Exhuma

Pungsu-jiri, Korea's form of feng shui, comes from the same Chinese yin-yang and Five Phases thinking that Taoism draws on. It reads land for gi, an energy that runs along ridges and water, and a site where gi gathers is a myeongdang. An ancestor buried in one passes that energy down to the descendants. An ancestor buried badly passes down misfortune, which is why the family in Exhuma pays to have a grave dug up.

The Korean title, Pamyo, means breaking open a grave, the first step in moving remains to better ground. Families still do it. Queen Myeongseong moved her father's grave four times, President Kim Dae-jung moved his parents' tombs, and an estimated 20,000 geomancers work in South Korea today.

Korean viewers noticed that the four leads share names with independence fighters, and Jang Jae-hyun answered with "no comment". Sang-deok the geomancer shares his with Kim Sang-deok, who after liberation chaired the first committee to investigate collaborators with Japan. Young-geun the undertaker shares his with Go Young-geun, who assassinated a Korean officer involved in the murder of Empress Myeongseong. The shaman Hwa-rim is named like Lee Hwa-rim, who joined the March 1st Movement at fourteen, and her apprentice Bong-gil like Yun Bong-gil, who threw a bomb at a Japanese military celebration in Shanghai's Hongkou Park in 1932. Even Hwa-rim's fellow shamans, Ok Gwang-sim and Park Ja-hye, carry activists' names.

The number plates keep the count. Sang-deok drives 0815, Liberation Day. Hwa-rim and Bong-gil's car is 0301, for the March 1st Movement of 1919, and Young-geun's hearse is 1945.

Hwa-rim leads a gut, a shaman's rite of drumming, chanting, dance and offerings. Hers is a daesal-gut, which turns a deadly force aside onto sacrificed animals. Jang shot the rite as close to a real one as he could: the pig carcasses are real, computer effects were kept to a minimum, and the working shamans Lee Da-young and Gochunja coached Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun, with Lee Da-young performing protective rites for the cast while the scenes were filmed. Bong-gil's tattoos are Buddhist scripture, worn for protection.

The Baekdudaegan, the ridge running the length of the peninsula, is read in geomancy as Korea's spine. Around 1903 the Japanese geologist Koto Bunjiro likened the peninsula's outline to a rabbit. In 1908 the Korean magazine Sonyeon printed a map of the peninsula as a roaring tiger instead, and Koreans have drawn it as a tiger since.

The belief is called soemalttuk: that the colonial government hammered iron stakes into Korea's mountains to cut the land's energy and stop great leaders being born. In 1985 a climbing club pulled 27 rods off Bukhansan and gave 15 to the Independence Hall. The belief peaked in 1995, when the Japanese Government-General building in Seoul began coming down on the fiftieth anniversary of liberation.

No document shows any such plan. Many of the rods were survey or trail markers and some were left by shamans, and the fear is older than the occupation: in the 18th century King Jeongjo blamed stakes planted by the Chinese. A character in Exhuma concedes that 99 percent of the claims proved false, and Jang said he kept the story because nobody knows either way.

Beneath the grandfather's coffin stands a second one, upright and bound in wire, in a layered burial called cheopjang that hides one grave beneath another. The grandfather was a collaborator with the colonial state, and his ghost is the first of three enemies. The second is a sorcerer called Gisune, a play on kitsune, the Japanese fox spirit. The third is the corpse of a general from Japan's invasion of Korea in 1592 to 1598, the Imjin War, so one grave holds a collaborator, a colonial occultist and a far older invasion.

The clue that the fox has cut the tiger's waist puts the stake halfway down the spine, and from the grave Sang-deok can see North Korea. Critics read the stake as sitting where the peninsula would later be divided.

The general is fire and metal, and steel cannot touch him. In Five Phases thinking water and wood overcome those two, so Sang-deok fights him with wood soaked through. The team also notices he will not touch the scripture on Bong-gil's skin, and before the last fight they paint verses over their own faces and bodies.