The Hollywood movies that inspired Bong Joon-ho’s ‘The Host’
When South Korean director Bong Joon-ho took home three Oscars for Parasite, the first non-English language film to win ‘Best Picture’, many filmgoers were not surprised. Not only was the movie a critical and financial success, but Joon-ho had already established himself as one of the most skilled and exciting directors of the decade.
His second film, the 2003 serial killer mystery Memories of Murder, is steeped in an atmosphere of futility and tension. Based on a real-life series of murders in Korea in the 1980s, it’s a haunting piece of cinema with an electrifying ending that made its director a filmmaker to watch. While Memories of Murder gained traction with critics overseas, it wasn’t until Joon-ho’s third film, The Host, appeared in 2006 that the director was well and truly on the map.
Ostensibly a monster movie, The Host was further proof that Joon-ho is able to fit his unique sensibilities into classically formulaic genres. The plot follows the Park family, made up of a grandfather, his three adult children, and a granddaughter. They live together in humble conditions, with the grandfather and his eldest son running a snack stand. One day, an amphibious monster emerges from the Han River and begins wreaking havoc on the city, gobbling up passersby and depositing them in its underground lair. One of the people the creature captures is the granddaughter, Hyun-seo. Desperate to bring her back home, the family band together to fight the monster, even as the military begins imposing strict quarantine rules and the media seeds misinformation.
Joon-ho was partially inspired by a real-life scandal in 2000 when an American mortician was found guilty of dumping formaldehyde into the Han River, an incident which is reimagined early in the film. But while The Host has all the trappings of a classic monster movie, it goes beyond the genre to deal with Joon-ho’s now-familiar themes of family, inequality, and the tyranny of capitalism. For these elements, the director found inspiration in Hollywood, specifically from two blockbusters directed by high-profile filmmakers.
When an interviewer asked Joon-ho if he drew on other monster movies for The Host, he responded, “For reference or inspiration? In this case, not this kind of typical monster movie. I was inspired by M Night Shyamalan’s Signs and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. For instance, in the movie Signs, it deals with an alien invasion, but it’s hugely different from other alien invasion films like Independence Day, the reason being it focuses on the family and isn’t a film of spectacle. It’s about the family and the minute details of the family. That’s a film that inspired me.”
In Signs, Mel Gibson plays Graham Hess, the patriarch of a family in rural Pennsylvania who discovers crop circles in his corn field. His wife has recently died, leaving him with two young children, one of whom suffers from severe asthma and an adult brother. The family drama is at the heart of the movie, with the aliens driving the plot forward in order for the members of the family to deepen their bonds and come to terms with the death of Hess’ wife.
Jaws is similarly focused on its human characters, with the shark only appearing late in the film. Joon-ho revealed elsewhere that Spielberg’s monster blockbuster inspired him by how it uses the spectre of the monster to reveal social dynamics within the town. As happens in the first half of Jaws, the authorities in The Host try to convince the population that there is nothing to worry about despite recognising the peril at their doorstep.
Like Signs, The Host is a family drama that uses the monster as a plot device to bring the family together and redeem each of the siblings for previous failings. Unlike either of the Hollywood movies that inspired it, Joon-ho’s film strikes a decidedly un-Hollywood tone. Not only is it full of comedic touches, but it also ends on a haunting, ambiguous note that echoes the director’s previous film, Memories of Murder.
