Imagine if your ancestors had the power to curse you for… well, general discomfort after death.

That premise forms the bedrock for the South Korean horror movie “Exhuma,” in which a quartet of shamans, geomancers and morticians join forces to deal with vengeful ghosts. This is a movie that could never be remade in another country – not just because it relies on tension and dread rather than jump scares, but because the historical and cultural backdrop are so uniquely Korean.

Shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her tatted apprentice Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) are summoned to Los Angeles to investigate a newborn baby who has been cursed by one of his ancestors. Hwa-rim makes arrangements with the family patriarch to exhume and cremate the child’s great-grandfather back in South Korea, with the help of her friends: feng-shui geomancer Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and experienced mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin).

But the job turns out to be more complicated than expected. The grave is on a mountaintop near the North Korean border, surrounded by malign omens: foxes, an unmarked stone, rumors of graverobbing, and a snake with a human head. The only way the corpse can be exhumed is with a complex ritual that draws out and dissipates the malignant energies (involving knives, a drum and several dead pigs), so they can dig up and then cremate the unopened coffin. Sounds simple, right?

Not so simple, because some brain donor opens it, unleashing a vengeful spirit that decides he wants to kill his entire family – and our heroes have limited time to save the remaining kin from meeting gruesome ends. But it turns out that ironing out this family debacle is only the beginning of the horrors to come, as another coffin is found buried beneath the first – and dealing with this angry ghost will not be so easy.

“Exhuma” is the kind of movie that horror needs. No jump scares, even when something shocking and unexpected happens. This is a movie that slowly builds up a sense of pervasive, eerie dread, filling every shadowy corner until it suddenly flows with splattered blood and soaring fire. It’s also a uniquely Korean movie – without revealing some of the plot twists, the story relies heavily on both Korean history and Korean folklore, so it couldn’t really be told anywhere else.

Director/writer Jang Jae-hyun slowly layers mysteries and atmosphere (so many foxes!) on top of each other, then slowly peels away those layers like an onion. Some of the scenes in the second and third acts of the movie are deeply disturbing, especially when Bong-gil speaks for the angry ghosts. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that it feels a little weird that we go through the entire cycle of dealing with the cursed family… and then, suddenly, that plot Trojan-horses an entirely unrelated evil ghost for the third act. It’s kind of odd. Not bad, exactly, but disorienting.

The actors are all uniformly quite good: Kim Go-eun is cool and collected as an intelligent, businesslike shaman, which makes it all the more unnerving when the character is stricken with bone-chilling fear in the third act. Lee Do-hyun plays a secondary role to her throughout most of the movie, but gets to show his acting chops when Bong-gil gets possessed a few times. And Choi Min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin have delightful chemistry as a couple of old buddies who specialize in exhuming and reburying troublesome dead people, swinging between easy camaraderie to harrowing battles against the supernatural.

“Exhuma” has a slightly odd plot structure, but that doesn’t keep it from being a harrowing, suspenseful movie that slowly builds its way up to the blood’n’fire. Definitely worth watching for those who appreciate atmosphere in their horror.