Grand Guignol and littérature putride in contemporary Korean horror cinema: Park Chan-wook's cinematic translation of Zola's Thérèse Raquin

Abstract

ABSTRACTThere seems to be near-universal agreement that South Korean director Park Chan-wook's films are highly disturbing. For one, Park uses violence and extreme abjection in his films to critique contemporary Korean society and human behaviour more broadly. More interestingly, the critical voices surrounding Park as a film-maker in the contemporary ‘transnational’ cinematic landscape are strikingly similar to those that surrounded French Naturalist author Emile Zola. I explore the variety of ways in which Park's 2009 film Thirst plays with the horror genre as it adapts and builds upon Emile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin (TR). I also suggest that the literary environment surrounding Zola's creation of TR has much in common with the current cinematic environment in Korea. I argue finally that Zola and Park, as purveyors of art, share similar ‘instinctual tendencies’, and I analyse select scenes in Thirst to demonstrate how Park uses Zola's TR to create an entirely new cinematic hybrid form.