Chasing Down One of the Scariest Serial Killer Movies Ever Made
Last year, I wrote about Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, one of the scariest gothic ghost stories ever made. There is a direct link between Amenábar’s masterpiece and several antecedent touchstones of the genre, including Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. All three are masterworks. As of this writing, none of them are presently available to stream. If you don’t own one of their physical releases, you’re not watching them.
It’s a perennial conflict, one that has intensified in recent years. Streaming services have continued to inundate audiences with more and more new content. Not all of it lasts—is anyone really itching for a physical release of their live-action Death Note adaptation? Yet, for as much as audiences rag on streamers, they’ve been home to some pretty stellar original horror releases. While key series like Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House has been released, others such as his third (and arguably strongest) series Midnight Mass have not.
Flanagan himself has contended that, yes, streamers should release more physical copies. They’re not likely to ever do so. Their collective business model is predicated on new subscriptions. Keeping noteworthy titles behind a subscription paywall is one of the few incentives they have for new subs. If you want to watch His House, you need to subscribe. If you’re in the UK, the BBC Films and New Regency co-production has been removed.
Sure, some distributors like RLJ Entertainment have made it a point to make Shudder originals available physically, though writ large, we’re living in an age of legacy releases and boutique blu-rays. Save for a few key titles, the contemporaneous content audiences consume won’t be available to own. This shift away from physical media has similarly and retroactively rendered past titles nearly impossible to find. This past weekend, I was desperate to watch Na Hong-jin’s debut The Chaser, his Blue Dragon Film Award-winning masterpiece. While it’s available to stream, it’s only playing on both AMC+ and IFC Films Unlimited. I’m not subscribed to either.
So, naturally, I sought to hunt down a physical release, chasing The Chaser, some might say. The 2010 Blu-ray release is presently listed on eBay for upwards of $100. While I did snag a bare-bones DVD copy for close to $20, it was one of just five listed as being in stock. Months out, there’s no telling whether the title would be available. And, in the age of innumerable streaming services, it’s impossible to guarantee it would even be available to stream. Such is the ephemerality of media as content and subscription forces. Physical media isn’t just about ownership, but preservation. When content is rendered disposable, part of an algorithm for liking Movie B if you watched Movie A, the urgency to preserve it for posterity dissipates.
It’s especially a shame for titles like The Chaser, arguably one of the greatest serial killers movies of the century. Like Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, The Chaser is a South Korean melodrama (positive connotation) in its purest form. Na Hong-jin, best known in the west for The Wailing (my personal pick for the scariest movie ever made), found his roots in The Chaser. There is a clear thematic throughline between the two works, whether that be the unfurling of bureaucratic comedy for tragic violence, the blurred lines between good guy and bad guy, or the sheer terror swelling in urban praxis.
Kim Yoon-seok stars as Joong-ho, a former detective and present pimp with little patience. Two of his girls have recently gone missing after getting a large advance, and as he compels Seo Young-hee’s Kim Mi-jin to go to work despite her sickness, he simultaneously urges her to do a little reconnaissance. He suspects client Je Yeong-min (Ha Jung-woo) is trafficking his girls. Cruelly, he intends for Kim Mi-jin to meet with Je Yeong-min for confirmation. Yet, Je Yeong-min isn’t trafficking sex workers. He’s just a deranged serial killer.
Kim Mi-jin is incapacitated in Yeong-min’s barren, urban bathroom, and no one knows where she is. It’s a race against the clock to find her before she dies. And race they do. Apropos of the title, much of the action here is Joong-ho racing after various suspects in frenetic, visceral foot chases in Mangwon-dong, a neighborhood in Seoul. It follows closely in the lineage of South Korean procedurals with its infrequent yet startling depictions of violence, the contrast between cramped, dingy interiors and bright urban streets, and the sheer incompetence of the local police force. Interestingly, Joong-ho successfully apprehends Yeong-min in the first act. With the suspected killer in police custody, Joong-ho feverishly tries to track Mi-jin’s movements to find her. His guilt is compounded when he meets Eun-ji (Kim Yoo-jung), Mi-jin’s daughter.
The Chaser arrived at the end of the United States’ effort to render the serial killer psychodrama an ugly refraction of reality. Copycat, Taking Lives, and Murder by Numbers—among several others—endeavored to subvert filmic expectations. All of them have their merits—especially Copycat—though they never probe the psyche quite as well as their South Korean counterparts. Not only is Joong-ho a pimp—a hard sell for any protagonist—but he’s also not a superhero. He’s no John Wick.
Na Hong-jin adroitly captures the pure physicality and brutality of hand-to-hand combat. In the midst of a fight, the camera lingers on both participants. They hack up mucous and gasp for air. They steadily try to find their balance and get back on their feet. The ebbs and flows of knockout punches and recovery are a marvel, the closest the genre has ever come to depicting the physical constraints of fighting with another person. Characters slip in wet alleys. They pause to catch their breath and clutch their cramps.
The Chaser unfurls, and the early comedic beats grow increasingly grim. Not everyone will love the ending, realistic as it is, but as a calling card for one of the greatest genre directors working today, it’s as perfect as they come. Interestingly, too, The Chaser is allegedly based on the true story of Korean serial killer Yoo Young-Chul, a man said to have murdered 31 people over the course of two years before he was sentenced to death.
The Chaser is absolutely worth watching (and it would pair quite nicely with Midnight). It’s a shame, then, that it’s been so difficult to track down. There’s no telling what the future of film distribution is going to look like. Whether there will be some ricochet back to the days of easy physical availability or not remains to be seen, though in the intermittent period, it’s disheartening that the present landscape is poised to cache some genre classics. Chase down The Chaser if you can. And if you snag it, don’t ever let it go.
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