Alfred Hitchcock: the director who gives Bong Joon-ho “very strange inspiration”
Firmly established as one of cinema’s pre-eminent auteurs, Bong Joon-ho has achieved worldwide fame and adulation without deviating from the themes and motifs that have served him well since the very beginning.
The filmmaker crafts stories that are rooted in Korean life and culture that make a habit of pointing fingers at the establishment and/or ruling authorities for the social, economic, and personal strife that afflicts the lives of so many inhabitants. Still, each one of his features feels markedly different from the last.
He’s yet to succumb entirely to the lure of Hollywood’s bright lights and bigger budgets, either, even though his graphic novel adaptation Snowpiercer and Netflix’s environmentally conscious fable Okja featured plenty of big-name American stars. Yet, they retained the moral core of his local work.
Blackly comedic serial killer thriller Memories of Murder, creature flick The Host, conspiratorial kidnapping tale Mother, and Academy Award-winning Parasite are all distinctly Korean stories that appealed to a global audience, with the latter winning Joon-ho Oscars for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Original Screenplay’, and ‘Best International Feature’.
Each of them requires the subtle manipulation of audience sympathies before the true narrative intentions are revealed, with Joon-ho encouraging viewers to relate to characters who would otherwise seem untrustworthy or unscrupulous on the page. His work is synonymous with jet-black humour; there are occasional bursts of visceral shock, and he tells serious stories swathed in genre trappings.
It all sounds very Hitchcockian in a way, so it’s no surprise that Joon-ho admitted to Vanity Fair that the ‘Master of Suspense’ “always gives me very strange inspiration”. Psycho, in particular, was influential in the way the director crafted the production design and narrative of Parasite after he pointed to the “very interesting structure” of the 1960 classic as a touchstone.
They’re not directly comparable in the most obvious sense, but there are connections there nonetheless. Hitchcock’s seminal slasher uses the backdrop of the Bates Motel to lure audiences in with a standard slasher setup, only to pull the rug from under everyone with the revelation of not only Marion Crane’s demise but the true machinations behind Norman Bates and his mother.
Parasite, meanwhile, turns its own story upside down at the midway point when the Kim family discovers they aren’t the only ones living a surreptitious second life in an affluent suburb. It may not have been a deliberate homage, but when Joon-ho is willing to admit he finds inspiration from Hitchcock in the most unexpected moments, it’s not a reach.
They’re two very different films made by two very different filmmakers separated by decades. While it might be a disservice to brand Parasite as overtly Hitchcockian, it isn’t a million miles away.
