If I Catch You Ill Kill You The Chaser

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Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/62/1/20/6218062 by Colby College user on 13 April 2021

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‘If I catch you, I’ll kill you’: The

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Chaser, South Korean serial killer

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cinema and the crisis of sovereignty

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.. SE YOUNG KIM
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On 18 September 2019, the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police
..
1 See Agence France-Presse, ‘South ..
...
Korea serial killer suspect found ..
Agency in South Korea announced that it had arrested a suspect in the
..
after 30 years but won’t face ..
prosecution’, The Guardian,
..
.. so-called Hwaseong serial murders, identifying 56-year-old Lee Chun-
..
19 September 2019, <https://
..
.. jae as the perpetrator of the brutal rape and murder of 10 women
between 1986 and 1991.1 The nation’s shock at this statement was
..
www.theguardian.com/world/ ..
..
2019/sep/20/south-korea-serial- ..
killer-suspect-found-after-30-years-
..
.. compounded by the fact that the killer had eluded law enforcement for
..
but-wont-face-prosecution> ..
.. so long that the statute of limitations for the case had expired way back
accessed 1 December 2020. East in 2006. Closure, as a result, seemed unlikely if not outright
..
..
..
Asian names are written in
impossible. Reflecting the country’s complicated response to the news,
..
..
traditional fashion, with family ...
names coming first. The revised
..
.. the filmmaker Bong Joon-ho noted in October 2019 at the Beyond
Film Festival ‘that it would take him a while to explain his feelings’.2
..
romanization of Korean is used, ..
..
with the exception of names that ..
have widely-used English-
..
.. Bong’s thoughts about this development in the case were of particular
..
spellings. All translations into ..
.. interest to the press because his film, Sarinui chueok/Memories of
English are mine.
..
..
.. Murder, a thriller loosely based on the Hwaseong murders, had revived
2 ‘Bong junho gamdok “Hwaseong ..
yeonswaesarinsageon yonguija
..
.. interest in the crime when it was released in 2003. In addition to
..
teukjeong, gyeongchale ..
.. advancing Bong’s career, Memories of Murder had initiated a veritable
baksureul”’ (‘Director Bong Joon- craze among filmmakers as they all scrambled to make their own serial
..
..
ho “Suspect in Hwaseong serial ...
killings confirmed, applauds the
..
..
..
killer films. But just as the film was related to true events, the reach of
police”’), Donga.com, 2 October
..
..
..
Memories of Murder appeared to go beyond cinema and back into real
2019, <http://www.donga.com/ ..
life: four months after the film’s release on 24 September 2003, 37-
..
news/article/all/20191002/ ..
97691647/1> accessed
..
.. year-old Yoo Young-chul began a killing spree that claimed 21 lives
..
1 December 2020. ..
..
..
..
20 Screen 62:1 Spring 2021

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hjab005
3 See Kyung-Hyun Nam, ‘Hwaseong ...
.. before he was captured in July 2004.3 Placed in relation to one another,
killings still baffle police’, The ..
Dong-A Ilbo, 1 April 2006, <http://
..
.. Memories of Murder and the Yoo case mark the moment in recent Korean
history when cinema became enamoured with serial murder.4 Korean
..
..
english.donga.com/List/3/all/26/ ..
..
246760/1>; Jiyeon Lee, ‘Serial ..
.. news media made this connection, remarking that with the Yoo case the
killings grip South Korea’, PRI, ..
13 February 2009, <https://www.
..
.. nation was seeing ‘Seoul’s version of Memories of Murder’, a suggestion
that the rural horror of the Hwaseong killings had migrated to the capital.5
..
pri.org/stories/2009-02-13/serial-
..
..
..
killings-grip-south-korea> both ..
.. Five years after the release of Memories of Murder and four years after
accessed 1 December 2020.
Yoo’s capture, Na Hong-jin’s Chugyeokja/The Chaser (2008) opened in
..
..
4 This was also a period where the ..
...
Korean cinemas. The most successful serial killer film produced after

country saw a spike in serial ..
..
murders. Jeong Nam-gyu killed ..
.. Memories of Murder, its brazen marketing promoted the appearance of a
13 people from 2004 to 2006. See
killer ‘who shook the country’.6 In addition to referring to its own cinematic
..
..
Mee-yoo Kwon, ‘Serial murderer
..
..
kills himself in jail’, The Korea
..
.. killer, the slogan also referenced Yoo, as The Chaser was a fictional account
..
Times, 22 November 2009, ..
.. of the Yoo Young-chul murders. In narrativizing the case, The Chaser plays
<http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/ ..
www/news/nation/2009/11/113_
..
.. its part in engaging national trauma and mounts an attempt to analyse Yoo
..
55932.html> accessed
..
.. by way of its fictional killer Ji Yeong-min (Ha Jung-woo). Yet as part of the
discursive formation of the South Korean serial killer, a discourse that
..
1 December 2020. Kang Ho-sun ..
..
killed 10 women between
2005 and 2008. See ‘Korean killer
...
..
..
includes films, media coverage and criminological reports, The Chaser goes
gets death penalty’, 22 April 2009,
..
..
..
far beyond simply contextualizing Ji Yeong-min and Yoo Young-chul.
BBC, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ ..
.. In this essay I analyse the production of the South Korean serial killer
asia-pacific/8011560.stm> ..
accessed 1 December 2020. A
..
.. through a close reading of The Chaser. Positioning it within a broader
..
2009 article on Kang comments on
..
.. discussion of serial murder in South Korea in the 21st century, I read The
..
how he was the third major serial ..
.. Chaser in relation to Memories of Murder and other serial killer films
killer to be arrested since 2004 in ..
a country ‘that is known for its
..
.. produced between 2003 and 2019, with news reports and criminological
..
relatively low crime rate’. See Lee,
..
.. studies augmenting the films. Initially The Chaser contends that Yeong-min’s
resentful violence stems from a perceived loss of agency, a crisis of
..
‘Serial killings grip South Korea’. ..
5 Chang-won Pyo, Hangukui ...
yeonswaesarin: huidaeui sarine
..
..
..
masculinity that motivates him to create an exceptional space into which his
daehan beomjoe susa shimni
..
.. gendered violence can be released in a desperate, recuperative act.
..
bunseok (The Serial Murders of ..
.. Accordingly a bathroom becomes a space of psycho-geography, where
Korea: Criminal Investigation and ..
Psychological Analysis of the Most
..
.. murder and misogyny collide with the broader philosophical problem of
..
Notorious Killers) (Seoul: RHK,
..
.. sovereignty, while simultaneously laying bare The Chaser’s extra-textual and
..
2014) p. 355. ..
.. international interests. The motif of the bathroom evokes violent Korean
6 Until 2013, Memories of Murder ..
and The Chaser were the two
..
.. cinema of the 2000s, while explicitly referencing the horror film Saw (James
Wan, 2004) as interlocutor and competitor. Considered alongside the fact that
..
most successful thrillers in Korean
..
...
film history. See Brian Yecies and ..
.. a popular explanation for serial murder was that it was symptomatic of so-
Aegyung Shim, The Changing Face ..
of Korean Cinema: 1960 to 2015
..
..
..
called ‘advanced nation disease’, which gestures to the historical context of the
(New York, NY: Routledge, 2015),
..
.. 1990s socio-economic collapse and the enormous precarity of the 2000s, The
..
p. 174. The film’s poster described ..
.. Chaser suggests a critical link between serial killing and the global economy,
its antagonist as ‘Nanareul ..
dwiheundeun hidaeui sarinma’ (the
..
.. providing genuine insight into this phenomenon, which must be understood in
..
infamous killer who shook the
..
.. relation to the experience of Korean modernity. At the same time, as part of a
..
country). ..
.. broader national discussion regarding not only serial murder but no less a topic
than contemporary Korean history, The Chaser cynically positions the killer as
..
..
...
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a horrible but undeniable marker of economic progress.
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.. The Chaser revolves around the duel between Yeong-min and the
7 A coalition of pimps was ..
instrumental in the apprehension
..
.. eponymous chugyeokja, Eom Jung-ho (Kim Yoon-seok), a detective
turned pimp.7 At the film’s start one of Jung-ho’s sex worker employees
..
of Yoo. ..
21 Screen 62:1 Spring 2021 Se Young Kim The Chaser, South Korean serial killer cinema and the crisis of sovereignty
...
..
..
has already been killed by Yeong-min, and the punter’s consequent
..
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request for another escort alerts the pimp that something is awry. Jung-ho
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.. enlists the help of single mother Mi-jin (Seo Young-hee), another of his
..
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.. employees, to set a trap into which Yeong-min does eventually fall, but
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.. unfortunately not before he has attacked and imprisoned Mi-jin. Moreover,
..
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.. the technical illegality of Jung-ho’s apprehension of Yeong-min
..
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.. (complicated by the fact that the police are unaware he is the serial killer
they are so desperately chasing) results in him going free. Jung-ho again
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picks up the chase, but is too late to stop Yeong-min from murdering Mi-

