It quickly becomes clear that it’s a production which benefits greatly from having them both on-board, and onscreen they have a believable chemistry together, which keeps things feeling grounded and based in reality. In that movie Dong-hoon was the lead, playing the title character, so The Priests provides the opportunity for them to share top billing. Yoon-seok and Dong-won have shared the screen together before, in Choi Dong-hoon’s 2009 feature Jeon Woo Chi: The Taoist Wizard. The latest is a young deacon, played by Kang Dong-won, last seen as the bad guy in Kundo: Age of the Rampant, and together Yoon-seok plans to expel the demon from the girl once and for all. Yoon-seok isn’t without allies in the church though, and those that believe in him have been hooking him up with assistants to help perform the exorcisms, however none of them ever last very long. Kim Yoon-seok, here in his third movie from 2015 alone, plays a world weary soju drinking exorcist, who despite orders from the church explicitly telling him not to, has been secretly performing exorcisms on a young girl in a coma, believed to be possessed. The plot of The Priests will no doubt seem familiar to anyone who’s seen William Friedkin’s seminal work The Exorcist, a 1973 production that still holds up over 40 years later. It’s estimated that almost 30% of the Korean population is of the Christian faith, with 10% of that figure being Catholic, so if anything it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more movies from the local industry pitting the church against some sort of evil spirit. So, with the arrival of director Jang Jae-hyon’s debut feature, The Priests, it’s fair to say a sufficient amount of time has passed for audiences to accept the latest demonic possession movie. Korea thankfully hasn’t been quite as energetic, with their last notable entry into the exorcism sub-genre coming in the form of 2009’s Possessed.

Since 2010 alone we’ve had The Last Exorcism (and its sequel), The Possession, and The Devil Inside. Hollywood has of course, as it always does, been churning them out like they’re going out of fashion.

What can’t be argued though, especially in recent years, is that just as popular as the tales of vengeful spirits, are the tales of spirits which have possessed an innocent human host. While movies like The Whispering Corridors series and A Tale of Two Sisters both stand out as superlative examples, it’s fair to say that many of the countries entries into the genre are quickly forgotten. Out of the many genres that can be found within Korean cinema, it’s the supernatural horror movie that seems to struggle to find any consistency in terms of quality. Cast: Kim Yun-Seok, Gang Dong-Won, Park So-Dam, Kim Eui-Sung, Son Jong-Hak, Nam Il-Woo, Lee Ho-Jae, Kim Byung-Ok, Jo Soo-Hyang, Park Woong

The priests 2015 trailer