Did you know Kim Jong Il was a big fan of movies? It’s recorded that the second Supreme Leader of North Korea often said he wanted to be a film critic or a film producer as a young man. He even ended up writing the handbook that would shape North Korean movie making (titled On The Art of Cinema), and according to some sources he aided in the production of as many as 100 movies in his life. Among his best-known works are 1969’s Sea of Blood and 1972’s Flower Girl, both about the Korean independence movement of the 1930s and Korea’s conflicts with the Japanese occupation of the country. His best-known film Pulgasari, is a kaiju movie about a giant monster that eats metal.

A MYTH, A REMAKE, AND A DREAM OF MONSTERS

We are of course talking about 1985’s Pulgasari, a movie based on the Korean myth of the Bulgasari, or Bulgasal. It’s also loosely a remake of the 1962 movie Bulgasari, a lost South Korean film that, to my understanding, only a singular surviving copy of which is known to exist is in the custody of the Korean Film Archive. Despite its lackluster reception at the time, Bulgasari was the first piece of South Korean film to have proper special effects in it, making it an artistic watershed moment in Korean film history.

The Bulgasari myth that the film is based on goes as follows: an innocent blacksmith (or his daughter in some versions) is killed by an unjust regime, and an effigy of a monster is created and imbued with life by his wish, becoming the Bulgasari. The creature is then sent to destroy the oppressors by eating the metal from their weapons. The creature becomes gradually stronger and larger with each conflict, until it runs out of control. Seeking more metal to satisfy its hunger, it ironically conquers the people it was supposed to protect.

When a deep sense of love for filmmaking collided with an even deeper sense of nationalistic pride in the idea that North Korea could become a filmmaking powerhouse, Il’s efforts to make a film about this story turned towards the talents of South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, and his ex-wife Choi Eun-hee. Sang-ok was undoubtedly an odd choice for a medieval movie about a raging monster, since his experience and claim to fame was primarily in war dramas about the exploitation of women. A plan to get ahold of Sang-ok, combined with the revival of Godzilla in 1984 as the Heisei-era was set in motion, solidified Il’s plot. 

As the story goes, a would-be dictator then kidnapped the South Korean national treasure’s ex-wife, using Eun-hee as bait to lure Sang-ok into his clutches. It was hard for outsiders to verify that the two hadn’t defected due to the country’s insularity, and that was the story that Il planned to keep running with. These weren’t the only crew brought on either, as Il managed to deceive a whole crew of former Toho employees to join in by faking a shooting schedule in China and bringing them to North Korea instead. 

THE FLIGHT OF THE FILMMAKERS

And make Pulgasari they did, with Sang-ok residing in a labor camp for the majority of his time in the country. So, what did Kim Jong Il think of the end product of their captivity? 

He loved it. 

After all, it was very popular among the DPRK’s citizens and in the eyes of Il, a technical marvel. The only problem was North Korea’s film industry needed a serious infusion of cash flow after Sang-ok had made several other films at Il’s behest following Pulgasari. Il’s new plan to amend this was the opposite of his original: he would actually cut Sang-ok and Eun-hee loose and allow them to travel (under the watch of armed guard) to promote the film. He’d even send them to Vienna in hopes of securing foreign investors to fund another film, this time about Genghis Khan rather than a giant steel-munching monster. 

Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, the couple fled at the first opening they got, and made it into the protective arms of the U.S. via the Venetian embassy; they even ended up remarrying after the fact. Kim Jong Il supposedly struck all record of Sang-ok’s work from the public eye as a response, expunging his name from the creation, and the rest is history.

PULGASARI AND THE SOUL OF THE MONSTER

There’s been, for good reason, a lot of reevaluations of Pulgasari and its artistic merits in recent years. Its creation was the perfect storm of cultural fears turned truth, fact stranger than fiction, and urban legend turned verifiably real event. It’s just too good of a story to ignore. 

The film’s themes and narrative are dynamic in this context, reignited under the shining lens of new knowledge about how the film was made and the impact it had on North Korean culture. Some find it to be an unbelievably well-made piece of counterculture, secretly weaponized against the man who wanted it made in the first place. Others find it an unwatchable and disturbing relic of film history. And some even treat it as a cult classic that lives up in quality to its reputation as a real-life production. 

Ultimately, I was somewhat underwhelmed with what I found when it came to the meat of Pulgasari. It isn’t boring, certainly, so it hasn’t committed the worst sin a movie can. But as much as I can talk about liking the sentiment of the original myth, its perennial idea of the power of the collective and the dangers of centralizing a movement around one person, and the performances being surprisingly good, there’s just one big glaring problem with this monster movie: the monster is the least interesting part in the entire runtime.  

In my recent conversations of kaiju films as of late, I’ve talked about the presence of a well-made monster suit; the way the mise en scene of tokusatsu can reach through the screen and immerse you, add a new layer of life to the film. But when the Pulgasari becomes the monster he’s supposed to be, he doesn’t have any of that. Design-wise, it’s a fine suit with its vaguely-reptilian-vaguely-mammalian style. But there’s a distinct lifelessness that you’ll have to reckon with when watching it; it’s stiff in motion, and plastic in the most unappealing of ways. Its scale against the buildings and people around it feels weak, which is hard to ignore in a movie where the creature’s gimmick is that it’s constantly growing. 

There are just so few expressive moments outside the time in its miniaturized form where the titular creature gets to live. It stomps around and destroys, but the stage-play sort of presentation in how it’s framed feels more strange than enjoyable. The Pulgasari has an uncanny evocation of fear in its glassy and bestial eyes, but it’s a one-trick pony as far as practical monsters go. Vaguely unsettling, with little else to offer. 

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH PULGASARI?

I don’t blame the craft of the Toho employees or the performance of Kenpachiro Satsuma, a Showa-era Godzilla actor who had been taken along with them to play the Pulgasari. I think what happened with Pulgasari is, ironically, the same thing that happens with many horror movies. Making a monster movie is always a gamble, and not every kaiju film will be a Godzilla vs Hedorah, or Kaneko’s Gamera. Even beyond the unimaginable pressure of being kidnapped and forced to make a film, you can have a perfect storm of talent, and still end up producing something less than the sum of its parts thanks to the unending storm of circumstances and technical issues that plague film crews.

As always, I encourage you to see Pulgasari for yourself, if not for the entertainment value you might find in it, then for the mythos that have been unveiled about its making. It’s a doozy unpacking the film knowing the truth of its birth, and more importantly not that hard to get ahold of: there are more than a few uploads online that make the film free to watch. 

For the first time looking for media for an article, the rip I’ve found is on YouTube is surprisingly high quality in its remastered state. 

We’re far from the time when Pulgasari was a rarity that was hard to view, so if you take anything from this, take that as a small victory and take advantage. Seize the day, and happy watching horror fans!