Featured Image Credit: NEON/The Criterion Collection
Topics: True crime, Korea, Film and TV
Joe Yates
Warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault which some readers may find distressing.
A harrowing crime movie based on a real life story has a clever reason behind its powerful final scene.
Between 1986 and 1994, Lee Choon-jae murdered 15 women and girls, but it took more than 30 years before one of South Korea's most notorious serial killers was ever found out.
The movie in question was based on his awful crimes, and at the end of the film one of the detectives is seen staring into the camera, and the reason for doing so is chilling to say the least.
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Over the course of eight years, the 61-year-old raped and murdered 15 girls and women in South Korea - starting just eight months after being discharged from the Republic of Korea Army where he served as a tank driver.
On September 15, 1986, at the age of 23 he took his first victim's life. Over the next four months, and still just 23 years old, he would murder four more women.
He killed another three more times in 1987, to take the total to four.
Between 1988 and 1991 he raped and murdered another six women, before taking the life of one more victim - his sister-in-law - in 1994.
From then until 2019 nobody knew who carried out the wicked crimes.
Now, let's talk about why the three-time Oscar winning director Bong Joon-ho told his South Korean compatriot Song Kang-ho, who played Detective Park Doo-man, to stare down the camera in the 2003 film Memories of Murder - which was described by one person on Twitter as 'one of the best ever'.
The 55-year-old explained his reasoning for doing so was because he was confident that the serial killer would watch the film, and so he wanted Detective Park to look into the camera with the intention for him to be staring directly at the murderer.
Joon-ho wanted it to serve as a chilling reminder that the authorities would never stop looking for the culprit.
Whether Choon-jae did actually manage to watch the film, no one knows - but it's incredible cinematography nonetheless.
That is because he was apprehended in 1994 and locked up for the rape and murder of his wife's sister, but at the time nobody knew he had already carried out similar acts on 14 other women and girls - one as young as eight years old.
If you've been affected by any of the issues in this article, you can contact The National Sexual Assault Hotline on 800.656.HOPE (4673), available 24/7. Or you can chat online via online.rainn.org