‘The Host’ is Academy Award winner Bong Joon-ho’s early period monster mash

Long before he took home Oscar gold, the South Korean auteur gave us a whole different kind of parasite…

One thing about the horror genre that deserves more attention is its function as a talent incubator. Horror is comparatively cheap on the average and there’s a built-in audience for monsters, madmen and more, so emerging filmmakers can often find a pathway to making a feature in the world of blood bags and gore gags.

Some of the most acclaimed directors in the world had early career success in horror. Francis Ford Coppola had Dementia 13. Before Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, Sam Raimi made the Evil Dead flicks. Peter Jackson? Brain Dead. Even Spielberg had Jaws. And Bong Joon-ho, who found critical acclaim and audience adoration with social satire Parasite? Well, he had The Host.

Something fishy in the Han River…

Released in 2006, the Korean-language monster movie The Host was Bong’s third feature film, but the first to find an audience outside his native South Korea and the festival circuit. In the film, the city of Seoul is menaced by a giant creature that has mutated in the Han River after US military scientists have dumped a batch of contaminated formaldehyde in the water.

The critter, a wonderfully grotesque creation that looks sort of like a giant cross between a tadpole and squid, but with legs, rampages along the river, gulping down hapless humans and seizing young Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung, who later appeared in Bong’s Snowpiercer), daughter of dim-witted snack bar owner Park Gang-du (Korean superstar Song Kang-ho, who was the dad in Parasite).

While conventional wisdom says that Hyun-seo is dead, Gang-du and his family – dad Hie-bong (Byun Hee-bong), who helps run the snack shop; brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il of War of the Arrows), a drunken former political activist; and sister Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na of Jupiter Ascending and Sense-8), a champion archer, are determined to hunt down the monster and either rescue or avenge Hyun-seo. And we are off and running.

Up the underclass

The Host is Bong’s riff on giant monster movies à la Godzilla and King Kong. Especially the former; as you might expect from the future director of Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, there’s plenty of social commentary slipped in among the chaotic creature action. Bong’s empathy for the downtrodden and oppressed is all present and correct, and it’s not hard to see the hardscrabble Park family as a test run for Parasite’s Kim clan.

However, the sharpest barbs in The Host are reserved for the United States, in particular the country’s political, social and military influence over South Korea. It’s an American military scientist (played by The Walking Dead’s Scott Wilson) who orders the contamination of the Han, directly resulting in the film’s gargantuan monster, and while South Korean authorities participate in trying to cover up the beast and its rampage, it’s clearly at the behest of the American military. If Godzilla was a manifestation of Japan’s nuclear anxieties, The Host speaks to South Korea’s anxieties about being a front for US global military policy.

These strange times

Watching The Host in 2021, however, it’s hard not to be struck by the fact that, in the film, part of the authorities’ strategy to cover up the monster is putting out the story that those who have been in contact with it have been exposed to a virus and need to be rounded up and quarantined. In the real world, of course, we’re over 18 months deep into a very real pandemic and dealing with the consequences thereof, and our strategies have included quarantine. The key difference, of course, is that The Host is fiction and Covid-19 is all too real, and while pretending that massive conspiracies are real is all fun and games in Korean monster movies (or The X-Files, or whatever your conspiracy-flavoured media of choice is), incorporating them into your day-to-day life just gets you roundly mocked on social media or, worse, photographed punching a police horse.

So, by all means, make time for The Host. It’s a terrific monster movie that marked a turning point for the career of its director, and everything that made Parasite an absolute world-beater is present here in nascent form. But make a note to remind yourself that the whole fake-virus-to-justify-police-crackdowns subplot is as fictional as the central giant tadpole-thingy.