South Korean director Park Chan-wook was already a success in his own country when he rose to prominence in international cinema with the “Vengeance Trilogy,” a series of neo-noir crime thrillers that are also borderline horror, including Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005). Park would eventually move into English-language films, beginning with Stoker (2013), a Hitchcockian psychological thriller that again borders on horror. In the meantime, though, he had moved more clearly into horror with Thirst (2009), a stylish vampire thriller that manages both to incorporate numerous standard tropes of the vampire genre and to move beyond the usual bounds of the vampire film. The film is built on a version of the notion of vampirism as a disease, while employing an unusual take on the popular motif of the sympathetic vampire within a basic plot that is a variant of the vampire love story. One of the most unusual aspects of the film, though, is that this plot is also loosely based on that of a classic (non-horror) novel, Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867). Meanwhile, the film is also unusually successful in its ability to use the vampire narrative to explore a number of important contemporary issues that are relevant, not just to modern Korean society, but to modern societies around the world. Indeed, as Berg notes, this film participates in a widespread tendency toward globalization of the vampire narrative in recent decades. And, of course, Thirst joins much of Park’s other work as central examples of the particularly rich explosion in the production of South Korean horror films in the twenty-first century, including such stellar efforts as Bong Joon Ho’s The Host (2006), Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016), and Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016).
The Basic Story of Thirst
Thirst centers on Roman Catholic priest Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), whose name (though a perfectly ordinary Korean name) likely derives from the fact that sang is the French word for blood, given that the film is based on a French novel. Sang-hyun feels frustrated that he is not able to do more to help the seriously ill patients to whom he ministers in a Korean hospital. As a result, in a clearly sacrificial mode, he decides to offer himself as an experimental subject in a highly dangerous Catholic-sponsored medical research project at a monastery to try to find a cure for the deadly Emmanual virus (EV). As a result, Sang-hyun contracts the virus and apparently dies but is resurrected by a transfusion that (through some unexplained mechanism) transforms him into a vampire. He subsequently leaves the monastery, while his seemingly miraculous recovery from the virus leads many of his parishioners to believe that he himself has supernatural healing powers, attracting many new worshippers to his services.
Thirst thus belongs to the extensive family of vampire narratives that attribute vampirism to a specific medical source, a phenomenon that has been buoyed in recent years by medical discoveries of diseases that actually have much in common with vampirism. Medical sources of vampirism are most typically viruses, as in the widespread tendency to read many vampire narratives as AIDS allegories, especially beginning in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was on the rise. Tony Scott’s stylish vampire film The Hunger (1983), for example, was one of the first vampire films that seemed to carry clear AIDS resonances, while Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) is perhaps the vampire film that has been read most prominently in this way. Meanwhile, Sang-hyun’s status as a priest participates in a long tradition of depicting the Catholic Church as a principal bulwark against vampirism, a tradition reflected most prominently in the notion that vampires are terrified of Catholic crucifixes. Of course, the fact that this film’s main vampire is also its main priest undermines the usual opposition between priests and vampires, but that happens in other films as well, as when John Carpenter’s vampire Western Vampires (1988) features a Catholic Cardinal who is in league with the film’s chief vampire and hopes to become a vampire himself.
As Thirst proceeds, Sang-hyun’s new reputation as a healer brings him to the bedside of an ailing man who turns out to be his childhood friend Kang-woo (Shun Ha-kyun); the two renew their acquaintance, and Sang-hyun is invited to the home that Kang-woo shares with his overly protective mother, Mrs. Ra (Kim Hae-wook), who seems to spend most of her time solicitously caring for her sickly son. The third member of the household is Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), Kang-woo’s beautiful, but sexually frustrated, wife, who is treated in the family somewhat like a Cinderella-like servant. Sang-hyun and Tae-ju soon begin a steamy affair, fueled partly by her lack of fulfillment in her marriage to a man who is both physically and emotionally unable to fulfill her sexual needs. Sang-hyun, though, is more than up to that task, thanks to his newly superhuman physical prowess and to the fact that his new vampire nature makes him particularly lusty (especially after a lifetime of celibacy), even though he strives mightily (he’s still a priest) to resist those impulses.
