Horror Begins at Home: The Hidden Fears of ‘The Housemaid’ (1960)
Exploring social anxieties at the heart of a Korean classic.
A few years ago, I stumbled across a previously-unknown-to-me film called The Housemaid on Netflix. The summary promised sordid melodrama set in the household of a wealthy Korean family. Since one of my favorite genres of fiction focuses on overly-dramatic rich people, I couldn’t resist watching it.
The film, released in 2010 and directed by Im Sang-soo, didn’t disappoint on the drama front. Its plot focuses on the live-in au pair hired by the aforementioned wealthy family, who becomes subject to increasingly poor treatment at the hands of her employers. Without giving away the film's ending, I can say that The Housemaid features all the hallmarks of a wonderfully melodramatic story: sex, violence, interpersonal conflict, and revenge. All in all, it was an entertaining and pleasantly shocking film.
What I didn’t know when I first watched The Housemaid was that the 2010 film is, in fact, a remake. The original version came out in 1960 and was directed by Kim Ki-young, a director that (according to Wikipedia) was famous for his “intensely psychosexual and melodramatic horror films.”
From what I can tell, The Housemaid was then remade twice more by the same director. These two films — Woman of Fire and Woman of Fire ’82 — came together with the original 1960 movie to form Kim’s Housemaid trilogy. While I haven’t seen the second and third adaptations of The Housemaid and thus can’t attest to their quality, I don’t believe it’s controversial to say that the original 1960 version was by far the most well-known and influential of the three, as it is even considered one of the greatest Korean films of all time by some.
All this is to say that when I finally came across the 1960 version of The Housemaid on YouTube (after having searched for it in vain on streaming websites before that), I knew that I had to watch it. I did not, to be quite frank, go into the film with high expectations. I had greatly enjoyed the 2010 version of The Housemaid and so felt that, paradoxically, the original version had a lot to live up to. I also felt that given the time in which the first film was made, it would be unable to produce the sort of shock and horror that its successor had shown. Thankfully, I was proven very wrong.
The plot of the original Housemaid film is similar to the 2010 version in terms of the basic story, but the differences between the two become more pronounced as the film progresses.
In both adaptations, the narrative focuses on a working-class maid hired to work for a family. However, while the 2010 family is obscenely wealthy, the 1960 family is decidedly middle-class. The father has a job as a music teacher in a factory, while the mother works part-time as a seamstress to earn extra money.
The family has just recently built a new, two-story house, the upkeep of which proves too much for the wife — she becomes worn out to the point of collapse, leading to the decision to hire a maid. This issue of middle-class anxiety provides a thematic depth to the film that the 2010 version lacks.
Im’s family in The Housemaid are privileged and entitled to the point that it’s difficult to have any sympathy for them — perhaps as a result of this, the wife and husband of Im’s narrative are positioned early on as the villains of the story. On the other hand, Kim’s middle-class family is not so easily defined.
The anxiety of their precarious class status looms over the film from the start, as the family constantly struggles to balance their desire for typical markers of status (a bigger house, a television, even a maid) with the need to preserve their family’s wellbeing. It is implied several times in the film that their constant striving for more is in many ways to blame for the horrific events that follow.
This brings me to the second key element that differs between the two adaptations: the depiction of the titular housemaid.
In both films, the key conflict revolves around the husband having an affair with the maid, which sets in motion a chain of events that proves catastrophic for everyone involved. Before seeing the 1960 film, I knew that it presented the housemaid as a villainous femme fatale rather than the innocent victim she appears to be in the 2010 version.
I had assumed this was down to outdated gender politics — for a sexually-active, unmarried young woman, no doubt the only character type available to her would be the villainous femme fatale, running around seducing men and ruining people’s lives. So you can imagine my surprise when, despite Kim’s housemaid being exactly that — a villainous femme fatale who seduces men and ruins lives — her character turned out to be anything but a one-dimensional stereotype.
The complexity of the housemaid’s character is awe-inspiring, given that the basics of the plot would have made it very easy to paint her as an out-and-out villain. That she is the one who seduces the husband (not the other way around, as in the 2010 version), combined with the fact that she is positioned as a rival to the gentle, demure wife who is in a loving relationship with the husband, means that the audience was by no means automatically going to feel empathy for her.
Nevertheless, Kim’s characters resist easy categorization. While the housemaid’s seduction of the husband could be seen as the first strike in what becomes almost a war within their prized two-story home, she is not the sole aggressor. She, too, is harmed by the family, whose treatment of her entirely depends on how she relates to their precious middle-class existence. She is first used as a tool to preserve it, then despised when she is seen as a threat to it.
Of course, the family is correct in how they see her; she is a threat to their existence. Yet, we can’t help but feel sympathetic towards the housemaid for behaving this way. She wants what the wife has — the husband, the children, the comfortable life. Some of the most fascinating scenes are between the housemaid and the wife, whose relationship deteriorates into a fierce tug-of-war over not just the husband but also everything that comes with him.
The conflict between the housemaid’s desire to switch roles and the wife’s desire to keep them as they are forms the backbone of the story. One scene which perfectly encapsulates this tension comes when the housemaid is bedridden after an incident the wife is to blame for. The housemaid has been ill for ten days, but the wife refuses to get her food, saying, “I won’t cook for a concubine, even if today is the last day of my life.”
The Housemaid film, which Kim made in 1960 and the one that Im made in 2010, are very different creations, and not just because they were made half a century apart.
While Im’s is an excellent thriller and revenge tale with a likable protagonist, Kim’s original version possesses a kind of thematic depth which its 2010 remake couldn’t hope to achieve. Like Im’s adaptation, it is shocking and dramatic, but dismissing the 1960 film as mere melodrama would be to ignore the deeper themes in its provocative story.
It deals with issues of class, gender, and social norms — all without giving the audience easy answers, just as it denies us a straightforward demonization of the housemaid. There is no doubt that the housemaid herself is in many ways villainous, but after watching the film, we are left with the question: did she bring this horror into the house, or had it been there all along?
