For the best of horror movies, turn to Korea
You don’t even need to be a film buff to know that Korean cinema and TV series (often dubbed in a local language) are all the rage in India. It’s in this context that the hiring of Jongsuk Thomas Nam (back in 2015) to curate the After Dark section of the Jio Mami 21st Mumbai Film Festival with Star begins to get interesting. But there’s much more to Thomas’s story. Please read on.
Thomas is managing director at Network of Asian Fantastic Films and is based in South Korea.
Thomas is a nerd and is proud of it. He has an unassuming nature, thinning hair and baldness that is creeping on all sides from the top of his head. Apart from dark films, he also loves his phone and to get him to talk can be difficult as the man is obsessed with his screen.
I first noticed Thomas in 2017 when he introduced the brilliant and truly horrifying Australian film Killing Ground. The film serves as a testimonial to Thomas’s ability to bring the best films from all over the world to MAMI. Killing Ground was an Australian entry and the fact that the film was from that continent was a factor that Thomas took into account.
“I watch 500 films a year and choose the best for MAMI,” said Thomas. Films like Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces The Shining and Clockwork Orange were great influences on a young Thomas during his formative years as a student in the US.
Thomas was born in South Korea in 1968 but went to the US at a very young age. He graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park with a BA in communication arts in 1993. Today, he has contributed to prestigious film festivals all over the world as curator and consultant.
Thomas says getting his first driving license gave him the freedom to choose the movie he wanted to watch. And so, movies like Star Wars became a big influence. “I would count Friday the 13th, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street as some of the early horror movies that I saw and was influenced by,” he told BLink in an exclusive interview at a leading five-star hotel’s lobby in Mumbai’s Juhu area.
Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull and King of Comedy also had an effect on young Thomas. But a threat was looming large on Thomas when he decided to specialise in films. “Dad threatened to cut me off. So I had to bartender, sell electronic goods, wait tables before I managed to graduate,” he said.
While searching for movies to screen, Thomas looks at the film’s ability to scare, bend the rules of formula, its faithfulness to genre, originality and the film’s capacity “to trick audiences into having a good time”.
Among nerds, there are many who are cineastes, he said. “That’s also a big factor in the success of After Dark section,” Thomas told me, adding that he preferred to be called by his middle name because that won’t confuse readers.
In many ways, Thomas is ideally placed to introduce the reader of this article to the best of contemporary Korean Cinema. So, check out this list from him: Chi-hwa-seon, The Wailing, My Sassy Girl, The Host (2006) and A Taxi Driver. These movies may, if are a rookie-buff, serve as a delicious first course to South Korean cinema.
The feature films in the After Dark section at MAMI this year were The Lodge, Greener Grass, Midsommar, Harpoon, Alien, and a feature-length documentary on the making of Alien called Memory: The origins of Alien. Needless to say, Thomas picked the movies himself. The short films shown were: 11:50, Hunting Season, A Little Taste, Other Side of the Box and All-Inclusive. Each full-length feature was preceded by a short. As is customary at MAMI, many of the films were shown twice.
Films screened as part of the After Dark, were sci-fi, fantasy, black comedies and horror movies. Movies such as the restored version of Alien, which saw a very warm welcome at the festival, include horror and sci-fi elements.
“Do not underestimate horror movies. From the campy movies of an earlier era, films from the fantasy genre these days have become serious, in-depth and stark,” said Thomas.