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jin. In their final encounter Jung-ho nearly beats Yeong-min to death, only
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.. to be stopped by the dramatic arrival of the police. The Chaser concludes
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.. with Jung-ho at the hospital bedside of Mi-jin’s surviving daughter, Eun-ji
..
..
.. (Kim Yu-jeong).
..
..
.. The character of Yeong-min serves a double purpose in The Chaser,
..
..
.. both as the film’s antagonist and as stand-in for Yoo Young-chul. In both
capacities gender plays a crucial role. Conforming with popular notions
..
..
..
...
.. of the serial killer as ‘“the stranger beside me”, “everyone’s next-door
neighbor”, or “average-looking”’,8 The Chaser renders Yeong-min’s
..
8 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death
..
..
..
and Life in America’s Wound ..
.. plainness immediately evident in both cinematography (through the use
Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, ..
1998), p. 10. See, too, how the
..
.. of neutral medium shots) and the mise-en-scene (through clothing,
..
young girl at the conclusion of ..
.. grooming, physique and mannerisms). More importantly, Yeong-min is
Memories of Murder calls the
..
..
.. so unassuming that he is effectively rendered genderless, with the
Hwaseong killer ‘ordinary looking’. ..
..
.. detectives frequently calling him an ae, a neutral form of ‘child’. Duped
..
..
.. by his mundaneness, neither Jung-ho nor the police initially believe that
Yeong-min could be a killer, for he seems to lack what the film suggests
..
..
...
..
..
..
is the necessary masculine capacity for violence (figure 1).
..
.. This misconception does not last long, of course, and once The Chaser
..
..
.. establishes that Yeong-min is the killer terrorizing Seoul, it is quick to
..
..
.. confirm that he does in fact possess the requisite deviant masculinity to
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.. commit terrible violence. As was the case with the media coverage of
..
..
.. Yoo Young-chul, The Chaser contends that the pathology of a serial
..
..
.. killer is psychosexual in nature. The film effectively drafts a criminal
profile for the killer through two sequences following Yeong-min’s
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...
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capture. In the first, Jung-ho speaks with Seong-hi (Oh Yeon-ah), a sex
..
..
..
worker who survived an encounter with Yeong-min. Seong-hi relates
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.. how Yeong-min began to stalk her after an unsuccessful sexual
..
..
.. transaction, resulting from his impotence, before sending her threats of
..
..
.. mutilation and murder. The second sequence occurs across two locations:
..
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.. in the interrogation room at the police station, and in a dingy apartment
..
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.. Yeong-min shared with a cellmate from a previous prison sentence. In
the former, a criminal profiler reinforces Seong-hi’s testimony by
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suggesting that Yeong-min is impotent, and accuses him of substituting
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the murder weapons (a hammer and chisel) for his useless genitalia.
..
.. Yet Yeong-min’s psychosexual pathology is inadequate for The Chaser;
..
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.. according to the film, his is a psyche so monstrous that it expands beyond
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.. his corporeal limits. In parallel to the police interview, Jung-ho conducts an
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.. interrogation of his own with Yeong-min’s former cellmate. In the dark,
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Fig. 1. The ‘harmless’ and
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genderless Yeong-min, in ..
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Chugyeokja/The Chaser
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(Na Hong-jin, 2008). ..
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Fig. 2. Jung-ho surveys the ...
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psycho-geography of Yeong-min’s ..
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apartment, in The Chaser. ..
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..
..
..
..
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shabby one-room apartment that Yeong-min formerly occupied, something
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beneath the peeling wallpaper catches Jung-ho’s eye. Just as Yeong-min’s
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..
..
interview abruptly ends, the film cuts back to the apartment, with Jung-ho
..
..
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having torn down the wallpaper. The music builds to a crescendo as the film
..
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...
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.. shuttles back and forth between Jung-ho’s face and his perspective of the
..
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.. newly-revealed walls. The camera finally frames Jung-ho from behind,
..
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.. pulling back to reveal what he sees; the tattered layer no longer hiding the
dark, swirling images beneath it (figure 2). Moving between the interview
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room and the apartment, the parallel editing effectively visualizes both the
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mental derangement of the physical body and the manner in which that
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sickness extends into the immediate space.
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..
..
But this is not the only site of binarized psycho-geography. If Yeong-
..
9 In a country of ever-expanding ..
...
high-rise apartments, detached ..
.. min’s former apartment with its peeling wallpaper and grotesque imagery
homes are considered a marker for ..
considerable wealth. Several of
..
.. is the spatialization of the young man’s barely hidden psychosis, then the
..
Yoo’s early victims were affluent
..
.. house in Mangwon-dong (a neighbourhood in Seoul) is where his
sickness manifests in its fullest capacity. Architecturally the building is
..
senior citizens killed in their ..
..
dandokjutaek homes. Mangwon-
unremarkable save for the fact that it is detached, a dandokjutaek,
..
..
dong itself, however, is not a ..
indicative of inherited wealth.9 Yeong-min is not of course the lawful
..
particular wealthy neighbourhood. ..
...
..
..
owner of the home but has killed its original inhabitants, an act that hints
..
..
..
at his class background, expands his motives, and grounds him
..
.. historically. Yoo’s initial victims were a wealthy academic and his wife,
..
..
.. and indeed a class-based ressentiment was also maintained by two other
serial killers active in the 2000s, Jeong Nam-gyu and Kang Ho-sun.10
..
10 See He-rim Jo, ‘South Korea’s ..
..
most notorious serial killers’, The
..
..
.. They, like Yoo, had films based on their exploits – Mokgyeokja/The
Korea Herald, 26 May 2017, ..
<http://www.koreaherald.com/
..
.. Witness (Jo Kyu-jang, 2018) and Sarinja/Murderer (Lee Gi-wook,
2014), respectively. Uri dongne/Our Town (Jeong Gil-yeong, 2007), VIP
..
view.php?ud¼20170526000742> ..
..
accessed 1 December 2020. ...
(Park Hoon-jung, 2017), Botong saram/Ordinary Person (Kim Bong-

