The 8th Night 2021

A former exorcist, Seon-hwa,Lee Sung-min hovers on the edge of endurance as a demon long sealed for millennia resurfaces, casting a night that straddles the line between real and unreal. The story unfolds around a sleepwalker’s nightmare where the past bleeds into the present and the goal is simple in name but devastating in execution: stop the demon’s return to power before the two Eyes it bears can be reunited. The mood is thick with dread as the living become pawns in an ancient design that refuses to stay buried.

Centuries earlier, a monstrous entity crossed from hell into the human realm to sow misery. It bore two Eyes—the Red Eye and the Black Eye—and Buddha ripped them from the beast and locked them inside separate Śarīra caskets. In a desperate gambit, the Red Eye evaded capture for seven days by flitting through human hosts. On the eighth day, it surrendered to Buddha, and the Eyes were buried—one in cliffs in the Far East, the other in a desert to the Far West. Buddha’s injunction to never meet the Eyes set in motion a fate bound to generations yet to come.

In the present, Professor Kim Joon-cheol, Choi Jin-ho, travels the desert to prove the existence of the Śarīra caskets. He uncovers a relic that sober scientists dismiss as fraud, and his peers ostracize him. Fourteen years pass, and a bitter resolve hardens: he will reunite the Red Eye and the Black Eye. He unseals the casket, pours six vials of blood into it, and, just as despair threatens to win, the Red Eye erupts from the container, seemingly possessing him.

In Gwangju, Bhante Ha-jung, Lee Eol, guardian of the Black Eye casket, senses the Red Eye’s awakening. He confides the legend to a young monk, Cheongseok, Nam Da-reum, and warns that the hunt for the seventh pillar—often described as the Virgin Shaman—has begun. Cheongseok is tasked with locating Bhante Seon-hwa, whose wisdom might guide them through a maze of deceit and sleepwalking danger. The next morning, the monastery’s order is shattered when Bhante Ha-jung dies in his sleep, leaving behind only a dead man and a map that points toward danger.

Meanwhile, in Chilgok, the Red Eye possesses a hunter and slips into a secluded motel where a couple rests. A woman speaks of a meditation group that offered a free blood test; soon after, the couple is found with a hollow, shriveled body and a gaping wound in the skull. Detective Kim Ho-tae, Park Hae-jun, is drawn to the scene, but the evidence grows murky. His partner, Dong-jin, Kim Dong-young, suggests seeking help from a shaman, even as Kim, a skeptic, resists such an approach. The Red Eye’s tide of possessions and murders intensifies, and the trail of bodies pulls Cheongseok away from Gwangju toward the looming revelation.

Cheongseok leaves Gwangju in search of Seon-hwa, losing his bag along the way and suspecting a thief in the crowd. He finally locates Seon-hwa, who now works as a construction worker, and delivers the grim truth through written messages—Seon-hwa’s vow of silence is an obstacle that Cheongseok must surmount. Through flashbacks and the ghostly whispers of Ha-jung’s spirit, it becomes clear that Seon-hwa once refused succession and abandoned his monastery duties, leaving behind countless tormented souls clinging to him. The discovery of this past debt complicates the mission: the seventh pillar, and thus the ultimate barrier between the Eyes’ reunion, might lie with Seon-hwa after all.

On the road, the Red Eye continues its rampage, possessing a delivery man on a motorbike and leaving a trail of the same haunted victims—each body a husk with a gaping skull wound. Detective Kim chases the pattern and connects it to a recent string of suicides tied to a meditation group whose real aim was blood collection. The Virgin Shaman, still alive, appears within the group, and Dong-jin’s own blood is implicated in the larger scheme, a fact that reshapes loyalties and trust. He passes a talisman to Kim as a token of trust, and Kim carries it into the fray as the boundaries between belief and evidence blur.

As Cheongseok visits the house of the Virgin Shaman, a white-dressed young woman opens the door, and the boy recognizes her as the elusive seventh pillar—the actual Virgin Shaman. The girl in white is revealed as a ghost connected to Professor Kim’s manipulations, Ae-ran, an abused child rescued by Kim who was groomed to become the ceremonial sacrifice necessary to reunite the monster’s Eyes. Ae-ran’s presence twists the living into complicity, and the Virgin Shaman’s possession becomes a tool to lure Dong-jin into a trap. Dong-jin, bearing a talisman fashioned from his own blood by the Virgin Shaman, eventually becomes a vessel for the Red Eye, though Kim’s orders push the team toward a final reckoning.

The chase intensifies as Seon-hwa and Cheongseok attempt to force the Red Eye to possess Dong-jin so they can bait the demon into a fatal trap. Yet Dong-jin reveals a painful truth: neither Ae-ran nor the Virgin Shaman is the true seventh pillar. The mantle of the seventh pillar rests with Cheongseok himself, a revelation that destabilizes Seon-hwa’s plan and forces a desperate reconfiguration of loyalties. In a brutal turn, Ae-ran’s possession and Dong-jin’s actions culminate in a deadly ambush where the Red Eye consumes the young man, and the demon uses Dong-jin’s body to strike at Seon-hwa. Seon-hwa, in a final bid to save Cheongseok, constrains the Red Eye with a blood-signed talisman and a spell, but the plan backfires as the Red Eye compels Cheongseok to bear witness to a terrible release.

The climactic reversal comes when Cheongseok, guiding the seizure of the demon, manages to sever the tie between the two Eyes by forcing Seon-hwa to sacrifice himself. In a dramatic, painful act, Cheongseok kills Seon-hwa, preventing the reunion of the Red Eye and Black Eye and ending the immediate threat to countless lives. The fallen monk’s act clears a path for the boy to bear the burden and carry the casket away from the fatal convergence.

In the final sequence, Cheongseok stands at the border between India and Pakistan, returning the casket to the place where it was first unearthed. Ae-ran’s ghostly form appears, and Cheongseok offers his hand. As Ae-ran’s chains dissolve, signaling her release, a quiet, ambiguous hope remains—one last exchange between the boy and the spirit that hints at a possibility beyond the cycle of vengeance and ruin.

This sprawling, unnerving tale weaves myth and modern fear into a single night when the boundary between life and afterlife shivers, and the choices of a few haunted people determine whether an ancient evil can be kept apart or finally fulfilled.