Beyond the Multiplex

"The Host" rises up from American slime to destroy the Korean family! It must be destroyed! Plus: A new film on credit card debt will make you weep.

By Andrew O'Hehir

"The Host"

March 8, 2007 | There's a lot of excitement in the film world around "The Host,"the new monster moviefrom Korean director Bong Joon-ho that's finally reaching the United States. And why not? It's a vivid, anarchic picture that's high on old-fashioned thrills. It's sardonic, silly, violent and tenderhearted. It's purportedly political (though I wouldn't go too far with that). It's got a big, ugly rubber monster and a rubber-faced doofus for a hero, the kind of guy everybody thinks is a loser until he proves otherwise. If the family from "Little Miss Sunshine" moved to Korea and had to do battle with a big kid-eating mutant gazingus, well ... that would be very strange. But it might be a little like this. So what's not to like?

Nothing, actually. But here's what bugs me about the hype around "The Host," which isn't the movie's fault at all. In terms of humanity and cinematic ambition and any other admirable quality you can name, this picture stands in splendid isolation among contemporary horror films. This invites the question of exactly how horror arrived at its present dismal state. You risk being a generationally blinded idiot (as opposed to just a normal idiot) when you ask things like this, but I'll do it anyway.

from the '50s deep into the '80s, horrormovies were more or less the art filmsof disaffected suburban kids. (My disaffected suburban friends and I grew up watching both art films and horror movies, and we were hardly unique -- and yes, we ruined culture for future generations. But that's another story.) Giant irradiated bugs and rotting zombies and communistic pod-people and erotic parasites and child-eating janitors crawled from the collective subconscious to the screen and back again, driven by deep currents of fear and desire.

Even when horror movies were incompetent (and perhaps especially then) they reflected the guiding anxieties of the age. Freddy Krueger sprang from the paranoid, perverse underbelly of Reagan's America and could have been born nowhere else. George A. Romero's undead flesh-eaters (just how many recently dead corpses are available in rural Pennsylvania?) seemed like a crude symbolic force with many potential meanings -- student radicalism, the Ku Klux Klan, or just an urgent upwelling of the American cult of death -- all of them rooted in the specific neuroses of the 1960s. Dario Argento's maggot-riddled melodramas express postwar Italy's crisis of confidence just as clearly as Antonioni's arid and overpraised art films.

Maybe the beginning of the end arrived when film theorists and other bearers of the postmodern intellectual flame embraced horror films for their reputed transgression, and when the genre began to satirize itself. Let's face it, being rebellious is no fun -- in fact, it's no longer possible -- if university academics are on your side. As for horror self-mockery, I enjoyed the "Scream" films, but a little of that trend went a long way. After the neglected masterpiece "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" in 1994 -- in which the director, stars and studio executives behind the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series all play themselves, persecuted by a vengeful Freddy who still yearns for his close-up -- meta-horror had no new realms to conquer.

All this has left mainstream horror loaded with self-knowledge but drained of intellectual ambition. (I'm not talking here about Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa and so on, who are basically arty cult figures with some extra goop and gouged-out eyeballs.) We get remakes of classic '70s and '80s films by the carload, far grislier than their predecessors but also less dangerous, less alluring. Even the horror pictures that qualify as original works, like the "Saw" series, or Eli Roth's "Hostel" or Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects," seem deep in the shadow of less self-conscious exploitation flicks of yore. They can only distinguish themselves through shock value, and even there only by depicting some gruesome injury you've never seen on-screen before. The things that made the classic horror films classics -- tension, dread, claustrophobic atmosphere, flashes of unexpected humor, a giddy and confused and erotic terror -- are almost completely absent.

Maybe I'll have to find a way to boil down all this instructive musing into a diplomatic question for the panel on contemporary horror, featuring Roth and several others, this weekend at the South by SouthwestFilm Festival in Austin, Texas. Something more diplomatic, anyway, than "How come you all suck?" Maybe this is better: "You guys all try to rip off the Japanese and Korean films that straddle the barrier between horror film and art film. Is it just the lack of subtitles that make your versions suck, or do they suck in other languages too?"