Tae-ju is pretty hard to resist, though, partly because she wins his sympathy by claiming (falsely) that Kang-woo has physically abused her (though she has certainly been psychologically abused by both her husband and her mother-in-law). The smoldering sex scenes between Tae-ju and Sang-hyun are a crucial ingredient in this film, which thus quite effectively employs the motif of the sexy vampire that has been so widely used in recent years. Granted, Tae-ju seems significantly sexier than Sang-hyun, and she seems so even when she is still human. As Ken Gelder has notes, in fact, the young and relatively unknown Kim Ok-vin “steals” the film in the role of Tae-ju, even though she is cast opposite one of Korea’s top film stars in Song Kang-ho as Sang-hyun (101). Still, the film implies that Tae-ju’s newfound sexual energies have been ignited by Sang-hyun’s vampire sexual magnetism after years of building frustrations in her relationship with Kang-woo. At the same time, the film plays off its scenes of bodily pleasure with scenes of bodily destruction, reminding us that vampirism (like real human relationships) isn’t all fun and games.
If Sang-hyun is ultimately unable to resist Tae-ju, he also finds that he is unable to resist his need to drink human blood, which appears to be the only thing that keeps his EV from returning. He attempts to fulfill his need for blood by stealing from the hospital’s blood supply, but ultimately must turn to live sources. Meanwhile, in another key bit of vampire lore that will be turn out to be crucial to the resolution of the plot, he finds that sunlight is deadly to him, seriously complicating his movements. Still, as long as it is dark, he has superhuman strength and can even fly, partaking of other common elements of vampire mythology. However, he continues to bear a heavy burden of guilt and tries to satiate his thirst for blood without killing if at all possible.
Eventually, Sang-hyun turns Tae-ju into a vampire as well. Unlike the priest, however, she takes on the role with gusto, killing indiscriminately and even gleefully in her quest for blood. Realizing that he has created an inhuman monster even worse than himself, Sang-hyun decides to put an end to it all, forcing Tae-ju to join him as they expose themselves to the rising sun and are dramatically destroyed, bringing their story to a poignant end.
Thérèse Raquin and Vampires
Thirst is not unique in taking a classic novel and spicing it up by adding horror motifs. In fact, the best-known example of this practice appeared in the same year as Park’s film, in the form of Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, adapted to film in 2016. The success of this novel inspired an immediate followup in another Jane Austen mashup, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), which was then itself quickly followed by Mansfield Park and Mummies (2010) and Emma and the Vampires (2010). All of these Jane Austen mashups, though, are postmodern spoofs that draw their comic energies from the incongruity of inserting vampires, zombies, or other monsters into a Jane Austen novel. Thirst, though, takes its source material quite seriously and draws energy from the fact that its vampire narrative actually fits quite well with its source in Zola.
One reason why Park can take Thérèse Raquin so seriously is that it is not such a far-fetched move to derive a supernatural vampire tale from Zola’s naturalist fiction. For one thing, Zola’s plot is quite similar to Park’s, as Thérèse and her lover Laurent conspire to murder her husband Camille, leading to dark consequences. Indeed, Zola’s vision in the novel is dark enough to border on the Gothic, even without any supernatural elements, though it also includes a number of motifs that might appear to be supernatural, even if they are ultimately attributable to purely psychological manifestations. In his introduction to his 1992 English translation of the novel, Andrew Rothwell points out what a scandal this novel caused when first published (though also noting that Zola himself might have secretly contributed to the scandal in order to gain attention for the novel, whose author was not, at the time, well known). Rothwell notes that reviewer Louis Ulbach (who was a friend of Zola) described the novel as “putrid literature” and went on to complain of Zola’s “unhealthy preoccupation with lust, corpses, and decay” (Rothwell ix). Meanwhile, Rothwell notes that, despite its avowed naturalism, the book does contain a number of elements, including “ghosts and hallucinations, and Laurent’s perpetual scar, or stigma, which at first sight would seem more at home in a Gothic horror extravaganza than a Naturalist novel” (xxiii–xxiv).
That scar, ironically, came when Camille bit Laurent on the neck as they struggled during Camille’s murder, perhaps pointing toward Park’s vampire motif. Meanwhile, though, Thirst differs significantly from Thérèse Raquin in that Laurent, while physically powerful, is a rather predatory figure who is not treated nearly as sympathetically as is Sang-hyun in Thirst. Zola’s Thérèse, meanwhile, remains something of a victim throughout, which makes her slightly more sympathetic (but a lot more passive and less interesting) than is Tae-ju. Nevertheless, both Thérèse and Laurent go to very dark places psychologically after the murder of Camille, experiencing visions of his decaying body and eventually degenerating into paranoia and mutual hatred. In the end, their joint suicide becomes a sort of dark parody of the Romeo and Juliet story, as they die together bonded more by mutual hatred than by love.
