Can anyone suggest a reason or theory in justification or explanation of the
impulse towards sadism or masochistic suffering which is left unresolved at
the endings of most horror films? I just watched a South Korean film,
"Jang Hoa, Hong Reon", also known as "A Tale of Two Sisters" in its
English-promotion title. It possesses these elements of sadism, in the
aspects of a dysfunctional family, which is never resolved, and thus ending
in (1) a mother who committed suicide upon seeing her husband's medical
assistant mistress in her house, and (2) a younger sister who dies of shock
on seeing this act, together with (3) an elder sister who was unable to save
the younger sister and "punishes herself" through these imaginary fantasies
of her stepmother plotting to kill her and her younger sister out of
jealousy and abusive feelings as a "wicked stepmother figure" as well as
various
hallucinations of hauntings and apparitions on her own part which are only
revealed as her own "inner demons" at the very end or near end of the film.

Needless to say, the ending was hardly a resolution, since it ended in a
more realistic reflection of what actually happened to make the elder sister
create all these hallucinations herself: she stepped out of the house in a
fit of anger against her stepmother. Little knowing the accident which
happened to her younger sister, she has to return to dour reality at the end
of the day. The film ends intentionally with a freeze frame image of her
langourously stepping out of the house and leaving it behind her, almost as
if she wants to leave the sad past behind but cannot, since she has to
return to it for the sake of her younger sister(whom she does not know is
dying).

 Have any scholars or film critics written in this domain of filmic horror
and abject sadism or masochism, as well as its religious and existential
aspects and import? I have an inkling that the psychology of such horror,
especially in the prevalence of the sado-masochistic impulse, is partially
conveyed in the desire for order by characters, and the understanding that
this order is either impossible or that it must be achieved through great
painful sacrifices. The order achieved at the end of "A Tale of Two Sisters"
was exactly like that, in that it is bought at a very high price: the elder
sister in asylum, the death of the younger sister, the pretence that the
preceding deaths of family members and the incarceration of the elder sister
do not matter at all but are sane and sound measures by both the father and
the stepmother. The true horror seems to be the stifling rules of normalcy,
as implied, but how true or feasible is it theoretically in the genre of the
horror film?

 Kevin