Disappearance of TV ghost dramas

"Napryang" in Korean means cooling off in a summer breeze. The phrase "Napryang hosts dramas on a summer night" refers to a TV horror drama with a Korean female ghost in white mourning clothes and messy long hair springing out all of a sudden. This is quite a scientific expression. When a person feels fear, the amygdalda of the brain responds, agitating the sympathetic nerve and contracting blood vessels, making hands and feet cold. If sweat glands are stimulated into making cold sweat, body hair bristles up and the skin gets goose bumps.

Fear is divided into instinctive and learned. When a person sees a snake or hears someone scream, this is an instinctive fear. This is inherent in the brain even before the person is born. Learned fear is feeling fear by recalling a story related to a similar stimulus. Instinctive fear disappears when the stimulus factor fades, but learned fear stimulates the brain for a long time and forces the person to face a bigger fear. Someone who saw the movie "Ring," which a ghost with messy hair creeps out of the TV screen, can get the creeps simply by seeing a TV.

Korea`s three major TV networks are airing fewer ghost dramas in summer nights, and broadcast none this summer. A revised version of "Korean Ghost Stories" was revived after a nine-year hiatus but was axed after just two years. Viewers are familiar with U.S. crime dramas with plenty of bloody corpses and exposure of organs that air on cable TV. Terrestrial TV programs are hardly scary to such viewers. Cutting-edge make-up and computer generated images are expensive and advertisers are unwilling to be sponsors. This is why Korean ghost dramas are becoming such nuisances.

A pioneer of complexity science and systems theory, John L. Casti said in his book "Mood Matters" that horror movies are popular in an economic slump. Vampire movies and the classic slasher flick "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" are popular when the economy is in the shades of a recession. Given the adverse economic mood in Korea, the disappearance of TV ghost dramas cannot be understood as the economy escaping from the recession tunnel. Learned fear has a far stronger effect than a ghost story in a situation where serial killers like Yoo Yeong-cheol, Kang Ho-soon, Cho Doo-soon and Kim Jeom-deok still exist.

Editorial Writer Lee Hyeong-sam (hans@donga.com)