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.
