KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study examines Yeon Sang-ho's works as director and/or screenwriter in the post-pandemic period—centering on “Hellbound” Season 2 and “Parasyte: The Grey”, and considered alongside “The Cursed” (Bangbeob: Jaechaui), “Goeie”, and <Peninsula>—in order to elucidate how the so-called "Yeon Sangho horror universe" prefiguratively gives form to the formless anxieties of the contemporary public. To this end, the study draws on Giorgio Agamben's concept of "planetary civil war (stasis)" and recent scholarship on the Hobbesian allegory of the Leviathan. Through this framework, it reads the mob scenes in Yeon's works—in which crowds, coalescing into communities of belief in the vacated and invisible space left by the hollowed-out state, turn to mutual slaughter—as constituting a "Leviathanic body," a vast artificial body operating independently of the individuals who compose it. The study further draws on Wendy Brown's concept of "apocalyptic populism" and Timothy Morton's concept of "dark ecology" to examine how these bodies become entangled with a non-human unconscious rooted in climate and ecological crisis. Through this analysis, the study demonstrates that Yeon Sang-ho's horror and occult narratives move beyond existing neoliberal class narratives to serve as symptomatic texts that prefiguratively bear witness to a state of permanent civil war—an era in which utopian visions of revolution and progress have dissolved and universality itself has been evacuated.

Yeon Sang-ho's Horror Universe, Apocalyptic Populism, Mob Scene(m-Obscene), Leviathanic Body, Planetary Civil War(Stasis), Dark Ecology

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