Here’s my quick review of the Chan-wook Park’s wetly disturbing vampire film, Thirst, from the latest jmag. (And yes, I did later plagiarise my own line about “sparkling and non-sparkling vampires”, and I apologise to myself for it.) It’s finally getting a DVD release in Australia next month after some sadly limited festival screenings earlier this year.
THIRST
Directed by: Chan-wook Park
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Ok-vin Kim
Anyone who’s witnessed the five-star, what-the-hell-am-I-watching? spectacle of Oldboy knows that Chan-wook Park’s films are rollercoasters: funny, scary, and violently melodramatic.
His latest, Thirst, isn’t just a vampire movie; it’s also the weirdest literary adaptation you’ll ever see. It’s inspired by the decidedly non-vampiric Émile Zola novel “Thérèse Raquin”, but twisted into a slow-boiling, genre-smashing story of an infected priest and the temptations of bloodlust.
Thirst is being hailed as everything that Twilight isn’t. (Personally, I think vampire lore is big enough for both sparkling and non-sparkling varieties.) Thirst is missing the momentum of some of Chan-wook Park’s other films, but manages to make vampires feel fresh again.
Did I mention wetness? The impeccable sound design makes this one of the schlurpiest films in cinema history, all blood and snot and seawater. Sam Raimi’s recent Drag Me To Hell was obsessed with horrible things happening to mouths, but Thirst will make you long for simpler times when people just used to get stabbed in the eyes.
Other reviews this month: Away We Go, Coraline, and Where The Wild Things Are. (Here’s something of an extended 12″ remix of my Wild Things review.)
Issue #35 is on sale now.
#1 by Manolis on December 7th, 2009
How odd — I only recently read Therese Raquin last month, and now it’s been made into a Korean horror flick!
Therese Raquin is kinda vampiric and kinda horrorific. Zola, under the sway of positivistic thinking, deliberately wanted the morally repugnant characters in the book to take on characteristics physically and behaviourally that could “scientifically” show they were morally repugnant underneath.
This, he thought, made his book “more real”, or something of the sort.
And in the book, there is a bite on the neck that becomes festy, which works as a cliched metaphor — at least these days it’s cliched — for the road down moral perdition that the characters follow.
#2 by Martyn on December 8th, 2009
Interesting! I haven’t read it, but sounds like it’s slightly less of a stretch than I imagined.
I did get a chance to attend a Q&A with Chan-wook Park at Comic-Con this year where he explained that he was going to do a straight adaptation of “Therese Raquin”, and perhaps a separate a vampire movie – but neither of them were quite working. So THIRST is the result of a sudden flash of inspiration to slam them together.
(I hope that whatever classic novel you read next is also turned into a Korean horror film, just to freak you out.)