BEHIND THE SCENE2007
The first great creature
feature of the new
millennium,The Host
introduced a monstros-
ity spawned from the chemicals
befouling Seoul’s Han River. “I wanted
the creature to look very ill, as if it
was coming out of a poisoned river,”
explains Bong Joon Ho, the acclaimed
South Korean director who went on
to helmSnowpiercerandOkja.“The
image we were going for was a fish
with legs, and a disgusting mouth
resembling the appearance of a
flower.” In the film’s brilliant initial set
piece, the titular fish-legged flower-
mouth emerges from the Han to lay
siege to a crowd. Filming in broad
daylight on location at what Bong
describes as “one of the most famous
parts of the river” took eight or nine
days. It’s a stunning sequence, even
more impressive given the film’s mod-
est $10 million budget. The monster
was digitally added later, but because
Bong sought to use practical effects
as much as possible, the “creature”
was represented by a motorcycle,
a crew member named Kim Min-suk
wearing black spandex, and—for a
climactic big splash—an oil barrel
filled with cement. Bong recalls some
very confused onlookers. “A lot of
Korean people were watching, like,
‘What the f--- is going on here?’ ”
Pollution, that’s what!
THE HOST
MAKING A MONSTER
Director Bong Joon Ho reveals
how the creature devours Seoul.
By Darren FranichSong Kang-ho flees the beast
HOLLYWOOD’S GREATESTUNTOLD STORIES
Campfire-level firsthand
accounts of the supernatural.
Pass the s’mores!A new crop of scary pods will
scare your pants off01 Spooked A Murder
on Orchard
Street02Not much was off-limits on the supergraphic NBC series
(human cello, anyone?), but creatorBRYAN FULLER shares the one
plot point that was too gruesome to air.By Chancellor Agard2013
Illustration byTim McDonaghTHE ONE THING THEY COULDN’T DO ON
lure tabloid blogger Freddie Lounds
(Lara Jean Chorostecki) to a psychia-
trist’s office, where she would flip a light
switch, unwittingly activating a ceiling
fan that was attached to an incision in
the living doctor’s abdomen. “[It]
essentially disembowels him by spinning
the fan, all in one fell swoop,” says Fuller,
who suspects he was partially inspired
by how a would-be assassin meets his
maker, via a whip caught in a fan, in Indi-
ana Jones and the Temple of Doom. “That
was the only one where NBC was like,
‘I just don’t know how you’re going to do
it,’” says Fuller, but they weren’t the only
thing standing in the way of the seriously
twisted scene. “We would have pushed
back if we also hadn’t been told that
financially we didn’t know how we could
afford to produce such a gag, because
you have intestines swinging around a
ceiling fan,” he adds.
There’s still hope that the elaborate
setup will see the light of day. Says
Fuller, who currently works onAmeri-
can Gods, “It’ll probably end up in some-
thing.” We can’t wait.Inventiveness was
never a problem for Bryan
Fuller’s nightmarish psy-
chological thriller about
cannibalistic serial killer
Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen).
Working in conjunction with Joanna
Jamerson, NBC vice president of pro-
gram standards, the writers always
found new and increasingly macabre—
but safe for TV—methods of murder,
from constructing a totem pole out of
people to transforming victims into
winged angels. However, there was one
time their imaginations strayed a hair
too far for standards and practices.
In season 1’s “Rôti,” FBI profiler Will
Graham (Hugh Dancy) is tracking
escaped murderer Dr. Abel Gideon
(Eddie Izzard), who has started gifting
his former psychiatrists with Colombian
neckties, wherein he slits their throat
and pulls their tongue through the gash.
(Gross!) Somehow that was more
acceptable to the network than what was
initially proposed in the episode outline.
Originally the plan was for Gideon toPERTURBING PODCASTS
LAUREN
BEUKES
THE SHINING
GIRLSAUTHORBEUKES: ULRICH KNOBLAUCH