With the relatively recent onslaught of sexy vampires in films and television, these creatures of the night have lost all their dangerous and frightening edge. Robert Pattinson is far too debonair to seem threatening.
"Thirst," a film directed and written by Park Chan-wook, is a frightening film that delivers the creepiness and violence vampires portray best.
This 2009 South Korean flick stars Sang-hyeon (played by Kang-ho Song) as a priest whose greatest desire in life is to help people. He decides a way to do this would be to go participate in an experimental drug treatment for an epidemic that started in Africa.
This nasty virus, the Emmanuel Virus named after the doctor who discovered it, causes blisters to form around victims' hands, nose and mouth and spreads throughout the body's systems. Left to run its course, EV causes hemorrhage and death.
Sang-hyeon opts to test an inoculation, and he ends up contracting EV and dying. Mysteriously, just moments after being pronounced dead, Sang-hyeon comes back to life. Over time his skin heals, and people start revering him as a saint for his miraculous survival.
Many believers ask Sang-hyeon to pray for loved ones. One of these people is Lady Ra (played by Hae-suk Kim), the mother of his childhood acquaintance Kang-woo (played by Ha-kyun Shin). It is while doing this Sang-hyeon meets Kang-woo's wife Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim), a clearly unhappy and demented girl who was raised by Lady Ra.
Soon after visiting Lady Ra in her home, Sang-hyeon starts to experience troubling symptoms that make him suspect his EV is coming back. However, it turns out, he still has EV and has actually contracted vampirism, which suppresses the EV. He finds himself craving blood, and when he drinks it the EV blisters disappear.
Initially, he tries to commit suicide, but he cannot die. In most vampire films the story is one of self-loathing after being infected with vampirism, and the result is a vampire who doesn't want to get too involved with anyone in this world because he knows he cannot die, and he's dangerous.
Sang-hyeon, however, seems to be owning his vampirism. His attitude is one of incredulousness about why people have a problem with vampires in the first place – they're just like humans, only with different "biorhythms."
He finds he has a sort of super strength, the ability to jump great heights, and his cravings for sexual pleasure are as great as his craving for blood.
He and Tae-ju end up having an affair, and afterward he tells her about his "disease" of vampirism. She's obviously shaken, but they continue their affair and decide to turn Tae-ju into a vampire and kill Kang-woo so they can be together unimpeded.
The rest of the film details the guilt they face as a result of such a decision and the consequences of their violent actions.
What is unique about this film is that it is not your watered-down, high school vamp fantasy. "Thirst" is unnerving in a way that makes you question society's preoccupation with these mythic creatures. The characters are demented and odd, the lighting is dark and grimy, and there is a lot of blood.
Yes, it's sinister, unsettling and gory, but it is because of this that "Thirst" feels like what a vampire film should be.
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