In an interview with James Bell, Park explained why he wanted to adapt Thérèse Raquin:
It actually felt so familiar to me that if I had become a novelist it would have been the kind of novel I would have wanted to write. It has not an ounce of sentimentality. Its observations on the notion of love are so dispassionate that in certain parts, it almost makes you laugh. This was similar to the approach I had in mind for a vampire film I had decided to make long before I read Therese Raquin. I intended a more realistic approach to the notion of vampirism.
This explanation should be kept in mind when thinking about the implications of the film.
Thirst and Vampire Suicide
One thing that Thirst has in common with Thérèse Raquin is that both end in the joint suicides of their murderous couple, though Thérese and Laurent participate in this suicide equally, as opposed to Tae-ju, who resists nearly until the end and is really more a murder victim than a suicide. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock notes that there is an extensive cultural legacy of vampires who commit suicide, sometimes quite spectacularly. For example, the title character of the 1972 Blaxploitation vampire film Blacula ultimately becomes so distraught that he intentionally exposes himself to the sun, dying in a scene that should also probably win a special award for best melting vampire skull with maggots crawling out of the eye sockets. Of course, the motif of vampire suicide takes on extra significance from the fact that the vampire might otherwise have been immortal, which can sometimes make vampire suicides quite poignant, especially if the vampire is relatively sympathetic, which is certainly the case with Thirst. Indeed, Weinstock declares that Thirst is probably “the most striking iteration of the trope of the remorseful vampire committing suicide” (145). Vampires are typically seen as abominations, yet they are often seen as having been made vampires as the result of a divine curse in retribution for their previous sins as humans. Meanwhile, the fact that this “curse” also endows them with potential immortality (presumably allowing them to escape the tortures of hell) poses a number of vexing theological questions. And this situation is complicated still further in the case of the sympathetic vampire, who might have become a vampire through no fault of their own. Weinstock, for example, goes on to note the irony of Sang-hyun’s status as a priest and as someone who is selflessly devoted to helping others. He is thus clearly not made into a vampire as any sort of punishment from God. In fact, Weinstock concludes, religious elements notwithstanding, God is absent from this narrative altogether, either as the creator or the punisher of the vampires: “Since God will not punish them, they must punish themselves—and their punishment confirms that human ethics remain the yardstick against which their actions must be measured” (148).
Weinstock does not mention the source of Thirst in Zola, but his interpretation of the meaning of Sang-hyun’s suicide is entirely consistent with the naturalist worldview of Zola, who constructed his fictions as scientific materialist investigations of the conduct of human beings, driven essentially by their biological natures. For Zola, there are rational explanations for all human behavior, even if those explanations might be hard to find, and his characters do what they do because of the kinds of people they are and the kinds of situations in which they find themselves, with no overarching metaphysical systems to guide them. God, again, is absent from Zola’s universe.
In Thirst, it should also be noted that, throughout his experience as a vampire, Sang-hyun consults Father Roh (Park In-hwan), his lifelong spiritual advisor at the monastery where he grew up. And, in keeping with Weinstock’s suggestion that this narrative is a thoroughly secular one, Father Roh clearly understands that Sang-hyun’s condition is medical, not spiritual. He is, in fact, not at all repelled by Sang-hyun’s vampirism but instead begs Sang-hyun to turn him into a vampire, so that his sight and vitality can be restored. In what might seem to be a particularly dark moment for Sang-hyun, he agrees to supply Father Roh with some of his vampire blood in return for receiving absolution for his sins from the older priest. Then, after receiving absolution, Sang-hyun refuses to carry out his end of the bargain, instead killing Father Roh and drinking his blood. In light of his later suicide, though, it becomes clear that Sang-hyun regards vampirism as a curse, so that he regards his killing of Father Roh as a mercy that prevents the old man from experiencing the same curse. This moment, though, does indicate the complexity of this film, which never supplies simple and clear oppositions between good and evil or right and wrong.
