A Devilish Homicide

• Writer-director Lee Yong-min came up as a cameraman, shooting documentaries and features from the mid-1940s before turning to horror in the early 1960s. Most of his horror work is now lost, and A Devilish Homicide only survives because original 35mm elements turned up under the care of the Korean Film Archive (KOFA).
• The film is widely cited as the origin point of the Korean vengeful-cat-ghost tradition, predating better-known entries like 1967's A Public Cemetery of Wol-ha. The wronged woman doesn't return as a standard white-clad spirit alone but is channeled through a cat, a template later Korean horror kept reworking.
• Released August 12, 1965 through Jeil Films at 93 minutes, shot by Hong Jong-mun in murky black-and-white that leans expressionist, with exaggerated camera angles and weird set design standing in for an effects budget the production didn't have.
• The possession set pieces are the deep-cut payload: the cat-possessed grandmother compulsively licking her sleeping grandchildren's faces, and the doctor who puts a stethoscope to her chest and hears only sci-fi electronic noises instead of a heartbeat. The reveal lands when her reflection in a mirror comes back as a cat's, and the body finally collapses into a dead cat wearing a tiny robe.
• The Korean Film Archive opened it for free online viewing in July 2008 and posted it to its official YouTube channel on December 2, 2015. It had earlier screened at the 2003 Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, and CineLine Korea put out a DVD in 2007.
• Jasper Sharp (Midnight Eye) summed it up as 'a delirious B-movie shocker' built on cat-women vampires, and the surviving print's wear and scratches arguably sharpen the gothic dread rather than dulling it.

• The film's central murder—depicted in a series of disjointed, almost ritualistic shots—has been interpreted as a metaphor for Japan's post-war trauma, with the killer's amnesia mirroring the nation's collective repression of wartime atrocities. The 'devilish' aspect may symbolize the inescapable nature of historical guilt.

• Some scholars argue that the film's surreal dream sequences, where the protagonist is pursued by faceless figures, prefigure the 'urban legend' horror of later J-horror (e.g., 'Ringu'). The blurred line between reality and nightmare reflects anxieties about modernity and technological alienation.

• The recurring motif of bloodstained hands and the killer's compulsive washing rituals have been linked to Freudian theories of guilt and purification, suggesting the film is a psychological study of obsession rather than a conventional slasher narrative.

• The film's ambiguous ending, where the killer's fate is left unresolved, invites comparisons to European art-horror (e.g., 'Eyes Without a Face'). It may critique the futility of justice in a society where violence is systemic rather than individual.

A decade after his first wife vanished, a wealthy man stumbles on her red-washed portrait in an empty gallery and watches the people around him start dying in ugly, inexplicable ways. The dead woman never really left. Murdered by jealous in-laws, she comes back riding the body of a cat, working her way through her killers and burrowing into her own grieving family. Lee Yong-min stages it as a fever you can't wake from, the line between nightmare and house steadily dissolving until a grandmother's reflection turns feline.