20 Years Later, Bong Joon-Ho Looks Back at His Sci-Fi Thriller Masterpiece: 'It Was a Very Tough Process'

Two decades ago, in a 2006 interview with a Korean newspaper, Bong Joon-ho made a surprising statement about his then-new horror movie, The Host. The director, who would go on to make Parasite, Snowpiercer, and Mickey 17, revealed that the mutated monster from The Host was based on an actual creature he'd spotted in Seoul’s Han River, 19 years earlier. "I don't know exactly what it was," Bong said at the time. "What is clear is that it was a living creature, and it wasn't human. Its size was probably similar to a monster from a movie." I came across this bizarre detail while doing research on The Host for an interview with Bong himself. (The film turns 20 this year and is celebrating with a 4K remaster and a return to theaters.) So when I get on a Zoom call with the director, it's one of the first things I ask about. "Attending high school comes with a lot of pressure," Bong tells Polygon. "So that's maybe what led to that kind of a delusion." OK, mystery solved. Bong Joon-ho didn't actually see a mutated river monster when he was in high school, but he did imagine one under the pressure of college-placement exams. (His youthful obsession with another famous monster might have contributed, too, but we'll get to that in a minute.) Read on as Bong answers six of our most pressing questions about The Host, while also teasing his upcoming animated feature, Ally, which shares a surprising connection with the 20-year-old monster movie. 1 What's different about this new 4K version of The Host? Image: Magnolia Pictures/Everett Collection Ahead of the interview, I received a digital copy of the remaster and watched a few of my favorite scenes. This new version of The Host looks amazing, especially the CGI used to create the film's iconic monster. I wondered if perhaps Bong and his team had done some touch-ups on the creature, especially since the original film had a famously small budget. But according to the director, no specific changes were made to the film. "Our overall goal in the restoration was to recreate that feeling of watching a 35-millimeter print, the highest quality print on the first day of release," Bong says. "Of course, it was a digital restoration, but that was our goal to use the digital restoration to create that film look of watching the film on a high quality print for the first time. There wasn't anything that we changed digitally." 2 So did Bong Joon-ho actually see a river monster in high school? Image: Magnolia Pictures/Everett Collection Again, the answer is no, but Bong's full response reveals even more about the early inspirations for what would eventually become The Host. "Attending a Korean high school comes with a lot of pressure," he says. “It's a very tough environment. So I must have been in a pretty fragile mental state back then, where I was having some sort of delusion." That said, Bong points to two other factors that might explain why he thought he saw a monster back then — and how we wound up with a movie like The Host in the first place. "What was not a delusion were two facts," he says. "The first fact is that the place that I was living in at the time, our apartment was near the Han River, and I would see the river every day. And the second fact is that I was very fond of the Loch Ness monster. I would try to seek out articles and photographs of the Loch Ness monster. And so those two things combined in my mind, the fact that I was seeing the Han River every day and I imagined what if a monster like the Loch Ness monster appeared in this river that is right in front of me." 3 Will he ever return to horror? Image: Magnolia Pictures/Everett Collection While plenty of Bong's movies have horror elements (Parasite has some moments of terrifying tension), he's never truly returned to the genre since making The Host. According to the director, that may change soon. "It's not a monster movie, but there are horror thriller ideas that I'm developing at the moment," he says. "My iPad is always filled with movie ideas, and there are five right now that are becoming more specific. And out of the five, two of them could be classified as horror." He also notes that while his next movie, Ally, definitely is not a horror film, the upcoming animated feature does have one thing in common with The Host. "I'm in the middle of the post-production of my new animation movie," Bong says. "It has many creatures, and one of the creatures really looks like a monster, but a very funny monster. He's quite the character." 4 How the American military (and American movies) inspired The Host Image: Magnolia Pictures/Everett Collection The inciting incident in The Host involves an American doctor ordering his Korean subordinate to pour a large amount of formaldehyde into a drain that dumps into the Han River, which leads to the creation of the mutated monster. This scene draws on a real incident that directly inspired Bong's movie. "The scene of the formaldehyde being dumped is based on an actual event, the McFarland Incident, that happened in 2000 in Korea," he says. "At the time, there were a lot of environmental groups that were protesting in Korea. That actually felt like the beginning of a horror film to me." The other direct inspiration for The Host's premise is pure fiction. Image: Everett Collection "Maybe you remember a movie called Alligator — a very interesting American monster movie from the 1980s," Bong says. "That movie has a similar beginning. There's a chemical experiment and they release a baby alligator into the sewers. That alligator later becomes this huge monster. That's a film that I was really fond of at the time." "Those two ideas combined and that led to the political satire and everything else that's shown in The Host." 5 Was Godzilla an influence? Image: Toho In previous interviews, Bong has pointed to his love for the Godzilla movies as a direct inspiration for The Host, but when I bring this up now, he deflects, pointing instead to two other fan-favorite monster movies. "I liked the Godzilla films when I was younger. I would see them on TV. And I was also fascinated by the characters that appeared with Godzilla, like Mothra. But Godzilla didn't directly influence The Host," Bong says. "The monsters are very different in size. I wanted a monster that wasn't destroying buildings, but was more realistic and could be found in real life — a monster that could possibly hide between buses." "At the time of making The Host, I was probably more influenced by Ridley Scott's Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing. So I was actually drawn to monsters that are smaller in size." 6 How Bong filmed The Host's epic final scene Image: Magnolia Pictures/Everett Collection The Host centers on the Park family, led by the lazy and buffoonish Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), who are struggling to get by even before the monster steals Gang-du's daughter and disappears. At the climax, the Parks reunite and face off against the beast in a thrilling sequence that ends in a hard-earned victory and an emotional family reunion. The ending more than holds up 20 years later, especially with this stunning remaster, but looking back now, the primary emotion Bong recalls from shooting that scene is embarrassment. "The problem was, it was at a real location, the riverbank," Bong says. “It was not a soundstage, like the Alien movies. A lot of people were there watching the very famous Korean stars doing something on the riverbank. But unfortunately, there was no monster on set, of course. So we were doing very strange things in the air. We were pretending that there was something there. Song Kang-ho was already a huge superstar in Korea at the time, and he was screaming and doing these crazy things and people were watching and wondering like, 'What the hell is he doing?'" Shooting that moment, we just felt embarrassed. "Shooting that moment, we just felt embarrassed. We were just hoping they would watch the film later with actual VFX. But that's the predominant emotion I remember from shooting that scene: embarrassment." When storyboarding the scene, Bong also had to be extremely sparing in his use of the monster due to the film's limited budget. "It was a very tough process because we had a super limited budget for VFX," he says. "If you actually rewatch it again and count the number of times the monster is actually shown in its entirety, it's actually not many shots. I could only use seven shots of the monster in this sequence." "Without the monster in the frame, I had to make the audience feel the existence and the scariness of the monster. I had to maintain the terror throughout the scene. I had to think about how am I gonna do that without actually showing the creature? And in the end, I believe that led me to be more creative." The Host returns to theaters on Nov. 20, 2026. Tickets are available now.