Discuss The Wailing
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SPOILERS: Wait, What?
posted by Dali PartonSTAFFMOD on March 18, 2017 at 9:16 PM
So the japanese guy was a demon. But what about the shaman? Was he also a demon? That's what I took away from his camera work at the end. But... It seems like a big coincidence that the shaman they called for help would turn out to be a demon-in-shaman's clothes.
The scene when he asked for money made me think he was a charlatan, but the big box of pictures that just happened to spill at the end was obviously a big reveal of something. I'm just not quite sure of what. If he's been going around faking being a good guy, all those pictures suggest that he's killed a ton of people, which would make pretending to be a competent shaman pretty hard. I mean, its probably a job where all your new clients come by word of mouth so leaving a trail of bodies aka failed exorcisms would be bad for business.
Reply by Theriser
on April 7, 2017 at 8:45 AM
Not sure whether he was some form of demon. I think he was just helping the Japanese guy is some way, why I'm not sure
Reply by Geff
on May 2, 2017 at 1:59 PM
I think the city shaman tells the truth throughout the movie and he has no ulterior motive besides money. He doesn't want to possess/harm the family as some people are claiming. He is also not working with the forest shaman.
When he calls Jung-soo, he says that the death hex was attempted to be performed on the wrong person. He finally figured out that the forest shaman was not the true evil entity, but a shaman just like him. This is the truth.
In order to understand, why he was performing the death hex on the forest shaman you have to look at the dialogue between Jong-soo and city shaman earlier. The city shaman says that Jong-soo has met someone he wasn't supposed to meet, a ghost. Jong-soo mistakenly believes that the ghost city shaman is referring to is the forest shaman, but the real ghost was the girl who he had met earlier in the movie. Since Jung-soo tells the city shaman that the forest shaman is the ghost, city shaman decides to cast the death hex on forest shaman believing forest shaman to be the evil entity.
Both shamans use pictures of dead bodies to perform final passage rituals for the dead so that the dead cannot become possessed. The biggest clue for this is when forest shaman is trying to perform a final passage ritual for the dead guy in the car. His passage ritual is interrupted because of pain from the city shaman's death hex and the passage ritual fails, that is why the dead body becomes possessed and resurrected.
Nobody performed passage ritual on the forest shaman's dead body after he got killed and thrown off the side of the road. This is why we see him again later in the movie. His dead body is possessed.
Reply by tmdb69723878
on February 22, 2018 at 3:14 AM
The shaman is working for the Japanese demon. As the woman ghost/angel says, he's just a pawn. Earlier in the movie you see the demon's shrine with pictures of his victims before and after they are dead. The Japanese guy takes the picture before he kills them, and then the shaman takes the pictures of the dead bodies.