endriago 

The Host (2006) 
Directed by Bong Joon-ho 
Gore Lecture Series #3

Sayak Valencia adopts the term endriago throughout “Gore Capitalism” and its meaning carries broad, complex social implications. Its by-the-book definition inspires nightmares; mismatched limbs and half-bodies comprising a barely functioning whole. The endriago of Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is a slimy, sleek-looking monster, a swift creature emerging from South Korea’s Han River. So atramentous are its features that it’s difficult to imagine what pieces of others compose its frame. But its origin story, told in the film’s preamble, is simple. An American in a Korean coroner’s office demands that all the dusty bottles of formaldehyde be disposed of. The white hand of American globalization directs his underling and so bottle upon bottle is poured to the sewers that lead into the Han River. A couple of fisherman encounter a strange looking tadpole, their blood mixing with the creature, and years pass. The shadow of the endriago can be seen from passerbyers from time to time; a mutant composed of the blood of Seoul and the pressures of red-white-and-blue hegemony. 

Returning to The Host in a post-pandemic world is admittedly a bit disorienting. I had last seen the film upon its American release in 2007 and it was (likely) my first encounter with Bong. Its influence on me paled in comparison to Memories of Murder or the film that followed, Mother. And so I didn’t give The Host much thought, thinking it to be a monster-movie diversion from a filmmaker that would go on to make some of the most globally celebrated films of the century, capped off by an earned industry-acknowledgement for 2019’s Parasite. But returning to the film, after fifteen years and the blessing/burden of personal experiences that came during that interim, compounded with Valencia’s essay as a lens, I was quite startled by the film’s influence and potency. 

The foremost of Bong’s concerns is his insistence on analyzing the pressures of globalization on families. While he would refine the wicked capitalist games that the opulent play on the poor in Parasite, it’s here that a lot of these ideas first take shape. The Park family is destitute, living off a convenience stand that overlooks the Han River. The patriarch Gang-Doo (Bong luminary Song Kang-Ho), with bleached blonde hair, is first observed sleeping at the stand while his father Hie-Bong (Byun Hee-Bong) carries on the traditions of the past. Gang-Doo has two other siblings, his bureaucrat brother Nam-il (a babyfaced Park Hae-il , most recently seen in the excellent Decision to Leave) and Bronze-medalist archer sister Nam-Joo (Bae Doona). They’re all occupying different frames within the film, a disjointed family connected by the warmth of Gang-Doo’s young daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Asung). It’s an endriago of a different shape, a family unit fragmented to exist within television screens and unreliable cell phones. 

As the monster emerges to terrorize residents and kidnap Hyun-seo, the remaining family unite in their loss. But when it’s discovered that Hyun-seo is still alive, their attempts to rescue her are perpetually thwarted by the larger agencies in which they inhabit. The government begins a fear-mongering campaign as a means of keeping people in-doors, suggesting that the creature carries a contagious virus. The Parks are kept in quarantine until they bolt out, asymptomatic. Gang-Doo in particular is labeled as insane as he pleads to have his daughter rescued, with everyone operating under the general assumption that she must be dead. In one of the more horrifying scenes in the film, we see Gang-Doo and an American special-disease “expert” have a brief discussion. The American hears Gang-Doo out, lending a sympathetic ear, before suggesting that the “virus” has rotted Gang-Doo’s brain, to which they’ll need to extract a sample from his frontal lobe. It’s a clear remark on the social and cultural hierarchy at play, but Bong and Song capture the moment with such horror that it’s easy to excuse the obvious. 

I’m struck by the line in “Gore Capitalism” where Valencia makes note of the futile sense of agency one has when living in Mexico, where drug cartels dictate normative behaviors, “we live in a society in which individuals who want to become heroes find no ways to do so.” The Parks are perpetually confronted by government agents that prohibit their capacity to be just that: a hero to their family. We see in painful detail in which a family is broken apart and the impossible task it is to rebuild from that. The Parks witness the death of their elder and youngest in the process, the most feeble and innocent becoming casualties of a war waged between the elite hegemony. But an endriago need not be a monstrosity. They can be stitched together from the leftover pieces of the broken and shattered, as evidenced by the film’s sorrowful yet hopeful closing scene. A family is what you make of the people around you.