Nervous: A Nerve-Shredding Horror Haunted by Korean Cinema’s Old New Wave
Director Abner Pastoll discusses his British-Korean psychological horror film Nervous, premiering at FrightFest 2026. The narrative follows Sarah, who relocates to the Korean countryside and encounters a mysterious gramophone emitting silence from an unmarked record, triggering a selective auditory condition that prevents her from comprehending male voices. This literal communication breakdown mirrors the deterioration of her marriage to Sungsoo while amplifying her cultural displacement in a linguistically unfamiliar environment. Inspired by a documented case of selective frequency deafness, Pastoll explores themes of alienation, sensory disruption, and romantic fracture through genre cinema. The film’s setting—an architecturally ambiguous house in Gwangju that blends traditional Korean and Western aesthetics—emerged organically during production. Pastoll’s own experience as a transnational outsider (South African-born, UK-raised, Korea-based) informs the project’s thematic architecture without imposing external perspective.
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