Thirst and Vampire Sex
Literal vampires aren’t real, but all of the best vampire films derive much of their energy from their ability to comment on real-life issues that go well beyond their fictional narratives. Thirst quite obviously demonstrates the ability of vampire narratives to comment on such things as the destructive potential of infectious diseases or unrestrained sexual passion, with an especially striking emphasis on the latter. Meanwhile, the focus on the repression and subsequent release of Tae-ju’s sexual desires clearly has much broader implications as a commentary on the plight of many abused women. Much of the energy of this film comes from its depiction of Tae-ju’s explosive liberation, which is so intense that this film sometimes feels like it focuses more on sex than it really does. In fact, Tae-ju’s first attempt to have sex with Sang-hyun is a bit halting and clumsy and is then interrupted by her intrusive family without fulfillment. Then comes a key scene in which Tae-ju and Sang-hyun join the family mahjong game while clearly distracted by their unfilled sexual tension. Then, immediately afterward, they finally consummate this desire in a powerful release of passion in an extremely sensual sequence that rhymes with the intense physical beauty of this entire film. However, even in this scene (the only completed sex scene in the film), there are signs of trouble. For one thing, Sang-hyun can’t resist biting her and drawing blood, reminding us that he is, after all, a vampire. And they have sex in a hospital bed next to the bed of a comatose patient, adding a note of darkness to the entire episode. Meanwhile, this scene of passionate release will ultimately lead to Kang-woo’s murder and to Tae-ju’s transformation into a particularly dangerous and bloodthirsty vampire. The point, though, is surely not that her desires should never have been liberated. The point is that she still bears the scars of all of the years of abuse and denial she suffered earlier, and that liberation from all that is not a simple and easy matter. And, of course, the vampire motif is the perfect vehicle for making this point: one of the key characteristics of vampires is that they tend to pursue their own desires unrestrained by personal morals or social expectations, but that this pursuit usually leads to dire results.
Thirst and Vampire Politics
Partly because it is a twenty-first-century Korean film based on a nineteenth-century French novel and partly because it puts so much emphasis on the largely transcultural motif of sexual desire, Thirst seems largely concerned with issues that transcend culture and politics. At the same time, vampire narratives do tend to invite allegorical interpretations, and Thirst is no exception, even if any social and political allegories in this film (beyond issues related to gender and the domestic abuse of women as noted above) are a bit difficult to locate. Alison Hoffman-Han notes in introducing her interview with Park that the central characters of his films tend to be “good people doing bad things for reasons out of their own control, driven by hopeless desire and/or vengeance.” However, she notes, “Park’s characters never get what they want, and are left dead or either stripped of all self-dignity by the time they reach their narrative’s conclusions.” But she also goes on to suggest that the very bodies of his characters tend to have political meaning: “Perhaps allegories of South Korea in the era of global capitalism or meta-commentaries on human insignificance in this age of post-humanism, Park’s characters’ bodies are thrilling to watch, even though they inspire tremendous discomfort and fear in those doing the watching” (185).
In her actual interview with Park, though, Hoffman-Han tends to focus on the representation of sexuality in Thirst rather than political concerns. And those representations should certainly be taken seriously as the center of the film. Thus, Hyun Joo Yoo provides a psychoanalytic reading of the film, noting that “in Thirst, two vampires overwrite the grid of the modern nation-state, with bodies in the thrall of desire that those grids cannot contain,” while noting that Tae-ju’s more radical pursuit of her desires can be attributed to the fact that she had previously been more thoroughly repressed and subjugated by the patriarchal Symbolic Order than had Sang-hyun (117). This reading also supplies a Lacanian reading of the ultimate failure of the vampires to fulfill their desires. because, according to Lacan, this lack of fulfillment is fundamental to the human condition. This reading is also prefaced by a reminder that the subject of sexual abuse has recently received renewed attention as a social problem in South Korea due to 2017 charges of rape and sexual abuse against prominent film director Kim ki-duk, bringing about Korea’s own “Me-Too” moment.
On the other hand, by its very nature, the focus on desire in vampire narratives lends itself to readings within the context of consumerism: vampires, however powerful, must continue to consume blood in order to continue to function, just as consumers must continue to consume commodities in order for a capitalist economy to continue to function. Consumerism, like vampirism, is driven by the desire to consume, but this desire is one that can never be fulfilled. Thus, in a vampire film such as Thirst, which puts (from its title on down) so much emphasis on unquenchable desire, the potential commentary on consumerism seems quite clear.
