Most people love a good monster movie, but more often than not moviegoers find themselves sitting through a mostly unwatchable film just to see a handful of mediocre creature attacks. Every now and then, however, a movie comes along that rises above the standard formula and lifts the genre out of the B-movie gutter. Jaws did it in 1975, and now we have The Host, a Korean import that utterly embarrasses most Hollywood horror flicks of late. The film opens today in limited release across North America and is worth seeking out.
When an American doctor dumps gallons of formaldehyde into Seoul’s Han River, he unwittingly creates a mutant monster that one day crawls out of the water and begins devouring people. One victim, a young girl, survives and finds herself in the creature’s lair, hidden away in a vast sewer system. With the aid of a cell phone found on a dead body, she’s able to contact her family, rallying two generations to come to her rescue and put an end to the amphibious threat.
Where American horror filmmakers like to focus on vapid teens getting hacked to pieces, director Joon Ho Bong (Memories of Murder) manages to weave a compelling family drama into The Host, giving us characters we care about while also delivering genuine thrills and chills. The creature animation and various other effects by The Orphanage are top-notch, but so is the acting and storytelling.
Made for a modest $10 million, The Host isn’t the type of film you’d expect a major effects studio to get involved with, but it offered The Orphanage a chance to show the world what it is capable of in the area of creature animation, something the company hasn’t had many opportunities to focus on. With this addition to its reel, the studio appears to be gunning for some of the jobs that would typically go to ILM or Weta. Webster Colcord served as animation supervisor and Corey Rosen was creature supervisor.
The Orphanage is also hoping to get the contract for the inevitable Hollywood remake of The Host. Universal Pictures, a studio built on such early monster movies as Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy, has picked up the rights and is likely to produce a subtitle-free version for American audiences. Let’s just hope they manage to hold on to the spirit of the original rather than unleashing a monstrous mess like Sony’s 1998 rehashing of Toho’s Godzilla.
The Host is produced by Chungeorahm Film and Showbox/Mediaplex. Read more about the making of the film as we interview Colcord and Rosen in the latest issue of Animation Magazine.
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