..
..
..
..
..
han, 2017) and Amsusarin/Dark Figure of Crime (Kim Tae-kyun, 2018)
..
.. are also based on true stories.
..
..
.. The Mangwon-dong house is the kind of structure where a familiar
..
..
.. and seemingly harmless surface conceals a deeply sinister interior
..
..
.. chamber. Following their initial meeting, Yeong-min escorts Mi-jin to
..
..
.. the house. Mi-jin lies to him and absconds to the bathroom in order to
call Jung-ho. As she futilely attempts to make contact, she surveys the
..
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...
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room via a panning shot, seeing an unremarkable washing machine, a
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..
large industrial bath, a window, a rusty hook protruding from the wall
..
..
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(on which Yeong-min drains the bodies of his victims), and a
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.. showerhead. Following a cut back to the hook, a noticeably nervous Mi-
..
..
.. jin looks for an escape route, unable to reach Jung-ho. She steps into the
..
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.. bath and goes to the window, sliding it open only to find that it has been
..
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.. walled off. Increasingly frantic, Mi-jin looks into the bath, terrified to
..
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.. discover a bloody clump of human hair stuck in the plughole. With this
first real evidence of foul play in the film, both Mi-jin’s and the
..
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...
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audience’s suspicions are finally confirmed. Following a short exchange
..
.. between Mi-jin and Yeong-min, and a scene with Jung-ho, The Chaser
..
..
.. cuts back to an extreme close-up of Mi-jin, now bound and gagged on
..
..
.. the bathroom floor. Yeong-min enters the room. Stripped to his
..
..
.. underwear, he carries a black bag that clinks with its heavy contents, and
..
..
.. pulls from it the hammer and chisel, the former now ubiquitous in violent
..
..
.. cinema after its use in Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003). The completely
open space of the bathroom in which Yeong-min plays out his murderous
..
..
...
..
..
..
desires is the spatial representation of his sickness, a ‘horrible departure
..
.. from normalcy’, but at the same time, ‘at once ... abnormally normal’
(figure 3).11
..
11 Seltzer, Serial Killers, p. 6.
..
..
..
..
.. In Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception,
..
..
.. developed from the work of Carl Schmitt, the polis is suspended under
..
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.. the perceived threat of an external force; the gravity of a situation causes
..
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.. new emergency laws to be put into effect. Key to the state of exception is
that this extraordinary situation is anticipated and predicated in the law
..
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...
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itself – the legal order allows for its own suspension. In the same vein,
..
..
..
the bathroom for Yeong-min represents a space outside of the social
..
.. body of Korea in which he can address his own crisis of masculinity.
..
..
.. Psycho-geography, in this sense, becomes an act of territorialization. In
..
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.. reality, however, the bathroom is of course not truly external to The
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.. Chaser’s Korea; instead it is the Korea within the film that allows the
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Fig. 3. The Chaser’s tiled bathroom ..
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is a spatial representation of ..
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Yeong-min’s sickness. ..
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Fig. 4. The same aesthetic was
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already apparent in Saw (James ..
..
Wan, 2004).
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bathroom to exist at all. The bathroom is ‘an attempt to include the
..
..
..
exception itself within the juridical order by creating a zone of
..
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..
12 Giorgio Agamben, State of
..
..
..
indistinction in which fact and law coincide’.12 Thus it is not Yeong-min
Exception (Chicago, IL: University ...
.. who has mastery over the bathroom, but the filmic polis itself. Consider
of Chicago Press), p. 26.
the fact that the bathroom is not the only state of exception, but rather a
..
..
..
mise-en-abyme. In response to Yeong-min’s state of exception, the filmic
..
..
..
state executes its own state of emergency, which grants emergency
..
..
..
powers to both the police and the extra-juridical figure of Jung-ho. In
..
..
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other words, the state does unto the serial killer what the serial killer
..
..
..
merely attempts to do himself; in a manner befitting the experience of
..
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..
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modern South Korea, both do so because of a crisis in sovereignty. And
...
.. sovereignty, whether that of the state or of the serial killer, requires a
..
..
.. crisis so that it may reactualize itself; both allow for crisis in their very
structure.
..
..
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The mise-en-abyme and layered states of exception in The Chaser
..
..
..
demonstrate the film’s interest in spaces and borders, an interest that
..
..
..
extends into the state of South Korea in the 2000s and reaches further
..
..
..
13 The top-grossing US film in ...
.. still. More specifically, the bathroom in The Chaser reveals its debt to the
2008 was Kung Fu Panda, which ..
tallied one million fewer tickets
..
..
..
violent Korean cinema that preceded it, while also positioning itself in
than The Chaser. See
..
.. relation to the US horror film Saw. The bathroom in The Chaser shares
..
‘Yeondobyeol bakseu opiseu’ ..
.. with the primary set of the earlier film a tile-based aesthetic and an
(‘Box office by year’), Kobis, ..
<http://www.kobis.or.kr/kobis/
..
.. inordinate, even unrealistic, degree of filth (figure 4). Both spaces are
..
business/stat/boxs/
..
.. also monochromatic, with shades of brown in The Chaser and blue-green
..
findYearlyBoxOfficeList.do> ..
.. in Saw. The association is clearly economically motivated. Saw was an
accessed 1 December 2020.
enormous success, earning nearly one hundred times its budget at the US
..
..
14 For a detailed account of ..
...
box office, spawning an eight-film franchise and launching the career of

domestic struggles regarding ..
..
international trade and cinema, ..
.. James Wan. The gambit of The Chaser was similarly rewarded, as it
see discussions of the screen ..
quota system in Darcy Paquet,
..
.. became the second most successful film of the year with over five million
..
New Korean Cinema: Breaking
..
.. admissions in 2008, and established Na Hong-jin as one of the most
important filmmakers to emerge in the latter half of the decade.13
..
the Waves (London: Wallflower ..
..
Press, 2009), pp. 68–70. ..
15 The film initially lost to Jumper
..
.. In addition to ameliorating Yeong-min’s dread of lost sovereignty, the
..
(Doug Liman, 2008), only to top
..
.. bathroom thus addresses a national, commercial anxiety over Korean
sovereignty at the box office.14 South Korea is, after all, one of the few
..
the box office for the next three ..
..
weeks. It was also the third
highest-grossing Korean film of
...
..
..
countries able to challenge Hollywood hegemony.15 Korea’s success in
2008, with domestic productions
..
.. this regard is one of the main reasons why its cinema has elicited so
much interest.16 This was not the case for the majority of Korean film
..
taking the top three spots and ..
..
the USA taking the fourth. See ..
Darcy Paquet, ‘2008’,
..
.. history, but Swiri/Shiri (Kang Je-gyu, 1999) marked a drastic change as
..
Koreanfilm.org, 26 February 2011,
..
.. the first ‘Korean blockbuster’ to shatter the previous box-office record
held by Titanic (James Cameron, 1997).17 The Chaser shares a genealogy
..
<http://www.koreanfilm.org/ ..
..
kfilm08.html> accessed ..
1 December 2020.
..
.. with Shiri, but diverges in a substantive way: while Shiri was a domestic
..
16 As recently as 1993 domestic
..
.. blockbuster looking to match US production values, The Chaser was
concerned with genre.
..
films held a record 15%. See ..
...
Doobo Shim, ‘The growth of
Korean cultural industries and the
..
..
..
The bathroom in both Saw and The Chaser serves as the primary
Korean wave’, in Beng Huat Chua
..
.. location for spectacular violence, and it is in the degree and type of
..
and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds), East ..
.. violence that the two films truly coincide: The Chaser places itself
Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the
squarely in the subgenre of ‘torture porn’ that Saw helped to create.18 The
..
..
Korean Wave (Hong Kong: Hong
..
..
Kong University Press, 2008),
..
.. Chaser was not even the first serial killer film to make that connection
..
p. 16. ..
.. through the bathroom, as Our Town had done the same a year earlier, but
17 See Chi-yun Shin and Julian ..
Stringer (eds), New Korean
..
.. The Chaser’s greater success could be attributed to its masterful
importation of torture porn, which fits Jinhee Choi’s argument that
..
Cinema (New York, NY: New
..
...
York University Press, 2006), ..
.. Korean cinema successfully emulated and built upon US cinema in the
p. 56; Paquet, New Korean
late 1990s and into the 2000s.19 The Chaser can thus very clearly be
..
..
Cinema, p. 72.
..
..
18 See David Edelstein, ‘Now
..
.. categorized as New Korean Cinema, the successful movement from the
..
playing at your local multiplex: ..
.. turn of the century, especially in regard to Korean cinema’s self-
torture porn’, New York ..
Magazine, 26 January 2006,
..
.. awareness and self-imposed reification as a competitor to Hollywood.
..
<http://nymag.com/movies/
..
.. More specifically, The Chaser continues the momentum of violent
..
features/15622/> accessed ..
.. Korean films such as Oldboy, skewed towards torture porn, rather than
1 December 2020. Unlike Saw,
being influenced by films such as Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan
..
..
The Chaser belongs in a broader ...
generic movement in East Asian
..
..
..
Demme, 1991). While every film viewed for this essay is indebted to
cinema that tended towards ..
.. Memories of Murder, Oldboy and The Chaser influence nearly half of the
brutal violence, so much so that
serial killer cinema produced between 2003 and 2019.20 These three
..
..
UK DVD distributor Palisades
..
..
Tartan produced a label called
..
.. collectively have generated the mise-en-scene of the South Korean serial
..
‘Asian extreme’, which itself ..
.. killer film, which consists of rainy tableaux, sleepy rural towns,
became a genre of sorts. Saw ..
..
was released in South Korea on ...
.. labyrinthine neighbourhoods, hammers and knives, baseball caps and,
10 March 2005. See ‘Yeonglihan ..
seurillreo ssou isaek geimeuro
..
..
..
most importantly, tiled bathrooms.
hwajae!’ (‘Clever thriller Saw, hot
..
.. Beginning with the psychosis of Ji Yeong-min and carrying over into
..
topic through its unusual game!’) ..
.. New Korean Cinema and its resistance to US domination, the bathroom
Interpark, 16 February 2005, ..
<http://movie.interpark.com/
..
.. leads us to the broader international and historical context of The Chaser.
..
Community/Movie/Paper/
..
.. This is brilliantly laid out in Oldboy in a split-scene sequence that details
..
PaperView.asp?No¼172&Page¼ ..
.. the 15 years of Korean history that have been missed by protagonist Oh
1&Flag¼MT> accessed
Daesu (Choi Min-sik), including the 2002 Japan–Korea World Cup, the
..
..
1 December 2020. ..
...
2000 Intra-Korean summit, and the promises and dashed hopes of the

