Editorials
[Butcher Block] ‘I Saw the Devil’ is a Grisly Take on Revenge
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
The lines between thrillers and horror blur all the time, perpetuating the debate about what does and doesn’t qualify as horror. David Fincher’s Se7en, for example, is technically a mystery crime thriller, but the graphic depictions of the killer’s victims go beyond the norm for standard thrillers. So much so that a strong argument can be made for the film venturing straight into horror territory. In many ways, I Saw the Devil takes the thriller concept and pushes it to extremes, well beyond the normal bounds of the genre.
Directed by Jee-woon Kim, who’d previously terrified audiences with A Tale of Two Sisters, I Saw the Devil opens with a woman stranded on the side of the road on a snowy night thanks to a flat tire. A bus driver, Jang Kyung-chul, stops and offers to fix her flat. Instead, he killers her, scatters her body parts, and resumes his job as if nothing was amiss. The woman’s fiancé, Kim Soo-hyun, happens to be a secret service agent of the National Intelligence Service and vows revenge. When most revenge thrillers of this ilk would opt for a tense cat and mouse chase that results in justice, I Saw the Devil only uses that as a starting point for something much bleaker.
In typical revenge stories, the confrontation between protagonist and serial killer comes at the end, after a harrowing journey that sees the body count pile up. Here, Soo-hyun finds Kyung-chul almost right away. Instead of following protocol and having Kyung-chul locked up, though, Soo-hyun plants a tracking device and lets him go. In this cat and mouse chase, the cat continuously lets his mouse go so he can toy with him again and again in increasingly brutal ways. Meaning, Soo-hyun shows up, tortures Kyung-chul is grisly fashion, and lets him go again so he can repeat the pattern. In theory, that sounds like justice- director Kim makes sure it’s clear just how monstrous the serial killer is as he rapes and dismembers his victims in great detail. But, as the title indicates, sometimes you go looking for the devil only to find him staring back at you in the mirror. Soo-hyun quickly becomes just as disturbed as morally reprehensible as the serial killer that he’s hunting.
And if you haven’t guessed by now, things get hyper-violent and bloody. Aside from dismemberment and multiple sexual assaults, heads are bashed in, a hammer is taken to someone’s face, car crashes are visceral, and above all a slow, excruciating severing of an Achille’s heel will make you wince. The violence escalates into an explosive finale, and no one comes out unscathed.
Between the bloodshed, viscera, and depictions of the most depraved humanity has to offer, I Saw the Devil becomes less and less like a thriller and more like a full-blown horror movie. Just one that’s grounded in realism. Cinema has often explored the corruptive nature of seeking revenge, many different ways and times before, but never quite as primal or as immoral as this. South Korea has cornered the market on twisted, ruthless revenge thrillers- please check out Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and The Chaser if you haven’t yet- but I Saw the Devil is among the goriest and most emotionally disturbing.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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