20 Horror Films Where Humans Are The Real Monsters

6. The Host (2006)

Bong Joon Ho has never been shy about blending different genres to serve not just his plots but the social and political themes that run through them. And his monster movie The Host manages to twist its genre 360 by giving us a scary yet sympathetic monster and a head-on critique of the United States Forces Korea, which many of Bong’s countrypeople have a shaky relationship with.

The film shows us a Seoul tarnished by US overreach and intervention, both in terms of boots on the ground and in the sewer monster they have accidentally cooked up. Gwoemul, the giant tadpole creature that is spawned as a result, terrorises the locals and sends Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) on a collision course with the authorities when his daughter Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung) is abducted by the monster.

Despite the hideousness of the creature and its apparent inability to be reasoned with, we nonetheless find ourselves sympathetic to its plight, especially when it is targeted by the USFK’s toxic Agent Yellow and is set on fire in the final act. Because the real villains here are the USFK, who treat chemicals, Koreans, and other lifeforms as inherently disposable, acting with the wanton carelessness that the globe has come to expect from US forces. They are all too quick to create disaster, invent hoaxes to cover their tracks, and attack (in this case, lobotomise!) those who don’t agree with them.