The Ghost Story of the Joseon Dynasty

• Shin Sang-ok directed this in 1970 at the height of Shin Films, the studio he built into South Korea's dominant production house of the 1960s. Five years later a censorship scandal over a film called Rose and Wild Dog cost the studio its license, and in 1978 North Korean agents kidnapped him — a career derailment that lasted nearly a decade until his 1986 escape.
• The film was shot under Park Chung-hee's military government, when the Motion Picture Law required every script to clear a government pre-production review before cameras could roll — a censorship structure carried over almost intact from the Japanese colonial-era film law.
• It belongs to a wave of Joseon-era vengeful-ghost films Korean studios leaned into after 1967's A Public Cemetery of Wolha turned into a surprise box-office hit, kicking off a run of period ghost-revenge pictures that ran into the early 1970s.
• Shin Films produced roughly 300 films across the 1960s, making it easily the busiest and most commercially dominant studio in South Korea at the time — this ghost story was one small piece of a massive output.

The vengeful ghosts read less like a random haunting and more like a targeted purge — the dead are the ones who enabled the prince's abuse of power and carried out the wrongful execution, not just anyone who crosses her path. Read that way, the film argues for a kind of moral accounting that royal power can't buy its way out of.

The real villain isn't the ghost, it's the court itself — a system where a prince can have a man executed on a false charge and take his widow because nobody with power will say no. The haunting is just the mechanism by which that rot finally gets punished; the period setting isn't nostalgia, it's an indictment of unchecked royal authority.

The final exorcism doesn't resolve anything — the priest can banish the ghosts, but he can't undo the execution or the abuse of power that caused them. The haunting was historical memory. No ritual erases that.

Prince Yeonsan-gun wants Yahwa, so he has her husband Yun Pil-u executed on a trumped-up treason charge. Rather than submit, Yahwa kills herself — but not before ordering her cat to avenge them both. What follows is a body count: court ladies and palace guards turning up dead every morning, the ghosts of Yahwa and Pil-u trailing the sound of a mewing cat through the halls. Director Shin Sang-ok, working at the peak of his Shin Films empire, frames it less as random haunting than as a tribunal the prince can't buy his way out of. It's Kim Chung-won, Pil-u's old friend and head of the palace guard, who finally brings in a Buddhist priest to drive the ghosts out and quiet the palace — a fix that stops the killing without answering for what caused it.