The embattled position of this film’s characters also resonates with the embattled condition of South Korea’s economy in recent decades, which makes the fulfillment of consumerist desires even more difficult. Because of the prominence of Korean goods, including automobiles, appliances, electronics, and popular culture, most in the West probably tend to think of South Korea as one of global capitalism’s success stories. However, Korea hasn’t always fared well at the hands of capitalist globalization. For example, looking back on the devastating Asian financial crisis of 1997 from the perspective of ten years later, radical sociologist Walden Bello argues that, as the result of the crisis and the subsequent intervention by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Korea took a hard turn into neoliberalism, leading to a radical increase in the privatization of resources, radical growth among major Korean corporations, and a sharp rise in foreign ownership of those corporations. It also led to a great deal of hardship for the South Korean people. As Bello notes,
The IMF has touted Korea as a “success story.” However, Koreans hate the Fund and point to the high social costs of the so-called success. According to South Korean government figures, the proportion of the population living below the “minimum livelihood income” — a measure of the poverty rate — rose from 3.1 per cent in 1996 to 8.2 per cent in 2000 to 11.6 per cent in early 2006. The Gini coefficient that measures inequality jumped from 0.27 to 0.34. Social solidarity is unraveling, with emigration, family desertion, and divorce rising alarmingly, along with the skyrocketing suicide rate.” (Bello)
Bello was writing in 2006, but this dire situation only became worse with the advent of the global financial crisis of 2008, which hit South Korea hard, despite the fact that the 1997 crisis led to reforms that helped the country to weather the 2008 crisis better than most. For one thing, the decline in global trade had a substantial impact on Korea, which depends heavily on international trade for its economic health. In addition, the South Korean currency, the “won,” depreciated dramatically in comparison with the U.S. dollar between July and November of 2008, with the value of a dollar moving from roughly 1000 won to over 1500 won during that period (Sharma). This difficult economic situation was still very much a problem at the time Thirst was made and provides an important background to the film, though the Korean economy did begin to recover significantly by the second half of 2010. The won, however, has never returned to its pre-crisis value, standing at roughly 1393 won per dollar in May of 2025.
Conclusion
The potential for reading Thirst as an allegory about consumerism is inherent in the vampire narrative itself, though the intense emphasis on unfulfillable desire in this particular film makes it especially effective in that regard. Meanwhile, Thirst employs a number of standard elements of vampire mythology, but deromanticizes these elements in a way that removes essentially all resonances of sentimentality or supernaturalism. Ultimately, then, the film demonstrates that the plight of the vampire is both similar to and different from the plights of ordinary individuals, providing a defamiliarized commentary on numerous aspects of life in the modern world. These aspects particularly include gender relations within a patriarchal context, focusing on the plight of a female protagonist whose desires have continually been thwarted and contained by the patriarchal order as enforced by the family and a male protagonist whose desires have been similarly foiled by the patriarchal order of religion. They also extend to the plight of the consumer under late capitalism, surrounded by an ideological field that drives them to want to consume but ensures that this desire can never be fulfilled.
Works Cited
Bell, James. “A Stake through the Heart.” Sight & Sound, vol. 19, no. 11, 2009, p. 43.
Bello, Walden, “All Fall Down.” Foreign Policy in Focus, 27 July 2007, https://fpif.org/all_fall_down/. Accessed January 20, 2023.
Berg, Lauren. “Globalization and the Vampire.” Film Matters, Fall 2011, pp. 8–12.
Gelder, Ken. “Citational Vampires: Transnational Techniques of Circulation in Irma Vep, Blood: The Last Vampire and Thirst.” In Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood, edited by T. Khair. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 81–104.
Hoffman-Han, Alison. “‘You Can’t Help But Feel Uncomfortable, Even Though You’re Smiling’: An interview with Park Chan-wook.” Journal of Japanese & Korean Cinema, vol. 4, no. 2 2012, pp. 185–92.
Hyon Joo Hoo. “The Cartography of the Abject Nation in Thirst and Still Life.” Studies in the Humanities, vols. 44–45, nos. 1–2, 2017, pp. 113–31.
Rothwell, Andrew. Introduction to Thérèse Raquin, translated by Andrew Rothwell. Oxford University Press, 1992, vii–xxxv.
Sharma, Shalendra D. “How South Korea Weathered the 2008 Financial Crisis.” Global Asia, vol. 8, no. 1, March 2013. Available on-line at https://www.globalasia.org/v8no1/feature/how-south-korea-weathered-the-2008-financial-crisis_shalendra-d-sharma#:~:text=Despite%20valiant%20efforts%2C%20between%20June,July%20and%20November%20of%202008. Accessed 5 May 2025.
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Vampire Suicide.” In Suicide and the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith. Manchester University Press, 2019,139–59.
Zola, Émile. Thérèse Raquin. 1867. Translated by Andrew Rothwell. Oxford University Press, 1992