19 Jinhee Choi, The South Korean ..
..
Film Renaissance: Local ..
.. Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun presidencies. Perhaps most
Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs ..
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
..
.. importantly, it is the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis that marks this
..
University Press, 2010), p. 34.
..
.. period, along with South Korea’s encounter with the USA through its
..
20 Orora gongju/Princess Aurora ..
.. dealings with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Six years before
(Bang Eun-jin, 2005), Our Town, ..
Gamyeon/Rainbow Eyes (Yang
..
.. the release of Memories of Murder, the financial crisis revealed Korean
..
Yun-ho, 2007), Teukjong:
..
.. nationhood to be ‘extremely vulnerable’, a vulnerability defined by a
shameful US$57 billion bailout from the IMF.21 The role that the IMF
..
Ryangchesaringi/The Exclusive: ..
..
Beat the Devil’s Tattoo (Roh
Deok, 2015), Sarinjaui gieokbeop/
...
..
..
played was so great that the crisis came to be known domestically as the
Memoir of a Murderer (Won
..
..
..
‘IMF crisis’ (Aiemepeu satae). The IMF attached a number of conditions
shin-yun, 2017) and Akinjeon/The ..
.. to the rescue package, requiring South Korea to aggressively reorganize
Gangster, the Cop, the Devil (Lee ..
Won-tae, 2019) are indebted to
..
.. its corporate structure and implement a number of liberalization policies
..
Memories of Murder. In addition
..
.. that would open the economy to foreign investment. Miraculously the
..
to Memories of Murder, Siljong/ ..
.. country was able to pay back the IMF by 2001.
Missing (Kim Sung-hong, 2009) ..
borrows from Oldboy; Neol
..
.. It is no coincidence that Memories of Murder and The Chaser both
..
gidarimyeo/Missing You (Mo
..
.. appear when they do, well into the era of New Korean Cinema, nor that
Korean cinema explodes when it does. It is well documented how the
..
Hong-jin, 2016) from Park’s ..
Boksuneun naui geot/Sympathy ...
for Mr Vengeance (2002); and
..
..
..
state facilitated the growth of Korean film, beginning with the Kim
Naega sarinbeomida/Confession
..
.. Young-sam presidency’s recognition of cinema’s potential as a viable
international commodity.22 On the back of government support, and
..
of Murder (Jeong Byeong-gil, ..
..
2012) from his Chinjeolhan ..
geumjassi/Lady Vengeance
..
.. aided by the devaluation of the South Korean won, rising costs for the
..
(2005). Blind (Ahn Sang-hoon,
..
.. import and distribution of US films, and the emergence of new talent,
Korean cinema saw monumental growth in the 1990s.23 The post-IMF
..
2011), Iutsaram/The Neighbor ..
..
(Kim Hwee, 2012), Manhole (Shin ..
Jae-young, 2014), Geunomida/
..
.. restructuring advanced cinema further, with the Korean government
disinvesting from the chaebeol conglomerates and aggressively investing
..
Fatal Intuition (Yun Jun-hyeong.
..
...
2015), Haebing/Bluebeard (Lee ..
.. in its culture industries, most notably cinema, telecommunications and
Soo-yeon, 2017) and Dark Figure ..
of Crime all reference Memories
..
..
..
new media, and music.
of Murder and The Chaser.
..
.. The broader context of The Chaser’s success and its competition with
..
Yongseoneun eopda/No Mercy ..
.. Saw should therefore be understood as part of an incredibly complicated
(Kim Hyeong-jun, 2010), Akmareul ..
bwatda/I Saw the Devil (Kim Jee-
..
.. entanglement between debtor and creditor, whereby the debt to the IMF
..
woon, 2010), Shimyaui epeuem/
..
.. made a challenge to Hollywood hegemony possible, with the US
..
Midnight FM (Kim Sang-man, ..
.. government in turn trying to renegotiate the terms of importing films
2010), The Five (Jeong Yeon-shik,
during the explosive Free Trade Agreement talks of 2006 and 2007. And
..
..
2013), Sarinuiroe/The Deal (Son ...
Yong-ho, 2015), Ordinary Person,
..
..
..
while the culture industries of Korea may have flourished, the same
VIP and The Witness all ..
.. could not be said for everyone. In the years following the crisis, the
reference Memories of Murder, ..
Oldboy and The Chaser.
..
.. country saw massive numbers of redundancies, the devastation of the
trade unions, and extensive corporate deregulation.24 Indeed this knot
..
..
21 Because the IMF bailout ..
..
agreement was signed on ..
.. was so intimately tied that Joseph Jonghyun Jeon terms the period of
2 December 1997, political ..
.. Korean film between 1998 and 2008 as ‘Korea’s IMF Cinema’, to
scientist Chung-in Moon notes ...
.. describe how it emerged in a period of incredible tumult, especially in
that 2 December is considered to ..
be a national day of shame,
..
..
..
relation to the neoliberal turn towards financialization and the spectre of
second only to 29 August, which
..
.. US hegemony. Not only does The Chaser fall into Korea’s category of
..
marks the day in 1910 when ..
.. IMF Cinema, but Memories of Murder is the subject of Jeon’s first case
Korea was annexed by Japan. ..
See ‘In the shadow of broken
..
.. study.
..
cheers: the dynamics of
..
.. South Korea was a paradigmatic risk society during this period, as
..
globalization in South Korea’, in ..
.. both economist Chang Kyung-sup and anthropologist Nancy Abelmann
Aseem Prakash and Jeffrey A.
note how ‘collapse’ was a keyword, emblematized in the infamous
..
..
Hart (eds), Responding to ..
...
Seongsu bridge collapse in 1994 that killed 32 people, the Sampoong

