Class conflicts are a recurring theme in Bong Joon-ho’s films, which deftly traverse multiple genres to portray insights about economic disparities. One could describe Okja as a science fiction action drama and Snowpiercer as a post-apocalyptic dystopian action film. Likewise, in Parasite (2019), a comedic first half gives way to a dark thriller action film. It also strategically uses several elements of horror to transform its plot.
The film follows the story of the cash-strapped Kims, a family of four who work for the affluent Park family. The latter are unaware they have employed individuals from the same family for different roles in the house. The first half of the film depicts how the Kims successfully secure their positions through an elaborate plan. Ki-woo, the son, is the first to be employed as a tutor for the Park family’s daughter through a friend’s recommendation. Ki-woo identifies the need for an art tutor for the younger son in the Park family and recommends his sister, Ki-jung. Ki-woo and Ki-jung then hatch plans to get both the driver and Moon-gwang, the housekeeper fired so that their parents Ki-taek and Chung-sook can be hired.
What transpires in Parasite relies on Bong’s use of horror tropes to animate specific relationships between class and experience. There are three conventions of the horror genre, in particular, that the director works into the film, remodeling them to achieve a nuanced narrative about class precarity.
Check out the trailer for Parasite here:
Geography/Place
In conventional horror film storytelling, the upper class/suburban household becomes the center of risk. Its members are portrayed as vulnerable to the threat of the Other (ghosts, serial killers, vampires, zombies). Parasite strays away from the genre’s predecessors in this regard by setting up our identification with the Kim family rather than the Park family. While the film showcases the Parks’ concerns, its narrative strategy aligns us with the Kim family. This happens because we form our earliest identifications with the Kim family. The Park family and house are only introduced on screen 13 minutes (a coincidence?) into the film. We also leave the Park household several times to return to the Kims’ abode. While we could read the Kim family as threats to the order and security of the Park family, in routing us first through the Kim family, the object of security itself changes. Here lies a specific precarity in relation to their occupations. Within the Park home, we are all too aware that the Kim members are replaceable because they have each replaced someone else. They have become parts that serve a specific function that directs their labor towards the “wholeness” of the Park family.
Parasite also shares its screen time between two houses. We move between the sophisticated and symmetrically laid architecture of the Park home and the dilapidated and cramped semi-basement apartment where the Kim family lives. The Park home presents us with manicured lawns and tall walls that protect their privacy. On the other hand, we see that the Kim house lacks this upkeep and privacy. We watch as fumes waft into their home and a drunk bystander keeps urinating in front of their window. Both these attributes signal how the Kim house is more susceptible to threats from the outside. If the financially secure household stands in horror film as the site with something to lose, Parasite calls bluff on this notion of vulnerability by showing that those with less actually have much more to lose.
Even more, this financial precarity is tied to environmental precarity. Bong depicts this wealth gap through the architectural highs and lows within the city. The wealthy upper class lives on a higher altitude (large spaces owned by few) and as you move downhill through the city, the architecture of the landscape evolves into streets teeming with smaller houses and buildings (small spaces inhabited by many).
When the city floods, the layout of the land channels the flow of water and the dirt it carries downhill, moving from the rich to the poor neighborhoods. And here’s where identification works to sustain dread for the viewer. The night of the downpour, we do not rest at the Park residence. Instead, the lens keeps us close to the ground in a gym where the Kim family and hundreds of other displaced people take shelter for the night. There is no relief or restoration of normality for the viewer. The night’s events suggest that the effects of the ecosystem of the city, including the sloped roads which carry rainwater and dirt downhill, become the burden of those without the money to expel the toxic and polluting agents that all humans create.
The Ghost
A ghost lives at the Park residence. Oh Geun-sae, Moon-gwang’s husband, lives in their basement. The basement in the story comes with its own historical context. Earlier used as a bunker, alluding to South Korea’s violent past, this basement that the Parks don’t know about serves as an artificial tomb for Geun-sae. He lives in this space as if he had died. In Ghostly Matters, Avery F. Gordon argues that a ghost stands in as a “social figure” who indicates that “a haunting is taking place.”[i] For her, “to disappear is to exist in a world where dispossession and unreality rule,”[ii] which is exactly how Bong renders a ghostly quality to Geun-sae’s experiences. For most of the film, his absence is marked by his presence as a literal ghost who haunts the Park family’s youngest child, who believes he saw a ghost one night in the kitchen.
Gordon also posits “the postmodern, late-capitalist, postcolonial world represses and projects its ghosts or phantoms in similar intensities, if not entirely in the same forms, as the older world did.”[iii] Parasite’s ghost is precisely a ghost because of his financial precariousness. Geun-sae is in heavy debt because his cake shop business failed. He is on the run from loan sharks, and his existence has been reduced to social death; he has been secretly living in the basement for four years at the point we meet him onscreen.
The Abject
In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva refers to abjection as a psychic process in which we come to terms with what is culturally repressed within us. Objects of dread that threaten or disgust us are expelled from our bodies, private boundaries and borders of cultures. Sewage/feces and vomit feature several times in Kristeva’s list of specific objects of revulsion and disgust. Bong uses both of them in a sequence of shots. When the Kim family sans the mother return to find their apartment flooded, the camera follows Ki-jung as she wades into the bathroom where the toilet is spewing excrement into the air.
Seconds later, we see Moon-gwang throw up into the toilet in the Park basement, struggling to stay alive. And then back to a close up shot of the vomiting toilet from another angle. Both the scenes take place in basements. But what do we make of the proximity of this pair of shots of the abject? Contiguous and accessible to each other, these two shots locate subjects who are more precarious than others. Of the three families we follow in the film, it is only the Parks who remain unscathed by the harrowing inflections of a meteorological disaster and a bloody fight the same night. These objects of revulsion can be read as signaling their proximity to unsanitary environments and dangerous situations.
There’s another overt use of the abject at the Parks’ birthday party when Geun-sae slashes a man who is trying to tackle him with a knife, and his blood splashes across the nearby tables. At this point, we are presented with a close-up of a plate of bread splattered with blood. A minute later, Chung-sook stabs Geun-sae with a barbecue skewer in order to save herself.
In these shots, the two registers of food, blood and flesh combine to represent the abject and evoke disgust by meddling with the human-animal distinction. Oh Geun-sae as “ghost” becomes a symbolic representation of those who persist as abject and are scapegoated in this economic system. The blood he sheds before he dies implicates everybody as it lingers on the food and drinks set out for all those at the party.
In a cosmos ruled by capitalism, the ways in which wealth and labor interact become a matter of haunting. Bong’s path of storytelling highlights the unequal and unjust experiences that accompany one’s possession of wealth or lack thereof. The film does so by moving away from the tendency to vanquish the evil in order that a kind of normalcy is achieved at the end. Throughout the film, the characters interact with the house, the built environment of the city, and the ghost to reveal an economic hierarchy that could be read as monstrous and alive. In renegotiating certain horror film conventions, Parasite reveals a cruel cosmos, rather than a just one in which normality is restored.
Parasite is available on Amazon:
NOTES
[i] Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 2011: 8
Alishya Almeida is pursuing an MA in English at Lehigh University. She’s interested in eco-horror, affect studies and increasingly horror poetry.
Check out our other articles on South Korean horror – on The Wailing and Train to Busan.
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