HORROR never appears as the normal. Even when we are not telling each other ghost stories. In the Flash Gordon story, horror appears as Emperor Ming; in James Bond films, Dr No; and in the wayang, as grotesque-nosed ogres.

These days, world horror also comes in an odd form, or at least one considered odd: an enigmatic republic, that northern land once called the Hermit Kingdom and now walled off, a peoples democracy that bows down before a man wh