I'll be in Austin to check out a passel of the low-budget American indies and documentaries for which that appealing festival has become known -- as well as its great weather and pleasant hangout potential, which make it quite unlike a certain other film festival I could mention in a much colder part of the American West. There are also a few higher-profile events, including the premiere of "The Lookout," the thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of "Brick") and directed by Scott Frank (who wrote Steven Soderbergh's "Out of Sight") and a presentation by Robert Rodriguez, who will offer a peek at "Grindhouse," his mind-bogglingly self-referential new anthology project with Quentin Tarantino.

But before I catch that plane for warmer climes, let's talk movies. Beyond the messy excellence ("messcellence"?) of "The Host," we've also got a documentary about an even scarier monster, the goblin of credit-card debt on which our entire shaky economic edifice is built. There's a terrifying drama shot on actual locations of the 1994 Rwanda massacre, and a comedy about an almost-forgotten country called Yugoslavia.

"The Host": It rose from American slime to destroy the Korean family! It must be destroyed!
Yes, the fishy, flippery, 60-foot-long thingummy who emerges from the polluted waters of the Han River in central Seoul to terrorize the populace in "The Host" is the result of poison from an American military facility. Well, what the hell else would cause such a horrible mutation? The fertilizer off Uncle Hang-soo's farm? I don't think so.

There's no question that Bong Joon-ho's film, which is the most satisfying monster movie in many years, takes some easy shots at the American military-technological colossus, and at the Korean government's sheepdog-like subservience to it. I'm inclined to interpret pretty much any junky old movie as a dialectical critique of whateverness, but in this case both the sanctimonious leftists and the contrarian critics are reading way too much into this simultaneously big-hearted and farcical adventure.

"The Host" may have one foot in the allegorical and mysterious world of contemporary Asian horror cinema, but the other one is closer to the sentimental big-screen spectacles of Steven Spielberg, or even Frank Capra. Bong's human villains are about as ambiguous as his monster: The Americans are diabolical Strangeloves and the Koreans are two-faced sycophants. His hero, on the other hand, is Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), a middle-aged loser with a bad blond 'do who slumbers away the days at his dad's riverside squid shack. (That isn't any kind of a joke: Koreans really, really like squid.)

Gang-du's dad (Byeon Hie-bong) is a grump and complainer, his beautiful sister (Bae Du-na) is a champion archer who loses an international match through indecision, and his brother (Park Hae-il) is an embittered alcoholic. About the only sensible one is Gang-du's daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung), a resourceful little person of about 9 who puts up with this family as patiently as she can manage. Do you suppose coming face-to-face with a giant mutant whatzit will give this struggling family a chance at redemption, or what?

There's tragedy beneath the funniest bits of "The Host" and humor beneath the most serious passages, which is one reason why I don't think it should be viewed as some earnest political parable. When the big kahuna emerges from the muddy Han and begins gnawing up picnickers, the resulting chaos is both upsetting and comic -- at least until it grabs Hyun-seo and disappears. Even then, the film's tone is constitutionally unsettled: At the stage-managed ceremony of public grieving after the monster's first attack, the entire Park family collapses in a slapstick heap. As a stern orange-suited bureaucrat seeks to quarantine those who (like Gang-du) have actually touched the beast -- reputedly the host of a dangerous virus -- he wipes out in a pratfall worthy of Oliver Hardy.

Hyun-seo is gone, all right -- but is she really dead? After Gang-du gets a cellphone call from somewhere deep in the Han River sewer system, there is hope. Of course, as Gang-du explodes to a sinister American doctor late in the film, "Nobody ever fucking listens to me!" But our plucky family of working-class washouts doesn't give up easily. Infighting and bickering all the way, they take on the Korean cops and military, the evil and meddlesome Yanks (who want to release a poison gas called Agent Yellow in the city center), and, oh yeah, a hideous mutant creature who has their beloved Hyun-seo stashed somewhere for some future snacktime.

While the ignorance, hypocrisy and lies on display in "The Host" may result from America's increasingly clumsy quest to subjugate the earth in the name of freedom, those are the tools of authority in all historical eras and all nations. It's always those at the bottom of the food chain (those whom nobody ever fucking listens to!) who must battle the mutant monsters. On the margins of high-tech consumer society, the squid-shack proprietors will always be with us (as Jesus observed). "The Host" is a thrilling ride and a sometimes dry, sometimes sweet comedy, but beneath all that is a humane and tragic view of life worthy of the greatest films. Even those without rubber monsters.

