Hell could be around us

If I were to pick the scariest movie ever, it would be director Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009). For starters, choosing Kim Hye-ja as main lead spooks me out, given that the actress is well known for her image as loving mother. Kim knows that her son, Won Bin, is killing people around but still manages to coddle him with unconditional love.

Director Bong suggests a fundamental yet provocative question about the love of mother that has always been sacrosanct. He asks if maternal love is truly a great thing, insinuating the possibility that the essence of mother’s love may consist in an insane animal instinct that defies morality, legality, logic, or explanation.

Sandra Bullock’s Bird Box (2018), which is streamed on Netflix, offers a rather different type of horror experience. The movie is set against pandemonium where an unidentified pandemic stemming from Romania is sweeping across the entire world. People suspect it as germ warfare waged by North Korea or Iran, but it later turned out that the disease is transmitted through “sight” not virus.

Bird Box displays a terrifying mass suicide of people who give in to the temptation to take their own lives after being exposed to a mysterious light form the skies. This light remains unidentified until the movie is over, and Sandra Bullock and her kids embark on a perilous journey to find a safe haven, with their eyes covered and ears being the only recourse. Sentencing death by sight! This scintillating movie idea might be a metaphor for our “addiction to sight,” with the perpetrators of the “Nth Room case” who sold their soul for tumorous porn being a case in point.


sjda@donga.com