The Host (Korean: 괴물, meaning monster) (2006) Directed by Bong Joon-ho. Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Ha Joon-won, and Baek Chul-hyun. Starring Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doona, and Go Ah-sung.
As always, it helps to have some context.
All art is political in some way, and making movies has always been a very political business. In this column I’ve talked a lot about how the film industries from different countries have connected and influenced each other, and how much film scholarship and criticism are devoted to examining those relationships, with this month’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1954) being an obvious example of that connection.
But Korean cinema isn’t often included in that conversation before the end of the 20th century. Korean entertainment is now a global juggernaut of success and influence, but the way Western pop culture chatter often talks about Korean films (and television and music) makes it sound like entire media industries and dramatic forms sprung into existence in the early 2000s, with no history or context to speak of. That’s obviously not what happened, but there are some pretty interesting political and economic reasons why it seems that way.
I’m not going to get deep into history of the entire Hallyu (“Korean Wave”) phenomenon that brought Korean entertainment from being largely local media that was rarely exported to being the source of television shows of unprecedented popularity and history-making films and musical groups so successful their economic impact is understood in terms of a percentage of the Korean GDP. That is well beyond the scope of this column.
But I do think it’s worth summarizing briefly. The Korean film industry has a complicated history, because Korea has a complicated history. The Host (2006) was among the first Korean films to achieve international blockbuster status, but it didn’t come out of nowhere.
[Pardon me for a lengthy aside: I am also mostly going to refer to it as the “Korean” film industry, referring to all of Korea under Japanese occupation for most of the first half of the 20th century, and to the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) for the rest. Now, I could have wandered into a discussion of the North Korean film industry this month. I briefly (very briefly) considered it. Because you can actually watch the infamous North Korean kaiju film Pulgasari (1985) if you want (it’s on YouTube); the movie was made by South Korean director Shin Sang-ok after he and his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, were abducted by Kim Jong-il’s government and forced to make movies for North Korea. Pulgasari is a remake of the South Korean movie of the same name (also written as Bulgasari), which was a Godzilla clone featuring a monster from Korean lore, but that movie was lost shortly after its release and has never been seen since. I do not recommend peering down the rabbit hole of lost kaiju films unless you have several hours of free time ahead of you.]
So, as I was saying, the Korean film industry has a complicated history. Korea has been making movies since the early 20th century, although there is some debate about what exactly counts as the first Korean movie. Film scholars generally cite Righteous Revenge (Korean: 의리적 구토) (1919) as the first, but it wasn’t quite a movie as we think of them today. It was something called a kino-drama, which was a stage play performed in front of a film backdrop. (Unfortunately, nothing of that play or film survive.) The first feature films were produced a few years later, in the early 1920s.
It’s important to note, of course, that during this time Korea was under oppressive Japanese rule. There were a bunch of silent films made during the 1920s, including several with sly anti-Japanese sentiments, but in the 1930s the Japanese occupation government began severely censoring and restricting Korean-produced films and deliberately replacing them with Japanese-produced films for Korean audiences.
After Korea’s liberation following the end of WWII, domestic film production grew quickly. The Korean film industry didn’t have much money, but it still produced hundreds of films. Things got more complicated in the ’60s and ’70s, when Park Chung Hee, who had taken over the government as a military dictator in a 1961 coup, imposed strict censorship on film production and screen quotas on South Korean cinemas. The censorship meant filmmakers had to prove their loyalty to the government or risk being blacklisted, and the screen quotas meant movie theaters were required to show a minimum number of hours of South Korean films while limiting showings of foreign films. But the quotas didn’t actually spur domestic film production; instead, the combination of these restrictions tanked the film industry.
The governmental control of movie production and censorship began to relax during the 1980s. Korean filmmakers began to make independent films again and ventured out to international festivals. The screen quotas remained in place, but they still didn’t help Korean films to out-compete imported films, because there was something missing: money.