"The Host" opens March 9 in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Washington, Seattle and Austin, Texas; and March 23 in Albany, N.Y., Baltimore, Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Des Moines, Detroit, Hartford, Conn., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, New Haven, Conn., Providence, R.I., Richmond, Va., Sacramento, Calif., Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Santa Fe, N.M., and elsewhere, with more locations to follow.

from the '50s deep into the '80s, horrormovies were more or less the art filmsof disaffected suburban kids. (My disaffected suburban friends and I grew up watching both art films and horror movies, and we were hardly unique -- and yes, we ruined culture for future generations. But that's another story.) Giant irradiated bugs and rotting zombies and communistic pod-people and erotic parasites and child-eating janitors crawled from the collective subconscious to the screen and back again, driven by deep currents of fear and desire.

Even when horror movies were incompetent (and perhaps especially then) they reflected the guiding anxieties of the age. Freddy Krueger sprang from the paranoid, perverse underbelly of Reagan's America and could have been born nowhere else. George A. Romero's undead flesh-eaters (just how many recently dead corpses are available in rural Pennsylvania?) seemed like a crude symbolic force with many potential meanings -- student radicalism, the Ku Klux Klan, or just an urgent upwelling of the American cult of death -- all of them rooted in the specific neuroses of the 1960s. Dario Argento's maggot-riddled melodramas express postwar Italy's crisis of confidence just as clearly as Antonioni's arid and overpraised art films.

Maybe the beginning of the end arrived when film theorists and other bearers of the postmodern intellectual flame embraced horror films for their reputed transgression, and when the genre began to satirize itself. Let's face it, being rebellious is no fun -- in fact, it's no longer possible -- if university academics are on your side. As for horror self-mockery, I enjoyed the "Scream" films, but a little of that trend went a long way. After the neglected masterpiece "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" in 1994 -- in which the director, stars and studio executives behind the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series all play themselves, persecuted by a vengeful Freddy who still yearns for his close-up -- meta-horror had no new realms to conquer.

All this has left mainstream horror loaded with self-knowledge but drained of intellectual ambition. (I'm not talking here about Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa and so on, who are basically arty cult figures with some extra goop and gouged-out eyeballs.) We get remakes of classic '70s and '80s films by the carload, far grislier than their predecessors but also less dangerous, less alluring. Even the horror pictures that qualify as original works, like the "Saw" series, or Eli Roth's "Hostel" or Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects," seem deep in the shadow of less self-conscious exploitation flicks of yore. They can only distinguish themselves through shock value, and even there only by depicting some gruesome injury you've never seen on-screen before. The things that made the classic horror films classics -- tension, dread, claustrophobic atmosphere, flashes of unexpected humor, a giddy and confused and erotic terror -- are almost completely absent.

Maybe I'll have to find a way to boil down all this instructive musing into a diplomatic question for the panel on contemporary horror, featuring Roth and several others, this weekend at the South by SouthwestFilm Festival in Austin, Texas. Something more diplomatic, anyway, than "How come you all suck?" Maybe this is better: "You guys all try to rip off the Japanese and Korean films that straddle the barrier between horror film and art film. Is it just the lack of subtitles that make your versions suck, or do they suck in other languages too?"

I'll be in Austin to check out a passel of the low-budget American indies and documentaries for which that appealing festival has become known -- as well as its great weather and pleasant hangout potential, which make it quite unlike a certain other film festival I could mention in a much colder part of the American West. There are also a few higher-profile events, including the premiere of "The Lookout," the thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of "Brick") and directed by Scott Frank (who wrote Steven Soderbergh's "Out of Sight") and a presentation by Robert Rodriguez, who will offer a peek at "Grindhouse," his mind-bogglingly self-referential new anthology project with Quentin Tarantino.

