed they have killed him. We don’t know what happened between the demon and the guardian to have made him jump onto their path but we see the cop and his friends throw him over the mountain side with the guardian looking at them in disapproval? The guardian should have known the demon would only come back to life so why would she try to kill it in the traditional way? Was she trying to help the cop by getting rid of the demon itself? By dumping the body, was this what caused the cop to lose favor with her? But why? Up until that point, the cop had no idea that the demon could have been anyone else but the Japanese man.

At the very end, we see the Korean shaman, now fully on the same side as the demon, taking photos of the dead cop and his family. We then see all the pictures of previous victims when he accidentally dropped the box. This again initially led me to believe he supplied the pictures to the Japanese man from the very beginning and was in cahoots right from the start. I also thought the demon wanted someone else to do all the picture taking of potential victims, but then we saw in the cave that he was perfectly fine with operating a camera to take pictures of the deacon. I didn’t see any suggestion of it, but it could be that the Korean shaman would be the next host for the demon, given how injured the old Japanese man was after the fall as well as old age.

So all in all, I didn’t expect myself to think so much about the movie afterward, but here I am. There does seem to be a lot more questions than answers, but oddly, The Wailing is one of those movies where I don’t mind that much. At 2 hours and 45 minutes long, it’s not a short movie, and I would have liked for some of the things mentioned here to be more cleared up, at least more definitively. I mean, maybe it did, and I just wasn’t paying attention? Either way, this movie deserves to be watched again in another couple of years or so. There’s likely many other clues and hints that I’ve missed. I was seriously fooled into also believing that the Japanese man wasn’t the devil due to certain scenes, and this being my second watch! The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.