That changed in 1992, when Samsung got into the movie-producing business. Yes, that Samsung, the multinational conglomerate. Once Samsung did it, other conglomerates got into the movie business, and for a few years there was plenty of money to go around. The 1997 Asian financial crisis led to a lot of chaebols backing out of the film business, but during those flush few years some important changes had taken place. There was now talent and infrastructure in the hands of people who wanted to make movies and television, as well as new government support in the forms of both funding and changes to the restrictive Motion Picture Promotion Law that had previously hampered film funding and production. And, of course, this wasn’t happening only in film; this is also when Korean television and music were gaining popularity outside of Korea, for reasons very similar and parallel to what was going on with movies.
The impact of these changes spread to other Asian countries first. The aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis meant a lot of other Asian media markets were looking for affordable television shows and movies, and Korea happily jumped into exporting everything they could. The first Korean television dramas to be exported and gain huge foreign success did so in China and Chinese-speaking countries in the mid- to late-’90s. In music, Seo Taiji and Boys, the group that pioneered and popularized the eclectic, genre-mixing musical sound that characterizes what we now call K-pop, was active from 1992-1996.
That brings us to the 2000s. The Host wasn’t the first South Korean film to capture international attention, but it was wildly successful and beloved by both audiences and critics. This was still pretty early in the Hallyu expansion outside of Asia, but we were well enough into it that the film premiered at Cannes and was heavily, heavily promoted prior to its 2006-2007 releases in South Korea, all across Asia, and eventually in Europe and the United States. Bong Joon-ho already had a good reputation and a strong following as a director—although still a long way from his future Snowpiercer (2013) and Parasite (2019) levels of recognition and success—so he was able to secure decent funding for The Host, which was his third feature film. It cost about $12 million to make, which isn’t a lot by Hollywood standards but was massive by early 2000s Korean film standards.
So it’s a good thing it’s a fantastic movie, yeah? It’s always a bit embarrassing when an expensive, widely-promoted, aggressively-hyped movie turns out to be mediocre. The Host is not at all mediocre. It’s fucking great. It’s dark and violent and funny and painful. It manages to be both lovingly earnest and deeply cynical. It features Bae Doona with a bow and arrow. It’s so very good! I really love it, and watching it in conjunction with other monster movies this past month has given me some fresh perspective on just how great it is.
As seems to be an ongoing theme for monster movies, the idea for The Host was ripped from the headlines. In 2000, an American civilian working at a U.S. military morgue in Seoul ordered the morgue employees to dump embalming waste (the mixture of embalming fluid and bodily fluids drained from corpses) down the drain, rather than disposing of it properly as chemical waste. The chemicals ended up in the Han River, where they were discovered after people found deformed fish. There was public outcry and political scuffling between the Korean government and the American military over how to handle the case. Bong saw the news and thought (correctly) that it would be the perfect setup for a monster movie.
He has said in interviews that there was a lot of pushback from Korean press and critics prior to the film’s release, most of it around the fact that Korean audiences didn’t care for monster movies and Korean filmmakers wouldn’t have the budget or knowledge to make it look good anyway. In retrospect, so much nay-saying and hand-wringing seems a bit over the top, but it does illustrate the sort of expectations that were riding on this movie when it came out.
The opening scenes of the movie summarize the premise succinctly. We see the morgue, the disposal of the chemicals, and some fisherman noticing something wrong with the fish. There is an ominously large shadow in the river before a man dies by suicide. That’s all the setup the story gets, and that’s all the setup it needs.
From there we head over to meet the Park family, our main characters. Park Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) runs a snack stand on the banks of the Han River, with the extremely questionable help of his fumbling eldest son, Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho). There are two more siblings who will show up a bit later, competitive archer Nam-joo (Bae Doona) and unemployed Nam-il (Park Hae-il), as well as Gang-du’s daughter Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung). Before the monster appears, we spend just enough time with the family to learn that they are something of a mess, but they’re a mess in a very ordinary way.
Gang-du is serving some customers on the banks of the river when people spot something strange dangling from the underside of a bridge. It dives into the water and approaches, and a crowd gathers to look at it.