Globalisation (New York, NY: ..
..
Routledge, 2000), p. 86. ..
.. Department store collapse in 1995 that killed 502 people, the record
22 See Choi, The South Korean Film
number of car accidents, and of course the IMF crisis.25 Such incidents
..
..
Renaissance, p. 17; Paquet, New
..
..
Korean Cinema, p. 72.
..
.. were the tragic result of an attitude that sought ‘progress at any cost’,
..
23 See Paquet, New Korean Cinema, ..
.. with construction and urban development executed under criminally
p. 63.
negligent conditions.26 Infamous for already having the highest suicide
..
..
24 See Steven Denney, ‘Number of ..
..
irregular workers continue to rise
..
.. rate in the world, that number grew exponentially during the IMF crisis;
even more pointedly, violent crime also exploded during this period.
..
in South Korea’, The Diplomat, ..
..
10 November 2015, <https://
thediplomat.com/2015/11/
...
.. To this can be added the psychic toll. As Jeon notes, this period was
not only an economic catastrophe but an ideological one.27 The turn of
..
..
number-of-irregular-workers- ..
..
continue-to-rise-in-south-korea/ ..
.. the century was an immensely precarious time for South Koreans, where
>; S. Nathan Park, ‘South ..
Korea’s labor market reform
..
.. national identity based on the astonishing amount of economic progress
..
struggles’, The Wall Street
..
.. made after the Korean War was all but crushed. The nation’s self-
..
Journal, 15 February 2015, ..
.. determination was fundamentally challenged as Korea became beholden
<https://blogs.wsj.com/ ..
korearealtime/2015/02/25/south-
..
.. to a foreign power, which is why sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theorization
of risk society has resonated with the country since the 1990s.28
..
koreas-labor-market-reform-
..
..
According to Beck, the elevated risk of injury, fatality or psychological
..
struggles/>; Velisarios Kattioulas ..
...
and International Herald Tribune,
‘South Korea, in slowdown,
..
.. trauma is an inherent feature of western modernity that is ideologically
concealed under the auspices of scientific and technological efficacy.29
..
..
embraces deregulation’, The New ..
..
York Times, 20 April 1997, ..
.. Criminal psychologist Soo-jung Lee describes how Korea grappled with
<http://www.nytimes.com/1997/ ..
04/30/news/south-korea-in-
..
.. the historical origins of its circumstances, with many believing that the
..
slowdown-embraces-
..
.. lack of infrastructural support for the economically vulnerable, initiated
..
deregulation.html> all accessed ..
.. during Kim Young-sam’s segyehwa (globalization) policy and continued
1 December 2020. ..
25 Kyung-Sup Chang, ‘Compressed
..
.. in further moves towards neoliberalization, was a factor in the rise of
crime (including serial killing) around the turn of the century.30 Jeong
..
modernity and its discontents:
..
...
South Korean society in ..
.. Nam-gyu was someone who maintained such a belief: upon his arrest he
transition’, Economy and Society,
..
vol. 28, no. 1 (1999), p. 31; Nancy
..
.. stated that ‘This tragedy would not have happened if the government and
society had helped me’.31 It should also be noted that Jeong’s killings
..
..
Abelmann, The Melodrama of ..
..
Mobility: Women, Talk and Class ..
.. were focused on working-class areas only because of the prevalence of
in Contemporary South Korea ..
(Honolulu, HI: University of
..
.. closed-circuit television in wealthier neighbourhoods, and that Yoo and
..
Hawai’i Press, 1993), p. 6.
..
.. Kang Ho-sun both targeted sex workers, forced to live precariously due
to the illegality of their work.32
..
26 Chang, ‘Compressed modernity ..
..
and its discontents’, p. 49. The
Remarkably, then, the nation’s shock was accompanied by a self-
..
..
2014 sinking of the MV Sewol ...
could also be seen in this way.
..
.. aware sense of resignation, an acceptance that such horrible incidents
were simply the consequence of years of unbridled development.33 The
..
27 Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, ‘Residual ..
..
selves: trauma and forgetting in
..
..
.. period between 1997 and 2003 was thus the moment when the long-
Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy’, ..
Positions: East Asia Cultures
..
.. deferred trauma of industrial modernity was finally confronted. In
..
Critique, vol. 17, no. 3 (2009), ..
.. considering the incredibly rapid economic growth of South Korea, Chang
p. 720. ..
.. develops the theory of ‘compressed modernity’, detailing the particularity
28 Beck was influential in South
...
..
..
of the country’s unprecedented rate of industrialization. For Chang, the
Korea to the extent that he ..
unforeseen problems that arise out of this process are of crucial
..
visited the country in 2008 and ..
2014, and a memorial service
..
.. importance. The IMF crisis epitomized compressed modernity, forcing
..
was held in Seoul following his
..
.. Koreans to confront the possibility that in the furious adaptation of liberal
..
death in 2015. See Ji-young .. democratic capitalism, they had also built ‘a highly collapse-prone
..
Sohn, ‘Traditional memorial
economic, political and social system’.34
..
..
service to honor Ulrich Beck in ..
..
Seoul’, The Korea Herald, ..
.. Considered in this light, it is clear how the horrible brutality that takes
12 March 2015, <http://www. place in the bathrooms of The Chaser and Our Town connects not only to
..
..
..
koreaherald.com/view.php?ud¼ ...
Saw but also to Oldboy and to Bakhasatang/Peppermint Candy (Lee

20150312000781> accessed
..
..
1 December 2020. See Sang-Jin
..
.. Chang-dong, 1999), two earlier films that were crucial to the
establishment of contemporary Korean cinema.35 In Oldboy the ‘cell’ in
..
Han, Beyond Risk Society: Ulrich ..
..
Beck and the Korean Debate ..
(Seoul: Seoul National University
..
.. which Daesu is imprisoned for 15 years features an attached tiled
..
Press, 2017) for a detailed
..
.. bathroom, as does the police station’s interrogation room in Peppermint
account of Beck’s dialogue with
..
..
.. Candy. In subjecting a student activist to water torture in that bathroom,
South Korean scholars. ..
29 Chang, ‘Compressed modernity
..
.. the fictional Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu) is effectively being portrayed by
the film as a participant in the historical trauma of Korean autocracy,
..
and its discontents’, p. 47. ..
..
30 See Lee, ‘Serial killings grip south ...
.. specifically the regimes of Chun Doo-hwan (1979 to 1988) and Park
Korea’. ..
31 ‘Unrepentant serial killer gets
..
..
..
Chung-hee (1963 to 1979). In doing so, The Chaser not only invokes the
death’, The Chosunilbo,
..
..
..
torture porn of US genre cinema but also establishes a critical link to
21 September 2006, <http:// ..
.. torture under the Korean military dictatorship. The film further develops
english.chosun.com/site/data/ ..
html_dir/2006/09/21/
..
.. the connection made by Memories of Murder between serial killing and
..
2006092161030.html> accessed
..
.. state violence, where the police under Chun Doo-hwan torture suspects
..
1 December 2020. ..
.. into confessing to murders they did not commit. Nine years after The
32 See Kwon, ‘Serial murderer kills ..
himself in jail’.
..
.. Chaser, Ordinary Person, loosely based on the Kim Dae-doo murders,
ties all of these threads together by having Chun Doo-hwan’s police do
..
33 See Chang, ‘Compressed
..
...
modernity and its discontents’, ..
.. the same, but this time in a tiled bathroom (figure 5).
p. 31; Abelmann, The Melodrama ..
of Mobility, p. 6.
..
.. The broader question of self-determination that haunts these films is
..
..
.. the horrible violence that undergirds Korean modernity, from the
..
and its discontents’, p. 31. ..
.. brutality administered by men like Yong-ho, to the collapse that follows
35 In addition, both Sympathy for Mr ..
Vengeance and Memories of
..
.. out-of-control development. Inheriting the belligerency of the state from
..
Murder feature tiled autopsy
..
.. Yong-ho 20 years after the democratic election of Kim Young-sam and
..
rooms where the aftermath of ..
.. nine years after the IMF crisis, Jung-ho’s is a form of ‘sovereign
terrible violence is confronted.
violence’, as theorized by Steve Choe, or a desire to gain mastery over
..
..
Memories of Murder also ...
includes a small tiled bathroom
..
..
..
selfhood in the increasingly groundless conditions of neoliberal
like the one in Oldboy. ..
..
..
globalization. As Choe asserts, ‘the quest towards sovereign subjectivity,
..
.. of becoming an untroubled human agent, is inextricably linked to the
..
..
.. complicated development of modernity in twentieth and twenty-first-
century Korea’.36
..
36 Steve Choe, Sovereign Violence: ..
..
Ethics and South Korean Cinema
..
..
.. I contend that this reflexivity towards compressed modernity is central
in the New Millennium ..
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam
..
.. to South Korean serial killer cinema. But the catch is that the discourse
on serial murder in South Korea comes to markedly different conclusions
..
University Press, 2016), p. 18. ..
...
..
..
..
regarding the killer and his historical conditions. Following Memories of
..
..
..
Murder, which in turn built on earlier films such as Tell Me Something
..
.. (Chang Yoon-hyun, 1999) and Gonggonguijeok/Public Enemy (Kang
..
..
.. Woo-suk, 2002), The Chaser participated in establishing not only South
..
..
.. Korean serial killer cinema, but the Korean serial killer himself. As
..
.. previously mentioned, the Korean media commented on the symbiotic
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...

