The 15 Most Disturbing South Korean Movies

Ever since Old Boy wowed audiences worldwide back in 2003, South Korean cinema has flexed its own reel muscles with distinctive and edgy films. Gruesome portrayals of reality? Check. Absurd plot twists? Definitely. Not giving a fuck about animal rights? Sure, why not?

Of course, stuffing all of South Korea's movies into one specific hole would be preposterous. Beyond violence and shock factors, there are many Korean flicks that exhibit more common portraits of life, but for a while, at least, it seems like we’ll be presented with more thrillers than romantic comedies.

Case in point: I Saw the Devil, which received a limited theater release last week. Directed by badass Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon (A Tale Of Two Sisters, The Good, the Bad, the Weird), I Saw The Devil deals with back-and-forth torture games, pitting a serial killer (Min-sik Choi) and an agent (Byung-hun Lee) whose fiancée was murdered by the slayer. It’s a bloody and intense experience that left us feeling uneasy and queasy, similar to many other Korean genre flicks.

With that said, broaden your horizons with our list of the 15 Most Disturbing South Korean Films. Allow us to share our traumatized joy.

To those Caucasian males with yellow fever, here’s a fact you might not know about your international student Korean girlfriend: Her nose, chin, and eyes were probably fixed by a plastic surgeon in Apgujeong, Seoul. Now, plastic surgery isn’t exclusive to Korea, and we’re certainly not saying all Korean females are obsessed with altering their looks. But admit it, Koreans; it’s clearly becoming a norm in your country.

Taking on the very subject as its basis, this remake of the 1970s horror flick Remodeled Beauty is very discomforting. Directed by Bong Man-dae, Cinderella is about a group of poor teenage girls who are pressured to look “pretty.” They eventually scrape each other’s face with scalpels, which sounds dumb, but it’s actually quite hardcore. Plus, the idea of an abandoned and faceless gal locked away isn't making our trips down to the laundry room any easier.

A doctor uses hypnosis to ease a sleep-deprived, female patient with big hair and a nice rack. While hypnotized, the world's most unprofessional doctor takes advantage of the woman, leading to repeated acts of adultery.

As time passes, the doctor’s obsession grows, but he also discovers a solid truth we should all remember: Getting involved with a crazy chick can cause headaches in massive proportions. Unfaithfulness leads to crazy antics, and we can’t emphasize how much this film illustrates that point.

This isn’t a thriller, horror, or art-house flick, nor torture porn. Breathless is, for all intents and purposes, a drama. But it’s a drama full of anger, ass-whupping, and an encyclopedic collection of every curse word in the Korean language.

Men, women, and children can’t avoid the fuming rage which steams out of thug/loan shark Sang-hoon (played by the film's director/producer, Yang Ik-joon). His violent escapades simmer down, however, when he encounters a girl with a troubled past and a truculent yap.

For those wondering, this isn’t a film where the two characters engage in bizarre underage sex; it's one that masterfully illustrates the lives of those less fortunate in Korea, and brings up the cyclical tendencies of brutality. Even without exaggerated killings or gory blood spills, though, the violence displayed is so unbearably raw that it’s hard to sit through the whole film without constantly cringing.

OK, so we have a 38-year-old sculptor and an 18-year-old student meeting in a motel to engage in hardcore sexual intercourse. We’ve all seen that, and there’s nothing too crazy about it, right? But wait, it’s not just fellatio and anal; it’s a sadomasochistic relationship, which involves brutal beatings and spankings.

Over the course of two hours, we’re shown more sex than you'd see in most porn flicks; interestingly enough, Lies was made in Korea only a few years after its censorship liberalization. Don't watch this with your significant other, unless she's into that sort of thing.

Part artsy and part exploitation, Never Belongs To Me is best classified as “weird.”

Check the premise: A woman gets raped by a tiger, and gives birth to a tiger-man who looks like Ron Pearlman and resides in a dumpster while preaching odd sexual philosophies. He (or it?) eventually reunites with his half-brother, Gun-tae, and they decide to pursue crime to bring happiness for their oppressed family. While doing so, they get entangled with a cyborg hooker and a psychotic doctor who inserts a penis gun on Gun-tae, which fires bullets instead of sperm.

Get all that? Now here’s the crazy part: This penis gun is only functional when he sees posters of ballet dancers, and Gun-tae goes backdoor on his enemy, and kills him by shooting bullets when he comes. Nothing else to say, man.

In Ahn Byeong-ki's Phone, a menacing cell phone reaches a journalist who just busted open a child prostitution ring. Instead of threatening calls from angry mobsters, her phone picks up transmissions from supernatural beings. All that’s kosher, until the daughter of the protagonist’s friend picks up the phone. Then, all hell breaks loose.

Making comparison to Japan’s The Ring won’t do no justice to this flick, as this possessed little girl develops all sorts of bizarre traits. If a depiction of an Electra complex—which leads to French-kissing her dad, trying to break her own neck, and wildly hissing like a feline—doesn’t knock your socks off, you must know some wild chicks.

