CJ Entertainment, 2009
starring: Kang-ho Song, Ok-bin Kim
directed by: Chan-wook Park

the plot: A devout and selfless Korean priest (Song) volunteers to help test a vaccine for a deadly virus. But the disease proves uncontainable, and soon the priest is covered in blisters and coughing up blood. In a last-ditch effort to save his life, doctors give him a blood transfusion, which miraculously revives him even after he’s been declared dead. Returning home, the priest finds that his senses are dramatically heightened, he is endowed with incredible strength, and sunlight sears his flesh. He begins lusting uncontrollably after a friend’s young wife (Kim), who proves receptive to his advances. Worst of all, he soon develops an insatiable thirst for human blood. If deprived of it for too long, the virus returns and his blisters reappear. It doesn’t take the priest long to understand what he’s become, and yet he seeks to repress his evil urges and maintain his ascetic ways. He punishes himself for his sinful thoughts and feeds only on the blood of hospital patients in a coma. But how long can he go without killing?

why it’s good: Despite the mass proliferation of vampire TV and cinema over the past few years, this masterful Korean horror flick manages to put a different spin on the genre. The priest faces an impossible moral and religious dilemma: It’s not his fault that doctors pumped his body full of vampire blood, and yet he can only quell his urges through suicide, which he considers the worst sin of all. One of the film’s creepiest images is the priest lying prostrate on the hospital floor as he sucks a patient’s blood through an IV tube. It’s not until deep in the movie, after the priest infects his young mistress, that the bodies start piling up. Giddy with her newfound powers, she starts hunting for sport, puncturing her victims with a sharp pair of scissors and slurping up the blood that comes spurting out like a water bubbler. When the priest tries to convince her of the folly of this recklessness, she laughs and reminds him they are no longer human. “Then what are we?” he asks. “We’re human-eating beasts, that’s what,” she replies. “Is it a sin for a fox to eat a chicken?” The movie also features a few long and highly erotic sex scenes, along with occasional dark humor. There are some goofy, “Crouching Tiger” style leaping effects, but the bloodletting is artfully and horrifically done.

why you should own it: “Thirst” won the Cannes International Film Festival’s Jury Prize in 2009, but it never received a wide release in the United States. The DVD is devoid of special features other than your choice of language for the subtitles (the film is in Korean), but it’s still worth checking out. This has got to be one of the first movies to feature vampires without fangs, and yet it’s got all the gore, humor and eroticism any horror fan could ask for, all executed with a sense of cinematic elegance. Director Chan-wook Park seems to be moving up in the world—he’s currently filming “Stoker,” which stars Nicole Kidman and is due out in 2012.