..
..
..
..
..
Fig. 5. The bathroom tiling ..
..
..
reappears in Botong saram/ ..
..
Ordinary Person (Kim Bong-han, ..
..
..
2017). ..
..
..
..
..
..
.. relationship between cinema and actuality, calling both Yoo
..
..
...
Young-chul and Jeong Nam-gyu ‘Seoul’s version of Memories of
..
..
..
Murder’ while talking about Yoo’s collection of films, including Public
37 Pyo, Hangukui yeonswaesarin,
..
..
..
Enemy.37 In contrast to the Korean media, Mark Seltzer offers a more
pp. 355, 376, and ‘Suspect in ..
.. nuanced account regarding the relationship between media and serial
serial killing caught’, The ..
Chosunilbo, 18 July 2004,
..
..
..
killers:
..
<http://english.chosun.com/site/
The designation of the serial killer as a type of person has had we have
..
..
data/html_dir/2004/07/18/ ..
noted, a sort of switchback or looping effect: public knowledge about
..
2004071861017.html> accessed ..
..
1 December 2020. Fascinatingly,
kinds of people has a way of interacting with the people who are
..
..
Yoo has taken on a second life in ..
known about and how these people conceive of themselves. Serial-
..
English-language internet
..
...
discussions as the so-called ..
.. killer, virtual-reality profiles come to life and copy-catting as motive
‘Raincoat Killer’, most likely due
..
..
.. are fictional versions of the ‘technical definition’ of the serial killer
to a combination of the yellow
lifting itself up by its own bootstraps.38
..
..
raincoat he wore when he was ..
..
taken to murder sites by the ..
police, a reference to Public
..
..
..
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of the modern conceptualization
Enemy and its killer who murders
..
.. of the criminal since the 17th century, Seltzer observes a similar process:
..
in a raincoat, and a post on ..
By the turn of the century, serial killing has become something to
..
Reddit by u/whalebaboon, ‘The ..
..
man in the yellow raincoat’,
do (a lifestyle, or career, or calling) and the serial killer has
..
..
10 November 2013, <https:// ...
www.reddit.com/r/LetsNotMeet/
..
.. become something to be (a species of person). The serial killer
..
comments/1qaaig/the_man_in_ ..
.. becomes a type of person, a body, a case history, a childhood,
the_yellow_raincoat/> accessed
an alien life form.39
..
..
..
1 December 2020. ..
..
38 Seltzer, Serial Killers, p. 15. ..
In other words, Lee Chun-jae and Yoo Young-chul were made serial
..
39 Ibid., p. 4. ..
..
..
..
killers not just by their actions but also by the Korean media. In addition
..
.. to playing key roles in that process, Memories of Murder and The Chaser
..
..
.. illustrate how the production of the South Korean serial killer was a
..
...
..
fundamentally historiographical effort. For one thing, Memories of
..
..
..
Murder was widely responsible for the notion that Lee was the first serial
..
..
..
killer in Korean history. Yoo, on the other hand, was already the most
..
..
..
notorious killer upon his capture (and remains so to this day), a status
..
..
..
reinforced by the success of The Chaser. Although Lee Chun-jae was not
..
..
..
the first to commit serial murder in South Korea, I am less interested in
...
..
..
‘correcting’ the chronology. Instead I would like to discuss what appears
..
..
..
to be an investment in that order, an interest that reveals the
..
.. epistemological and historiographical dimensions to tracking serial
murder in the country.40 In turn, the orientation towards the study of
..
40 For example, a 2004 Chosunilbo
..
..
..
article contends that Kim Dae- .. serial murder brings us back into the orbit of Korean modernity and
..
doo is the nation’s first serial ..
killer: ‘“Yeonswaesarinsageonilji”
..
.. global economy.
..
1975-nyeon Kim Dae-doo sageoni ..
.. In 2014 Pyo Chang-won, currently a politician but a forensic
weonjogyeok’ (‘“Serial murder criminologist at the time, published his book Hangukui yeonswaesarin,
..
..
..
diary” the 1975 Kim Dae-doo ...
or The Serial Murders of Korea, whose subtitle promises a ‘criminal

case is the original’), Chosunilbo, ..
..
18 July 2004, <http://m.chosun.
..
..
..
investigation and psychological analysis of the most notorious killers’.
com/svc/article.html?sname¼ ..
Positioned as an authoritative account of the subject, the book offers a
..
news&contid¼2004071870093> ..
accessed 1 December 2020. See
..
.. great deal of insight into attitudes towards serial murder. In the
..
also Pyo, Hangukui ..
.. introduction, ‘Yeonswaesarineun sahoejeok nanchibyeongida’ (‘Serial
yeonswaesarin, p. 65.
..
..
.. murder is the incurable disease of a society’), Pyo indulges in and
..
..
.. acknowledges national body metaphors while casting doubt on the
connection between serial murder and economy: ‘There are those who
..
..
..
...
..
..
argue that serial murder is a somewhat inescapable phenomenon that
..
.. appears alongside economic growth, or an “advanced nation disease”. I
wonder if that is actually the case.’41 But as I discuss later, Pyo refutes his
..
..
..
..
p. 12. ..
.. own argument, unable to avoid the fact that serial killing must be
..
..
.. discussed in terms of global economy.
..
..
.. In Korea that national body metaphor of seonjingukbyeong, or
..
..
.. ‘advanced nation disease’, is often considered in relation to public
health;42 but as Pyo suggests, it deserves a far more wide-ranging
..
42 See, for example, K. S. Lee and J. ..
..
H. Park, ‘Burden of disease in
discussion. Alongside the tension between capitalist liberalism and
..
..
Korea during 2000–10’, Journal ...
of Public Health, vol. 36, no. 2
..
..
..
Confucianism, Korea shares advanced nation disease with its neighbour
(2013), pp. 225–34; Dae-ik Kwon,
..
.. Japan. Historian Edward R. Beauchamp explains the idea of advanced
..
‘“Seonjingukbyeong” Atopiseong ..
.. nation disease in the Japanese context:
pibuyeom cheonsik gamsosero’ ..
..
(‘“Advanced nation diseases”
Others see the problems emerging in today’s Japan as nothing more
..
..
atopic dermatitis, asthma ..
decreasing’), Hangukilbo,
..
..
..
than what they call ‘advanced nation disease’ (senshinkoku-byo), in
5 January 2016, <http://www.
..
..
..
other words, the inevitable, if alarming, results of modern industrial
hankookilbo.com/m/v/ ..
.. society – increases in the rates of divorce, juvenile crime, school
951b8e376bde4100a52aa154a06f ..
adf0> accessed 1 December
...
.. violence and other social ills associated with countries like the United
States.43
..
2020. ..
..
43 Edward R. Beauchamp, ‘The ..
..
development of Japanese
..
.. By suggesting a critical link between serial murder and national location,
..
educational policy, 1945–1985’, .. South Korean serial killer discourse simply suggests that ‘advanced’
..
in Beauchamp (ed.), Windows on ..
Japanese Education (New York,
..
.. nations have ‘advanced’ difficulties. This attempts to offer a rational
..
NY: Greenwood Press, 1991) ..
.. explanation for a particular type of crime, but also suggests its
p. 45.
..
..
.. inevitability. The implication is that if a developing or undeveloped
nation aspires to capitalist modernity, then it must fully expect the
..
..
...
..
..
..
possibility of an outbreak of serial murder; it is seen as a teleology of
..
..
..
economic progress.
..
.. A trailer for Memories of Murder provides a further indication that
..
..
.. serial murder in South Korea is considered a matter of capital. The trailer
..
..
.. begins with scrolling text that outlines the details and statistics of the
..
..
...
..
..
Hwaseong serial murders. As the trailer shows scenes from the film,
..
..
..
subtitled lines of text fade in, one by one:
..
We didn’t know what serial murder meant.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
We assaulted so many people that weren’t the perpetrator.
..
..
.. We thought it would end quickly.
..
We even took a commemorative photograph, thinking that we had
..
44 ‘Yeonghwa sarinui chueok ..
..
Memories of Murder,
him.
..
..
2003 yegopyeon’ (‘Memories of ...