Within minutes they get a very good look indeed. We’re not even fifteen minutes into the movie and, bam, there’s the monster. No hiding, no lurking, no mystery. And I love that! Yes, I also loved it when Godzilla had a nice, slow build before revealing himself, but different movies need different monsters. A monster movie released in 2006 means that everybody knows what’s coming. Audiences have been wowed by special effects and creatures before, so getting into the story is more important than building up to the reveal.
Our Immediately Appearing Monster is also a good storytelling choice because this movie, even though it is literally titled “Monster,” is not about a monster. Nor is it really about a city or a country or humanity having to face an unknown and unprecedented danger. It’s about a family. One ordinary family and their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.
But I do want to talk just a bit about the monster, because I think it’s pretty cool. The creature is almost entirely CGI, inserted into scenes filmed on-site on and around the Han River, although there are a few shots that use a puppet. (Apparently the effects team had to convince Bong to let them use a puppet; he intended everything to be CG from the start.) The design is a grotesque hybrid of a mouth inspired by H.R. Giger’s xenomorphs in the Alien franchise and a body that is, in the words of CG Supervisor Shadi Almassizadeh, “like a carp mixed with a T-rex.” There is also a dash of pelican in there, because pelicans are truly eldritch terrors beyond our comprehension. (And also because of the behavior of regurgitating and storing food for later consumption, I guess, but I choose to believe it’s mostly the eldritch terror thing.)
Back on the banks of the Han River, the creature emerges from the water and begins immediately going on a rampage, grabbing people every chance it gets. We see this entirely from Gang-du’s point of view, so the scale of the danger is not immediately clear, but the confusion, panic, and fear is extremely well-developed. All that fear turns to heart-wrenching horror when the monster grabs Hyun-seo. Gang-du watches the creature carry his daughter away across the river before it vanishes into the water.
The Host knows what we expect after decades of monster movies, and it is deliberately playing with those expectations in the aftermath of the first attack. We expect a mobilization of soldiers, scientists, and governmental forces—and that does happen, but nobody is able to explain anything, nothing about it is reassuring, and they definitely do not have anything under control.
Nam-joo and Nam-il join their father and brother where they are gathered with the other survivors of the attack. Officials in hazmat suits show up to report that one man who came into contact with the creature has contracted a dangerous virus, but beyond that they don’t seem to know what to do or how to handle the situation. When Gang-du receives a phone call from Hyun-seo, proving that she is alive and trapped in the monster’s lair somewhere in the sewer, his claim that he spoke to his daughter is dismissed out of hand. The uncaring officer doesn’t even bother to check the phone’s call history. This is representative of what’s going on around the Park family: There are a lot of people bustling about importantly—doctors, police, both American and Korean soldiers—but all of them treat the victims of the attack like an annoyance or an afterthought.
The family decides they have to save Hyun-seo themselves. They escape quarantine with the aid of some gangsters—who shamelessly shake Hee-bong down for extra money—then begin to search the sewers. They are armed with guns and a map, but they have no idea where to start looking and are, honestly, pretty clueless about what to do. After spending a night in the family snack shop, they spot the monster outside and try to kill it. They run out of ammunition, however, and Hee-bong is killed, Gang-du captured by the military, and Nam-joo and Nam-il flee to keep searching in their own ways.
Hyun-seo is alive, trapped where the creature stores its prey to eat later; she is alone until the creature grabs two homeless brothers. The older one dies, but the younger boy, Se-joo, survives being regurgitated. Hyun-seo begins trying to find a way out for both of them.
I was thinking about point of view a lot while watching The Host, because I think it’s doing something quite different from most movies of this type, the ones that sit at the intersection of monster movies and disaster movies. What we more commonly expect from the film’s narrative point of view is along the lines of what we saw in Godzilla (1954): the characters’ perspectives allow us to watch the story unfold from a position of knowledge or power, such as with the scientists or soldiers dealing directly with the problem, or from somebody who attains such a narrative position during the course of story.
The Host doesn’t do that. The film steadfastly resists giving the Park family any sort of power or authority. They’re not especially good at hunting or fighting a monster. They aren’t uniquely adept at navigating the situation. They barely get along with each other. Sometimes this is played for laughs; sometimes it’s a tragedy. They’re clumsy, uncertain, often cowardly, and always scared. All they have going for them is their desperation to save Hyun-seo.
