Exhuma

Hwa-rim and her protégé Bong-gil are hired by a Korean-American couple in Los Angeles whose newborn cannot stop crying and keeps stopping breathing. Hwa-rim diagnoses the cause as a Grave's Call — a vengeful ancestor pulling the infant toward death — and determines the family's ancestral grave in Korea must be dealt with. She assembles Sang-deok, an older geomancer who sells auspicious burial sites to the wealthy, and Yeong-geun, a practical funeral director who handles the logistics of the dead.

The team travels to a remote mountain site near the North Korean border, far from any well-chosen burial ground. Sang-deok is immediately unsettled — the grave feels more like a prison than a resting place. During excavation a laborer severs a snake with a human face, releasing a blast of malignant energy. They retrieve the coffin in a driving storm and store it overnight at a nearby hospital. A custodian opens it against explicit orders, releasing the grandfather's spirit — revealed to have been a Japanese collaborator whose crimes bound him in a punishing, containment burial. The ghost begins hunting his own bloodline, killing his descendants in rapid succession. The team races to cremate the remains before the spirit can reach the infant in Los Angeles. The cremation severs the connection. The baby survives.

Months later, Yeong-geun returns to the mountain troubled. The laborer who severed the snake has been undone by nightmares. Yeong-geun discovers what the team missed: beneath the grandfather's grave lies a double burial — a standing coffin sunk vertically seven feet down with a massive pole driven through it, and a severed female head preserved as an occult object. He calls the team back.

They extract the standing coffin and retreat to a nearby Buddhist temple to regroup before deciding what to do. That night, Bong-gil wakes to witness a seven-foot figure tearing apart bodies and livestock in the dark before shooting away as a fireball. He collapses possessed. The entity from the standing coffin — linked to something older and larger than any family curse — has used him as a host.

Through Bong-gil's possession as a conduit, Hwa-rim uncovers the origin. In the 1600s, a Japanese monk known as Kitsune performed a ritual to curse Korea for centuries: a samurai was decapitated, a katana driven into the body, and the resulting ghoul sealed upright in a standing coffin with a spike through its torso at a site chosen for its geomantic power near the border. During the colonial occupation, Ji-yong's collaborator grandfather's grave was built directly on top — a cover and a reinforcement, binding a national curse to a single family's crimes. By exhuming both burials, the team has partially released the shogun ghoul. It is growing stronger.