But before I catch that plane for warmer climes, let's talk movies. Beyond the messy excellence ("messcellence"?) of "The Host," we've also got a documentary about an even scarier monster, the goblin of credit-card debt on which our entire shaky economic edifice is built. There's a terrifying drama shot on actual locations of the 1994 Rwanda massacre, and a comedy about an almost-forgotten country called Yugoslavia.

"The Host": It rose from American slime to destroy the Korean family! It must be destroyed!
Yes, the fishy, flippery, 60-foot-long thingummy who emerges from the polluted waters of the Han River in central Seoul to terrorize the populace in "The Host" is the result of poison from an American military facility. Well, what the hell else would cause such a horrible mutation? The fertilizer off Uncle Hang-soo's farm? I don't think so.

There's no question that Bong Joon-ho's film, which is the most satisfying monster movie in many years, takes some easy shots at the American military-technological colossus, and at the Korean government's sheepdog-like subservience to it. I'm inclined to interpret pretty much any junky old movie as a dialectical critique of whateverness, but in this case both the sanctimonious leftists and the contrarian critics are reading way too much into this simultaneously big-hearted and farcical adventure.

"The Host" may have one foot in the allegorical and mysterious world of contemporary Asian horror cinema, but the other one is closer to the sentimental big-screen spectacles of Steven Spielberg, or even Frank Capra. Bong's human villains are about as ambiguous as his monster: The Americans are diabolical Strangeloves and the Koreans are two-faced sycophants. His hero, on the other hand, is Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), a middle-aged loser with a bad blond 'do who slumbers away the days at his dad's riverside squid shack. (That isn't any kind of a joke: Koreans really, really like squid.)

Gang-du's dad (Byeon Hie-bong) is a grump and complainer, his beautiful sister (Bae Du-na) is a champion archer who loses an international match through indecision, and his brother (Park Hae-il) is an embittered alcoholic. About the only sensible one is Gang-du's daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung), a resourceful little person of about 9 who puts up with this family as patiently as she can manage. Do you suppose coming face-to-face with a giant mutant whatzit will give this struggling family a chance at redemption, or what?

There's tragedy beneath the funniest bits of "The Host" and humor beneath the most serious passages, which is one reason why I don't think it should be viewed as some earnest political parable. When the big kahuna emerges from the muddy Han and begins gnawing up picnickers, the resulting chaos is both upsetting and comic -- at least until it grabs Hyun-seo and disappears. Even then, the film's tone is constitutionally unsettled: At the stage-managed ceremony of public grieving after the monster's first attack, the entire Park family collapses in a slapstick heap. As a stern orange-suited bureaucrat seeks to quarantine those who (like Gang-du) have actually touched the beast -- reputedly the host of a dangerous virus -- he wipes out in a pratfall worthy of Oliver Hardy.

Hyun-seo is gone, all right -- but is she really dead? After Gang-du gets a cellphone call from somewhere deep in the Han River sewer system, there is hope. Of course, as Gang-du explodes to a sinister American doctor late in the film, "Nobody ever fucking listens to me!" But our plucky family of working-class washouts doesn't give up easily. Infighting and bickering all the way, they take on the Korean cops and military, the evil and meddlesome Yanks (who want to release a poison gas called Agent Yellow in the city center), and, oh yeah, a hideous mutant creature who has their beloved Hyun-seo stashed somewhere for some future snacktime.

While the ignorance, hypocrisy and lies on display in "The Host" may result from America's increasingly clumsy quest to subjugate the earth in the name of freedom, those are the tools of authority in all historical eras and all nations. It's always those at the bottom of the food chain (those whom nobody ever fucking listens to!) who must battle the mutant monsters. On the margins of high-tech consumer society, the squid-shack proprietors will always be with us (as Jesus observed). "The Host" is a thrilling ride and a sometimes dry, sometimes sweet comedy, but beneath all that is a humane and tragic view of life worthy of the greatest films. Even those without rubber monsters.

"The Host" opens March 9 in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Washington, Seattle and Austin, Texas; and March 23 in Albany, N.Y., Baltimore, Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Des Moines, Detroit, Hartford, Conn., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, New Haven, Conn., Providence, R.I., Richmond, Va., Sacramento, Calif., Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Santa Fe, N.M., and elsewhere, with more locations to follow.