And they fail. The three siblings defeat the monster, but not before their father is killed, and not in time to save Hyun-seo.
The monster may not be that large compared to the other fine chonky fellows we’ve watched this month, but it is still portrayed as a city-level disaster with international implications. There are scientists and generals at work somewhere in Seoul while all this is going on, but we don’t meet them. We don’t know what they are doing. We certainly are not asked to have any sympathy for them. The official actions we are privy to are all examples of security theater: the authorities are trying to provide the appearance of handling the problem while being completely ineffectual in actually addressing it. What good is searching for a monster if you aren’t even going to bother to trace a cell signal? What good is a restricted zone if children can slip through unnoticed? What good are anti-contamination measures if nobody has even confirmed there’s a virus? The few authority figures we meet are useless, self-serving, or corrupt: the cop who dismisses Hyun-seo’s phone call, the doctor who claims the existence of a virus without any proof, the quarantine official who readily accepts a bribe to let wanted (and presumably virus-infected) men into a restricted area.
Bong has spoken about how The Host was, at the time of its release, unusual for Korean movies because the villains (such as they are) are American, rather than the more common North Korean. He has also stated that the American military’s insistence on fighting an imaginary virus is commentary on the Iraq War and those imaginary weapons of mass destruction. (The early 2000s of it all is really very obvious.) The complex, generational, and always evolving opinions about the American military presence in Korea are a much bigger topic than we can get into here, but that political relationship is one element of the film’s context. In truth neither American nor Korean officials are spared scathing critique in this film. The few moments of heroism we do see come from individuals who make a helpful choice in the right place at the right time: the off-duty American soldier who confronts the creature during the initial attack, the homeless man who helps Nam-il with his Molotov cocktails.
There is throughout a barrier between the authorities and the main characters. The Park family need help. They have information that would in turn help locate the monster. But greed, pettiness, and incompetence keep getting in the way.
The choice to center a story around people in positions of knowledge or power—about important people—can make a lot of narrative sense. It puts us closer to the action, closer to the stakes, closer to the big-picture decisions.
But it’s also the comfortable choice. We want to believe that when a big, weird monster attacks, somebody will know what to do. We hope for moments of powerful heroism. We expect new scientific developments to be stronger than the science that brought the monster upon us. We desperately want somebody competent and badass to take charge. In monster movies that operate on much smaller scales, that can be anybody. When we scale it up to monster-shaped disasters affecting cities and nations, we want the military, the scientists, the leaders. We want Idris Elba to show up and cancel the apocalypse.
The real brilliance of The Host is how it strips that comfort away—but it doesn’t replace it with any sort of ruggedly individualist heroics. The Park family only manage the barest minimum of heroics, failing more often than they succeed, because they’re just ordinary people who have been left to do what they can while the authorities fail to control the situation.
It’s a bleak look at how a society reacts to disaster—but the film doesn’t end on an entirely downbeat note. We never learn if the Han River has been cleaned up, if there are other monsters in the making, if anything will change about how the situation was handled. In the final scene, we get a brief glimpse of international news about the event; it’s empty background noise to Gang-du, the man who actually killed the monster. He’s living in his late father’s snack shop on the river, where he has taken in little Se-joo, the boy who survived when Hyun-seo did not. He keeps a gun behind the counter and watches the river, just in case. But they are warm inside when it’s cold outside, and there’s plentiful food on the table, and sometimes that’s the best ending that ordinary, unimportant people can hope for when the world goes mad around them.
What do you think of The Host? And its hapless characters, its sometimes painful humor, its razor-sharp satire? Any thoughts on the way overtly political monster movies have evolved since WWII? Are you now ready to enjoy the music video parody of the film from Korean hip-hop group Epik High: “Wannabe” and “Trot + High Technology” (2009)? I think you’re ready. Have fun.
Next week: The king has reigned supreme for 91 years. Let’s give him his due and tell him he is a very fine large lad with King Kong (1933). Watch it on Max, Amazon, Apple, Google, YouTube, Vudu, and Microsoft.
