Getting I Saw The Devil A Korean Release Meant Kim Jee-Woon Had To Cut Some Scenes

On paper, "I Saw The Devil" doesn't break new ground. Intelligence agent Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun) sets out for revenge after the murder of his fiancee Jang Joo-yun (Oh San-ha). When he discovers the identity of her murderer, Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-Sik), he decides to play cat and mouse to drag out his vengeful catharsis.

All-in-all, a pretty typical setup for a revenge thriller. Such movies are a popular breed in South Korea and "I Saw The Devil" shares many qualities with other high points of the genre. Indeed, Choi Min-Sik previously played a serial killer and object of revenge in Park Chan-Wook's "Lady Vengeance."

Where the film is exceptional is its violence. Director ​​Kim Jee-woon shows both living and dead characters' bodies being destroyed in slow, nauseating detail. The gore would probably make even the aforementioned Mr. Park queasy. It certainly did so to the Korean Media Rating Board (KMRB), which is why Kim had to be careful about how extreme the violence was in his final cut.

South Korea's movie rating system is similar to the Motion Picture Association Of America's (MPAA) system, with five ratings from least to most extreme. Those ratings are: All, PG-12, PG-15, R-18, and Restricted Rate. The ratings are assigned based on the following criteria: theme, sex/nudity, language, horror, drugs, imitable behavior, and violence. It was this last criterion that tripped up "I Saw The Devil."

The film has a particular fascination with dismemberment. When Kyung-chul murders Joo-yun, the scene initially seems like it's going to end before we see anything. Instead, the film only cuts to when he's finishing up the job. The camera catches a brief but striking shot of her remains; her head, stomach, and arms have been clearly removed.

Then comes Soo-hyun's revenge. He secures Kyung-chul in a guillotine and places the rope holding the blade up in his mouth. Kyung-chul must literally hold on for his life, but as the rope slowly slips from his clenched teeth, the blade comes crashing down. Another film might cut away at this moment, but Kim instead lets the shot linger so the audience can see the decapitation in exquisitely grimy detail. The cut only happens after so the camera can follow Kyung-chul's head as it rolls along the floor.

This level of violence resulted in "I Saw The Devil" initially being barred from public screening except in adult-only theaters (at the time, no such theaters existed). This left the film effectively banned until Kim trimmed the film down to R-18. What had to be removed?

Kim answered this question during a 2011 interview with Bloody Disgusting. The "Korean version" of the film ultimately only had seven cuts overall compared to the international version, but this was still enough to soften the violence. Kim explained:

"In the international version, we have ... when [Kyung-Chul] Achilles heel gets cut off. In the Korean version, the camera cuts away the moment the knife cuts into the Achilles heel. You don't see any more than that."

Kim also confirmed that one of the most objectionable parts was the character of Tae-joo (Choi Moo-sung). A friend of Kyung-Chuk, Tae-joo isn't just a killer, but a cannibal. A quick look at his freezer shows it stocked with dismembered body parts and he almost butchers another victim until Joo-yun intervenes.

The violence of "I Saw The Devil" is undeniably extreme, yet Kim himself felt it wasn't all that much worse than previous South Korean revenge thrillers. He argued:

"I think what happened was that a lot of the people responsible were kind of prematurely afraid of what they were going to see before they got to see it. So there was a kind of pre-reaction to what was possible in this film. And maybe it was a stroke of bad luck that I got stuck with that."

This wouldn't be the first time moralistic reactionaries have damaged a movie's public release. It's a small mercy that Kim's compromising took only seven small cuts to get "I Saw The Devil" screened.