- Director: Yong-gyun Kim
- Writers: Sang-hak Lee, Hoo-Kyoung Lee
- Stars: Si-young Lee, Ki-joon Uhm, Hae-hyo Kwon
- Runtime: 1 Hour, 44 Minutes
- Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2QHSlrY
Killer Toon (2013) Review
Synopsis
We are told over the credits that Kang Ji-yun is a leading horror writer, having sold 7 million copies of her latest book. Her next webcomic is due out on August 27th. We see Kanji-yun finishing her latest manuscript, which she signs in blood.
Her publisher, Mrs. Suh, watches several panels of the comic download, and they show her a story from her own past. Mrs. Suh’s own mother was disfigured, and the other children thought she was a freak or monster. At one point as a child, Mrs. Suh drew a comic and wished her mother was dead, almost immediately, she found her mother hanging in the next room. This is exactly what happened in real life, and she wants to know how the artist, Ji-Yun, knew all that, only Mrs. Suh and her mother were present when her mother died.
Suddenly, the office goes into some kind of lockdown mode, and Mrs. Suh is stuck in there alone. Pictures of her in the office start appearing on the monitors; pictures of her right now. We see her stabbed to death in a near-photographic animted style.
The investigator comes in the next morning and declares it a suicide. He gives the case to his subordinate, since he thinks the case will not turn up anything. He finds the drawings of the dead girl in the computer.
The artist Ji-Yun is driving alone at night and picks up a little girl who wants a ride. The girl says she is dead and then she vanishes. Some other freaky things happen out on the road that night. She wakes up the next morning parked on the side of the road. She tells her therapist that this sort of dream has happened to her before. The therapist explains Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome and suggests Ji-Yun is suffering from that.
That afternoon, she starts dreaming of Mrs. Suh, who seems to want to kill her. The police come and show her the drawings of the dead woman, and Ji-Yun admits she drew them. They’re just drawings, though, how could they be what actually happened? She died exactly the same way as the character in Ji-Yun’s art. Who else could have seen the artwork?
Ji-Yun is now working on a story about a mortician and his son, and across town, the story is playing out in real life. The new story explains how there mortician killed his own wife, twice. The police see the webcomic, and start to track down all the morticians in town. Ji-Yun figures out that what she had been drawing was real, and she heads to the same address. Meanwhile, the mortician is having a really bad night.
Ji-Yun gets there a minute before the police, and they end up arresting her for his murder. She explains that the ghost in the comic was really the killer. The police are kepticl to say the least. She explained that she imagined the story with the mortician, so how could it be real?
She explains that her stories were not her own. She had writer’s block, but someone emailed story ideas to her. She drew those stories, and they started coming true. The police check the IP of the person who emailed the originals to Ji-Yon and track down the address. They came from an abandoned haunted apartment complex. It turns out that both Ji-Yun and the embalmer lived there at one time. Ji-Yun explains that she knew a girl, Suh-Hyun, there who drew pictures that came true, and the people who lived there turned on them. Suh-Hyun becomes the police’s new prime suspect. Except… It’s not that simple.
Commentary
The film is 95% real life with animated, graphic imagery used to accentuate certain scenes. The artwork used is really good, and the real-world stuff is very colorful as well. This all looks really nice, almost like a real-world comic.
As the story unfolds, everything is eventully explained with more death, betrayal, murder, and lots of ghosts. Overall, I really liked it; it was a lot like watching a comic book turned into a movie. I had assumed that this began as a real comic, but no, it’s just a movie. Still, it’s very much got a comic book feel to it.