PopHorror Let's Get Scared
The Human Trap is an upcoming Korean indie horror film directed by Lee Moon-young. It stars Kang Byeol, Kim Ding-ho, Park Yeon-woo, and Kang Seung-hyun. This flick has a lot to offer even if it’s far from perfect. Let’s break down what I loved and what I didn’t.
A quick synopsis before we get to my thoughts:
A group of young friends from the city go on a camping getaway. What starts as a fun-in-the-woods adventure soon turns into a bloody nightmare as a madman and eventually his suave henchman stalk them like prey. Will they survive?
Here’s a look at the poster art!
My thoughts on The Human Trap
There were several things about this movie that I loved, starting with the characters. The characters are all pretty terrible people, which is perfect for a horror movie. While I was (mostly) not actively hoping for them to die, I wasn’t mourning any losses. And some deaths were downright cathartic.
This film had some pretty high production values, especially for an indie movie. The image quality is great, and the special effects were very well done. The Human Trap looks like it could have been made by a big-name studio, and for the visuals alone it is well worth the watch.
Have a peek at this beautiful trailer:
I also really loved that this movie closes out with some statistics about the number of people who go missing every year. Right before the credits roll we find out that 33,676 people went missing in 2019, of which 1,691 were never found. This means that 4.6 people go missing every day, never to be seen again. I am guessing these statistics are for South Korea, though I was unable to verify them.
The research I did suggests that these numbers are lower than the reality in South Korea, and the numbers for the rest of the world are even higher. But regardless of the actual figures, I appreciate the filmmakers using their platform to shine a light on the shocking number of people who disappear every day, as well as the potentially grisly fate these people may have met.
While all of this is wonderful, there were still a few things I didn’t love. The beginning of the movie felt painfully slow, with a lot of set-up, and I found myself bored early on. If I wasn’t watching for a review, I might have given up on it. It felt like there was not enough action to keep me interested, and many of the things that happened seemed a bit too perfectly planned out to leave this group stranded. I found myself scratching my head, wondering how people could be so stupid to just keep going with the flow when everything just kept going wrong.
I was also feeling pretty confused throughout much of the first half of the film. However, I can’t say for certain whether that was due to my ignorance of the Korean language and culture or if it was because of the script. I was unsure of the names of the characters, and what their relationships to one another were. I didn’t even catch the characters’ names until almost halfway through the movie, and I was deliberately paying attention to it. It felt like the relationships between the characters could have been made more clear, especially the campground manager. His position was not clear to me, and at first, I assumed he was a creepy older guy who was going camping with this group of teenagers.
For all its faults, The Human Trap offers far more positives than negatives and I felt it was well worth the time I put into it. The ending more than made up for the initial slowness in my opinion. If you enjoy Korean horror movies, or if you’re just a fan of teenagers being murdered in the woods, I encourage you to check it out.
The Human Trap premieres January 11, 2024, on Amazon Prime.