We ran all over the place, even though we had no skills.
..
Murder, 2003’), YouTube, posted ..
..
by ‘Yeonghwa yegopyeon 365’, ..
4 July 2015, <https://www.
..
..
..
We wanted to catch him so much it was driving us crazy.44
..
youtube.com/watch?v¼iEXKd-
The trailer efficiently condenses the function of the film, narrativizing the
..
..
RgE6s> accessed 1 December ..
Hwaseong serial murders while simultaneously depicting and excusing
..
2020. ..
..
45 Min-kyung Jung, ‘Cold cases ..
.. the historical ineptitude of the South Korean police force, the text
unfrozen’, The Korea Herald,
..
operating both as confession and apology. The personal pronoun ‘we’
..
..
26 May 2017, <http://www. ..
has no referent, and so stands in for the country, the police force and the
..
koreaherald.com/view.php?ud¼ ..
...
20170526000720> accessed .. fictional characters of the film. Written in the past tense by a subject in
..
1 December 2020. ..
46 The films include Princess Aurora,
..
.. the present (then 2003), the text gestures to an incompetence that stems
..
Our Town, Rainbow Eyes, ..
.. from ignorance and obliviousness at a particular point in time. What both
Missing, No Mercy, I Saw the the trailer and the film describe is how South Korea was still an
..
..
..
Devil, Midnight FM, Blind,
undeveloped nation in the late 1980s, subject to military dictatorship and
..
..
Confession of Murder, The ..
embodying an ethos of becoming a developed nation at any cost. For
..
Neighbor, The Five, Fatal ..
..
Intuition, The Deal, The Exclusive: ..
.. these reasons, amongst others, the country was unprepared to deal with
Beat the Devil’s Tattoo, Ordinary
..
such ‘sophisticated’ crime. In a 2017 article on cold cases that
..
..
Person, VIP, Memoir of a ..
prominently features the Hwaseong killings, Kwon Il-yong (credited in
..
Murderer, The Witness, Dark ...
..
Figure of Crime and The .. the piece as the nation’s first profiler), notes: ‘Cases like the Hwaseong
..
Gangster, The Cop, the Devil. ..
47 Bizarrely this is something that
..
.. serial killings went cold because of dated forensic technology’. He goes
on to describe how Kwon essentially cited compressed modernity as a
..
The Chaser borrows from real ..
..
life, as the absolute root cause: ‘The late 1980s and early 1990s were when a sharp shift in
..
..
..
incompetence of the Seoul
crime motivations occurred, as fast changes in society and the economy
..
..
Mobile Investigation Unit was a ..
left behind people at the margins of society, but the authorities failed to
..
central factor in the Yoo Young- ..
..
chul case. See Pyo, Hangukui adapt to the times’.45
..
..
yeonswaesarin, pp. 338–94.
..
The vast majority of Korean serial killer films, including Memories of
..
48 Statutes of limitations are plot ...
Murder and The Chaser, take up this failure of the police.46 In The
..
devices in Midnight FM,
..
..
..
Confession of Murder, The Deal, ..
.. Chaser, the police’s bumbling makes it necessary for an unofficial
The Exclusive: Beat the Devil’s ..
Tattoo, Memoir of a Murderer
..
.. lawman/criminal to find and apprehend the killer. Publicity for the film
emphasized this dimension, with the tagline proclaiming, ‘The most
..
and The Gangster, the Cop, the ..
..
Devil. notorious killer to shake the Republic of Korea: the one to catch him was
..
..
..
49 The Neighbor, Memoir of a
neither a police officer nor a district attorney’.47 On one hand, the fact
..
..
Murderer and Dark Figure of ..
that Lee Chun-jae was at large for so long emphasizes a yearning for
..
Crime all feature serial killers ..
..
who ridicule the criminal justice economic and technological development, for western criminal science
..
...
system and take advantage of ..
the moratorium enacted by Kim
..
.. and a properly functioning justice system where inconvenient
..
Dae-jun in 1998. See Sangmin
..
.. technicalities such as statutes of limitations do not allow criminals to go
unpunished.48 On the other, a broader conservative discussion of justice
..
Bae, ‘South Korea’s de facto ..
..
abolition of the death penalty’,
converges on the fact that Yoo Young-chul, while sentenced to death in
..
..
Pacific Affairs, vol. 82, no. 3 ..
2004, still sits on death row.49 South Korean serial killer cinema is
..
(2009). ..
..
..
...
..
..
haunted by the image of an impotent state and an ambivalent country,
..
..
..
unable to punish the criminal but wary of the legacy of fascism in the
..
.. country.
..
..
.. Memories of Murder and The Chaser thus set up the task for
..
..
.. South Korea in the 21st century. Even though Yoo was caught, it
..
..
.. was no thanks to the country’s firm juridico-legal infrastructure, and
..
..
.. the films contend that more needs to be done to ensure such
perpetrators are brought more swiftly to justice. Despite its radical
..
..
..
...
transformation from third-world country to leading global economy,

..
..
..
..
..
and in spite of the traumatic collapse of the 1990s, these texts
..
.. suggest that the serial murderer reflects how development is too slow
..
..
.. in South Korea. As the first notable case of serial murder, the
..
..
.. Hwaseong killings mark the starting point of an observable period of
..
..
.. lagging economic expansion. As The Chaser would do in 2008,
..
..
.. Memories of Murder mounts a simultaneous lament and excuse for
the fact that Lee was able to act with impunity. That the case
..
..
..
...
..
..
remained unsolved for decades, past the statute of limitations in
..
..
..
2006 (which also meant that Lee could not then or even now be
..
.. prosecuted), becomes excusable if neither the police force nor the
..
..
.. country ‘knew what serial murder is’. The elusive, anonymous,
..
..
.. Hwaseong killer becomes situated as South Korea’s originary serial
..
..
.. murderer, the one that got away, as it were. In the lineage of serial
..
..
.. murderers, Yoo then becomes the most infamous killer in the
..
..
.. country, a grotesque apex in another, concurrent graph of observable
‘progress’.
..
..
...
..
..
..
This is perhaps the most particular thing about Memories of Murder
..
.. and The Chaser: serial killer films always maintain a certain engagement
..
..
.. with temporality. Generally these films begin ‘mid career’, when there
..
..
.. has already been a killing; as a result, the pre-eminent threat becomes the
..
..
.. fact that he will kill again. The ontology of the seriality is what makes its
..
..
.. apprehension the film’s critical temporal task. As is the case with serial
..
..
.. killer films based on real events, both Memories of Murder and The
Chaser manipulate temporality for maximum dramatic effect. Even
..
..
...
..
..
..
though Lee Choon-jae and Yoo Young-chul are no longer active, for the
..
..
..
duration of Memories of Murder and The Chaser their respective serial
..
.. killers are at large, and thus there is a possibility that they will be
..
..
.. apprehended before they kill anyone else. But what separates these two
..
..
.. films from the majority of serial killer cinema is that Memories of
..
..
.. Murder is a period film that looks back to 1988 as if it were unfolding in
..
..
.. the present, but then jumps forward to 2003, the year of its release. Time
becomes increasingly muddled, which is also the case for The Chaser, a
..
..
...
..
..
..
2008 film that is ostensibly a period film in its historical representation
..
..
..
of 2003.
..
.. Richard Dyer identifies how serial murder is almost always associated
..
..
.. with modernity. More specifically he argues that the intense repetition of
..
..
.. life in capitalism produces an angst that links to the very seriality of serial
..
..
50 See Richard Dyer, Lethal
...
..
..
killing.50 The particular intense engagement with time in South Korean
Repetition: Serial Killing in ..
cinema, evident both narratively and formally, is mirrored in the
..
European Cinema (London: British ..
Film Institute, 2015), p. 10.
..
.. concentration of releases in the 2010s as well as the number of serial
killers active in the early 2000s, with none appearing in the last decade.51
..
51 A Hankyoreh editorial addresses
..
..
..
the drop-off of serial murder in .. This intensity of time in serial killer cinema and serial murder finds a
..
the 2010s in contrast to the spike ..
in the 2000s. Min-yeong Shin,
..
.. correlative in the particularity of the country itself, mapping effectively
..
‘2010 nyeon ihu yeonswaesarini ..
.. onto the experience of compressed modernity. A country that
eomneun iyu?’ (‘The reason there dialectically maintains both premodern and postmodern tendencies,
..
..
..
are no serial murders after ...
Korea simultaneously sees, as Chang notes, ‘accidents and hazards of the

