Director: Yong-min Lee
Release date: 1965
Contains spoilers
Also known as A Devilish Homicide, this Korean film owed a lot – I thought – to the Japanese story The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima and those films that flowed from it. Whilst contemporary, the cat spirit and the possession (or replacement) of a household member seemed replicated in this.
It starts with Lee Shi-mak (Lee Ye-chun) arriving at a building that seems, as he enters, oddly deserted. An odd-looking man spies on him entering the building. There was meant to be an art exhibition inside, a security guard tells him the exhibition has finished. However, he finds one portrait. It looks like – he says – Ae-ja (Do Kum-bong). We discover later that she was his first wife, now deceased. As he holds the portrait the canvas seems to melt.
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| the portrait |
He quickly leaves and gets a taxi driven by the strange man who was spying on him and is taken, against his will, to a house in the countryside. He enters but all the rooms are locked until he finds one open. He is approached by an artist, Park Joon-chul, who takes him inside and gives him the portrait and begs that he leaves. Unfortunately it turns midnight and the artist has him hide under the bed. He sees the feet of a woman and she stabs the artist and then floats out of the window. The dying artist tells him the portrait contains a secret and dies.
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| no reflection |
Shi-mak fears that he will be blamed for the murder… on cue a person (the taxi driver) starts rattling the door. Shi-mal climbs out of the window, using tied together curtains, but the man comes in. Suddenly he finds himself trapped, on the side of a building, with a guard dog below and the angry man above. He drops, fights the dog and escapes with the portrait but then finds the body of Ae-ja and takes it to his doctor friend who is perplexed as he had registered her death years before. We see that, in a mirror, her corpse does not appear and her blood, when drawn, is watery. When Shi-mak exits the room, she animates and kills the doctor.
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| biting the children |
He gets home and he and new wife Hye-sook are beset with strange occurrences. His eldest daughter is taken by Ae-ja, whose arm reaches through a window. The corporeal ghost attacks Shi-mak’s mother on her way home from temple, causing her to fall into a river and get drawn away but the mother than appears at their home. We see her compulsively licking the face of one of her sleeping grandchildren and later we see her suckling blood from the neck of one – giving us our vampiric moment.
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| reflecting as a cat |
The woman is actually a cat spirit and when Shi-mak vanquishes her (having seen her true form in a mirror and being given a magic ball, actually the third eye from a Buddha statue, by a housekeeper who appears to be a guardian angel) she turns into cat form. The film stalls when it goes into the backstory for an extended period but tells a story of deceit and murder as it is revealed that Hye-sook was maid to the family (and Ae-ja’s cousin) and was jealous so conspired with Shi-mak’s mother to frame the wife for an affair and then murdered her – relying on help from the artist and doctor. The cat actually ate the flesh from her corpses’ bones.
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| paw for a hand |
The cat does act vampirically and is the sort of cat spirit that does recur in some Japanese tales. The bad pacing aside (due to the third act being mostly backstory) this is quite good fun, with some lovely weirdness and a good atmosphere for the most part. There are some good moments in here and it is particularly recommended to fans of Japanese spirit cat movies who want to see what the Koreans could do with the idea. However, the overall film is probably worth 5 out of 10.
The imdb page is here.
On DVD @ Amazon UK
2 comments:
I'm reminded of Le Fanu's "Carmilla", in which Carmilla/Mircalla appears as a cat and the discovery of a tell-tale portrait reveals her true identity. Like Ae-ja, Mircalla also fed primarily on family members, no matter how distantly they were related.
Hey Khaia, thanks for stopping by. There is an overlap, definitely, though whether the filmmakers were aware of the La Fanu story I just don't know. I did mention Carmilla in the post I did for The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima and that didn't have the portrait element. Ar-ja is primarily preying on those involved in her death but some of those are family members and, of course, the children are also a target (the film never says who their mother was tbf).
Great observation :)
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