130, Suyeonggangbyeon-daero,
Haeundae-gu, Busan, Republic of Korea,
48058
THE DEVIL AND THE BEAUTY
DIRECTOR LEE Yong-min
CAST LEE Ye-chun, O Eun-i, KIM Seok-hun, CHOO Seok-yang
RELEASE DATE April 10, 1969
CONTACT Korean Film Archive
Tel +82 2 3153 2001
Fax +82 2 3153 2080
Email kofa@koreafilm.or.kr
When we think of 3D these days, the first things that come to mind are normally big VFX-heavy blockbusters, but the technology existed long before superheroes and not just in Hollywood. In Korea, there have been several 3D projects over the years, the first of them dating back to the 1960s.
Three were made towards the end of the decade - one of those, Lady in Dream (1968), was an early IM Kwon-taek film - but among those incipient efforts the one that stands out the most and seems most well-suited to the gimmicky format was LEE Yong-min’s ghoulish and delightful horror film The Devil and the Beauty (1969).
A deranged and besotted doctor conducts unusual experiments in his clinic with the help of two assistants. Meanwhile, he’s also been keeping his wife alive in a state of suspended animation in a vat hidden behind a secret panel beside his bed. To keep her alive he must supply the contraption with various fluids, including liquidated skin and blood. To maintain the steady supply of blood he is forced to harvest the corpses of unsuspecting victims that walk through the clinic doors.
Yet his career as a murderer started years earlier when he poisoned a friend and was then forced to dispatch his wife as well. Meanwhile, a new nurse joins the team but the doctor has a queer feeling about her.
The first 3D film that ever made it to Korea was William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill (1959) and LEE’s film owes a great debt to it. The similarities start with the haunted house setting (here a clinic), continue with the ghosts of people murdered within its walls, and continue down to prominently featured props, such as jangling skeletons and a vat of acid.
Other influencers are apparent as well as he had a great affinity for many kinds of classic horror. A Frankenstein-esque opening sequence and the heavy shadow and fog throughout bring us right back to the heyday of the Universal monster films of the 1930s. The hospital setting and the revenge plot that eventually surfaces in the story also show a debt to LEE Man-hee’s earlier classic The Devil’s Stairs (1964), itself a thematic and stylistic descendant of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s influential masterwork Les Diaboliques.
Yet LEE is no mere copycat and his love for all things horror is accentuated by ingenious and occasionally hysterical flourishes, as severed heads bounce around the walls, a skeleton arm puts a phone back on its hook, or a woman uses cartwheel martial arts to attack her opponent.
The Devil and the Beauty were restored in 2K by the Korean Film Archive in 2014 with Filmmuseum München helping to restore the 3D elements. The 3D effect for the film was achieved through two cameras but as some footage has been lost, it is incomplete for the first 20 minutes of the film. However, the 2D version is intact for the duration.