ForOn July 15, 2004, a thirty-three-year-old man named Yoo Young-chul was arrested in Mapo-gu in Seoul. His criminal record stretched back to 1998, since he was found guilty of a number of misdemeanors including forgery, property theft, and identity theft. In 2000, he was charged with child sex abuse and served three years and six months in prison. Following his release in September 2003, Yoo committed his first violent murder. His victims were an elderly couple whose heads he bludgeoned with a hammer. Yoo would use this instrument for his subsequent victims, primarily wealthy men and sex workers, and his procedure was similar for each of them. Once his victim was rendered unconscious, he mutilated and dismembered their bodies in his apartment. He then disposed of them in shallow graves near a Buddhist temple. According to his own testimony, the killer disturbingly consumed the livers of some of victims. In 2004, Yoo was found guilty of murdering a total of twenty people. During the trial, psychiatrists deemed him mentally sane and explained that he underwent a drastic personality alteration after his wife divorced him during one of his prison sentences. “My actions cannot be justified,” Yoo said of his crimes, “If we live in a society where people like me can live a good life, there will be another Yoo Young Chul.” Yoo conceded, in other words, that habitual killers like himself should not be forgiven.

As this story was unfolding in the public sphere, Bong Joon-ho's MEMORIES OF MURDER opened in Korean theaters in May 2003 and competed in major film festivals in Toronto, Tokyo, and Cannes. Park Chan-wook's SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and OLDBOY premiered in March 2002 and November 2003, respectively, both winning accolades from critics and audiences. The similarities between Yoo's narrative and those told by these films – including the murder of a series of victims by a hammer and the consumption of their organs – remains uncanny, to say the least. Moreover, dozens of serial killer films were produced around this time featuring mild-mannered, naïve young men violently victimizing women and children including H (2002), a crime drama that revolves around the misidentification of a ruthless killer, DIARY OF JUNE (2005), whose plot deals with the murder of high school students, as well as THE UNJUST (2010), MISSING (2009), and SILENCED (2011).