Multimodal Analysis in the Exhuma Poster: Barthes and Kress Leeuwen Theory

Abstract

This study looks at one official theater poster for the 2024 Korean horror movie Exhuma and uses it as the main source of information. This study looks at three male characters by using a method that brings together Roland Barthes' ideas about how signs work and Kress and van Leeuwen's way of understanding visual messages. The analysis looks at four different ways things are shown visually: the colors used, how the body moves, where someone is looking, and the style of the text. The results indicate that the dark color scheme suggests a cursed area, the three different movements represent the roles of Challenger, Fearful, and Sacrificial, and the lack of eye contact shows a danger coming from above. Together, these parts create the story of Jogsa, or how family sins are passed down through generations. This study suggests that visual elements without words are very important in creating scary stories. Previous research on Exhuma or Korean horror posters usually looks at Barthes' semiotics on its own, without connecting it to multimodal theory. This makes visual analysis stay surface-level, focusing only on 'expression' without looking into how color, gaze, and gesture work as signs or symbols. Therefore, this study is new in two important ways: first, it combines Roland Barthes' idea about myths with Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar (2021) to look at the poster as a real example of a multimodal text. Second, it focuses on the three male characters to show the cultural myth of Jogsa or ancestral curse, which hasn't been looked into in earlier poster studies.