2010?’), Hankyoreh, 11 December ..
..
2019, <http://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/
..
.. advanced industrial society-type, the undeveloped society-type and the
uniquely South Korean type’.52 In one country, then, we are able to
..
culture/culture_general/47968. ..
..
html> accessed 1 December ..
2020.
..
.. observe simultaneously the three stages of the ‘correct’ temporality of the
..
..
.. world picture, where nations are thought to be definitively either
..
and its discontents’, p. 47. .. advanced, developing or undeveloped. What Memories of Murder and
..
..
..
.. The Chaser participate in is the negotiation of not only serial murder but
of the intensified experience of compressed modernity, where time seems
..
..
..
...
..
..
out of joint.
..
..
..
South Korea, after all, went from being one of the world’s poorest
..
..
..
countries to joining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
..
.. Development (OECD) within one generation, a span of time represented
..
..
.. within Memories of Murder. In the same way that OECD membership
..
..
.. became a benchmark for just how far the country had come (just a year
..
..
.. before the IMF crisis), so too does the serial killer become a marker. In
..
..
.. addition to following serial killer cinema in setting out the ‘homework’
of the country, Pyo suggests as much at the beginning of Hangukui
..
..
...
..
..
..
yeonswaesarin:
..
The crimes of Yoo in which he murdered twenty innocent people
..
..
..
without any clear reason, left many shocked and confused. Our society
..
..
..
will have to move ahead, wearing the effects as if they were a scar for
..
..
..
..
..
..
a long time. Despite the flood of media reports, different analyses,
..
..
..
investigations, and court hearings following Yoo’s arrest, there are still
..
.. questions that must be answered, which is why the assignments that
Yoo left us will haunt us for a long, long time.53
..
53 Pyo, Hangukui yeonswaesarin, ...
..
p. 10. ..
Trauma and shame are not mutually opposed to pride.54 The scar that Pyo
..
54 See Jeffrey Kauffman, ‘On the
..
..
..
primacy of shame’, in Kauffman ..
speaks of is both a trace of a primal wound and a process of recovery,
..
(ed.), The Shame of Death, Grief ..
and Trauma (New York, NY:
..
.. and thus functions as a sign of survival, standing in for all three. The
..
Routledge, 2010), p. 17. ..
.. nation mourns the loss of life while simultaneously asserting that such
..
..
.. acts occur because the country has reached a certain point in its industrial
..
..
.. teleology. Both the perverse pride of the serial killer and the international
imagination are evident in a 2009 Korea Times report on a Life article
..
..
55 Rahn Kim, ‘Yoo Young-chul ...
included in world’s 31 serial
..
..
..
about the world’s serial killers. The headline reads: ‘Yoo Young-chul
killers’, The Korea Times,
..
.. included in world’s 31 serial killers’, and the article makes sure to note
that ‘Yoo was the only Asian’ to be included in the list.55 While it is
..
11 August 2009, <http://www. ..
..
koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/na ..
tion/2009/09/113_49958.html>
..
.. horrible that there was such a killer, for the Korea Times it is still worth
..
accessed 1 July 2019. ..
.. reporting that Yoo has been globally acknowledged.
..
..
...
..
..
In this essay I have examined the ways in which Memories of Murder
..
..
..
and The Chaser position Lee Chun-jae and Yoo Young-chul, standing in
..
.. for the 1980s/1990s and the mid 2000s, respectively, as two points on a
..
..
.. map of socio-economic progress in Korea. To be clear, I am not claiming
..
..
.. that The Chaser and Memories of Murder reflect the conditions of the
..
..
.. periods they depict, whether the 1980s, 1990s or the 2000s. Rather I am
..
..
.. suggesting that we can read shifting attitudes towards the history of
Korean modernity in South Korean serial killer cinema. The films’
..
..
..
...
portrayal of 30 years of Korean history and the contemporaneous

..
..
..
..
..
discourse on serial murder are both a lament for the country’s lagging
..
.. development and an endorsement of the impressive amount of progress
..
..
.. made. Pyo confesses to such an interpretation in the preface to Hangukui
..
..
.. yeonswaesarin, recalling the state of Korean criminal science in his
..
..
.. youth: ‘I remember clearly a moment when I was studying in the UK as a
..
..
.. poor international student, I became so jealous after seeing their
investigative process that I wept’. Reaffirming the privileged trauma of
..
..
..
...
..
..
the Hwaseong serial murders, he gravely enquires: ‘When will we have a
..
.. society and a police force that has the capacity to find the truth about
such unsolved serial murders as the South Gyeongi Serial Murders?’56
..
..
..
..
pp. 5–6. ..
.. Although Pyo is talking here about the UK and its supposedly superior
..
..
.. police technology, considering South Korea’s long entanglement with
..
..
.. eurocentrism it is safe to say that the UK stands in for the West. Similarly
..
..
.. Pyo is not only comparing the relative status of British and Korean law
..
..
.. enforcement, but also bemoaning the inadequacy of Korean society itself.
His critique thus aligns with Kim Young-sam’s global perspective and
..
..
...
..
..
..
his charge that Korean welfare needed to match that of North America
..
.. and Europe. But the progress that both Pyo and Kim believed to be
..
..
.. necessary can never be self-sufficient – in the same way that Yeong-
..
..
.. min’s sovereignty can only come at the expense of the feminine Other, so
..
..
.. too is Korean advancement only meaningful in relation to the UK, the
..
..
.. USA, and less-developed nations. In parallel to Pyo’s question,
..
..
.. Memories of Murder and The Chaser ask when the country will be able
to have a film industry that fends off American interlopers and perhaps
..
..
...
..
..
..
penetrates western cinemas.
..
..
..
This is especially the case with The Chaser, which understands
..
.. Yeong-min’s psychology in spatial terms and offers the killer’s psycho-
..
..
.. geography as the potential territory of national sovereignty.
..
..
.. Neoliberalism in this context becomes a mode of territorial conquest,
..
..
.. perhaps even a belated kind of colonialism in which Hollywood
..
..
.. hegemony is something to be countered and conquered. The telos that is
evident in Pyo’s question, The Chaser and Memories of Murder comes
..
..
...
..
..
..
down to that of the modern history of South Korea, where the nation
..
..
..
goes from being a third-world country, not sufficiently advanced, to
..
.. contracting advanced nation disease, all within living memory. That telos
..
..
.. maps onto the long-unsolved Hwaseong murders and ultimately onto the
..
..
.. jubilation at Lee Chun-jae’s capture. To return to Bong’s appearance at
..
.. the Beyond Film Festival, it is no surprise that there was such elation at
...
..
..
the historic Academy Award for his 2019 film Gisaengchung/Parasite:
..
..
..
the point at which the country finally caught its elusive serial killer
..
.. coincided with the moment when its film industry proved beyond doubt
..
..
.. that it belonged on the world stage.
..
..
.. A central sequence in The Chaser exhibits its indebtedness to
..
..
.. Memories of Murder while also hinting at what could be considered the
..
..
.. core of both films; it follows the moment when Jung-ho first catches
Yeong-min. Realizing that Jung-ho is on to him, Yeong-min abandons
..
..
..
...
his car and flees on foot, with the pimp giving chase through the

..
..
..
..
..
labyrinthine alleys of Mangwon-dong. One of the most exhilarating
..
.. sequences in Memories of Murder is also a night-time chase on foot
..
..
.. through a maze of streets, as the detectives track a prime suspect. The
..
..
.. two sequences are so similar that they could be edited together with little
..
..
.. friction, matching in action and sound in their breakneck pace of
..
..
.. movement and blistering percussion. Indeed the precedent set by
Memories of Murder is so critical to South Korean serial killer cinema
..
..
..
57 Those films include Rainbow
...
..
..
that some variation of it appears in no less than 16 other films.57
Eyes, No Mercy, I Saw the Devil, ..
.. Memories of Murder and The Chaser deviate in key ways, especially
Blind, Confession of Murder, The
politically;58 yet the fact that these sequences connect both these, and
..
..
Neighbor, The Five, Manhole, ..
..
Fatal Intuition, The Deal, The
..
.. most other, serial killer films underlines the significance of the chase.
..
Exclusive: Beat the Devil’s Tattoo, ..
.. Finally, and briefly, I want to revisit the aforementioned trailer to
Missing You, Ordinary Person, ..
VIP, The Witness and The
..
.. Memories of Murder, and wade into more speculative territory. I
..
Gangster, the Cop, the Devil. ..
.. rendered the line, ‘michidorok japgosipeotda’ as ‘We wanted to catch
58 See Joseph Jonghyun Jeon,
..
..
.. him so much it was driving us crazy’, but when translated in a more
‘Memories of memories:
literal fashion there is neither subject nor object; instead the line simply
..
..
historicity, nostalgia and archive ...
in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of
..
..
..
reads, ‘Maddeningly wanted to catch’. This statement speaks to Lee
Murder’, Cinema Journal, vol. 51, ..
Chun-jae, who had eluded both the filmic and the historical Korea, and
..
no. 1 (2011); Choe, Sovereign ..
Violence, pp. 166–82.
..
.. simultaneously alludes to that which escapes the clutches of the nation:
..
..
.. das Ding, that perpetuates the impression that Korea, like the detective, is
..
..
.. always one step behind in a race that never ends. I would like to propose
..
..
.. that what the country so maddeningly wanted to catch, in 1991, in 2003,
..
..
.. and even today, is the telos of capital. And yet in its lack of subject and
object, the chase becomes, unlike sovereignty, self-sustaining. In some
..
..
...
..
..
..
senses the chase is not about its target, but entirely about itself. Perhaps
..
..
..
that is what The Chaser teaches us. Whether it is the serial killer,
..
.. Hollywood hegemony or industrial modernity, it is not their elusiveness
..
..
.. that makes us mad – instead, regardless of its progress and/or failures,
..
..
.. madness is to be found in the chase itself.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..

If I Catch You Ill Kill You The Chaser

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