NIGHT-VISION AND THE CHESTBURSTER

BONG JOON-HO on THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and ALIEN

It was in the ’90s. I was watching The Silence Of The Lambs at a small theatre in Seoul. It was the climax of the film, when serial killer Buffalo Bill turns on his night-vision goggles and we see Jodie Foster’s fear-stricken face through his eerily green POV. At that moment, the entire audience in the theatre gasped uniformly. It was as if Jonathan Demme was suffocating us cinematically. We weren’t united through laughter or tears, but through the visceral reaction of being unable to breathe at the same moment.

There’s also a moment I wish I could have experienced.

The fabled chestburster scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien when the creature exploded out of John Hurt’s chest and into cinema history for the first time. I remember talking to John about filming the scene during the production of Snowpiercer.

Unfortunately, I actually first saw Alien on VHS tape in Korea and didn’t have the privilege of experiencing it in the theatre.

And Korean audiences saw James Cameron’s Aliens before Alien because of the ‘strange theatrical situation’ of Korean film industry at the time. (It’s too long and complicated to explain the situation here simply.) So quite many Korean audience in the theatre already knew of the chestbursting when the first film opened a few months after the second. Ha ha.