Kim Jee-woon's psychological horror-show begins as two cute siblings, Soo-Mi and Soo-Yeon, return home after getting treated in a hospital. Right away, the elder sister assumes her stepmother is abusing her younger sibling.

The truth, however, has more to do with mental instability, which is conveyed through creeping dread, cameos from ghost kids, and a familiar plot twist that's handled quite well.

In 2009, American audiences ignored the stateside remake, The Uninvited, though it's not as bad as one would think. Compared to Jee-woon's terrifying original, though, it's a Disney Channel special.

Believe it or not, there are fanatical Christians who roam around the streets of Seoul, condemning non-believers as guaranteed candidates for Hell.

The main protagonist’s mother in Living Death is just that, a religious maniac. Her oldest daughter doesn’t see eye to eye with such obsession, but when her sister goes missing, she rushes back home from college. A series of supernatural murders greets her return. The cause? Her possessed sister.

Although we're well accustomed to horror films dealing with haunted children, director Lee Yong-ju's film tackles the genre with cultural traits unique to Korea.

An independent slasher film, newcomer Kim Jin-won's The Butcher uses a cinema verite approach to show a group of innocent people being clipped one by one inside a slaughterhouse by a butcher wearing a pig mask. As the bodies pile up, a crew of heartless assholes films the whole ordeal in order to sell it to foreigners thirsty to watch some authentic homicide.

Overall, the film doesn’t have any artistic merit or even entertainment value; it simply attempts to garner a shitload of shock factors that are nauseating. If watching people crying, and pleading for their lives before they get raped and murdered in disgustingly realistic ways puts butterflies in your stomach, here's your movie. You sick bastard.

Loosely based on crimes committed by real-life serial killer Yoo Young-chul, The Chaser is a cat-and-mouse game between a slayer and a cop-turned-pimp who's avenging the deaths of his top escort girls. It’s a well-constructed thriller, but when it comes to killing? The procedures consist of decapitation and nonchalant hammering of female limbs. Feminist groups must love this one.

If this internationally heralded film taught us anything, it's this: In life, anything can happen. After a drunken night on the town, Oh Dae-su (the venerable Choi Min-sik) finds himself locked up in a motel room for 15 years, where he's served nothing but fried dumplings.

If that doesn’t sound torturous, he then gets released, and has no choice but to accept a ludicrous challenge offered by the mastermind (Yu Ji-tae) behind his imprisonment.

With only five days on his clock to save a sushi chef he recently met, Dae-su goes on a rampage. He eats a live octopus, loses a friend, engages in an incestuous intercourse, and eventually loses his tongue. Some guys have all the luck.

The Chaser on steroids? Starring Korean superstars Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik, this revenge thriller could’ve wrapped up after the 30-minute mark, since the main protagonist captures the villain without much effort.

Having your fiancee killed gruesomely by a serial killer must be one of the most traumatizing experiences in your life, but instead of clocking his prized enemy in the dome with a stone, the now-single guy lets the killer live. Why? So he can repeatedly catch him and beat the shit out of him again and again.

His tactics include ripping one of the killer's friend's mouth open with his bare hand, slicing open the killer's Achilles tendon, and smashing an eye with a dumbbell. You got to love dude's creativity.

We’re not positive about director Won Shin-yeon's intentions, but A Bloody Aria is downright sickening.

A creepy opera singer and his pupil head to the countryside, where buffoonish thugs take them hostage. The hoodlums don’t hurt them or rape the sole female character like how you might expect. Rather, they opt for brain fuckery, torturing their captives with devilish questions, a la Scream.

Once the singer and his student finally fight back, though, it's all about fists, weapons, and shattered jaws, with more blood per square inch than any Jason Statham flick.

Regarded as the champion of Korean arthouse flicks, director Kim Ki-duk consistently puts out films that are visually gratifying and thematically vile.

Noted by many critics as the jumpoff point for Korea's gross-out cinema, The Isle deals with a mute woman who operates a fishing resort full of small floating houses. An outlaw enters the picture and immediately charms her despite her initial refusals. Though she brings him a prostitute to serve his needs, she eventually gets jealous of the budding relationship between the couple and kills both the hoe and her pimp.

But wait, it gets worse: In an unsuccessful suicide attempt, the male protagonist eats fishhooks, while the female lead stuffs fishhooks into her you-know-what. Try to get that visual stain off your brain.

Part of Park Chan-wook’s revenge trilogy, although this film has no plot affiliation to Old Boy, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance is the best of the lot.

As far as the plot, Chan-wook's cinematic deathblow centers on a mute factory worker who's trying to save his cancer-stricken sister. When organ sellers trick him, he and his terrorist girlfriend decide to kidnap the daughter of his former employer. One unintended mistake, however, leads to another, and, by the end, damn near everyone in the film is offed in viciously brutal, non-Hollywood ways.

The fatality roll call includes suicide, drowning, electric torture, stabbing, batting, and others types of killing tactics mentioned by Raekwon and Method Man on Wu-Tang's Enter The Wut-Tang: 36 Chambers.