Horror and Revenge: Return of the Repressed Colonial Violence

Chapter 5 focuses on stories of vengeance as an exploration of the troubling remnants of colonial imagination. Stories of vengeful figures and their return—often in the form of a female specter—problematize both a particular historical time and the dominant imaginary of the colonial experience that other groups of films have promulgated. This chapter also discusses how the vengeance film genre criticizes the developmentalist logic of the Cold War through readings of two films, Yeraishang and Epitaph. These films produce an alternative vision of history that contradicts the discourses authorized by the present. This section thus concludes with the divergent scenario of nation and its scandalous exposé that constitutes a heretical yet productive dimension of national cinema.