“A revelation”: The graphic novel that inspired Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Memories of Murder’

Posted On August 11, 2024August 11, 2024

Bong Joon-ho’s staggering sophomore directorial effort Memories of Murder may have been indebted to many real-life crimes that occurred in the filmmaker’s native Korea in the 1980s, but the co-writer and director was lent a significant assist by a graphic novel created on the other side of the world.

His inspirations had been drawn from a string of unsolved killings in Hwaseong that weren’t solved until more than a decade and a half after the movie’s 2003 release, but even though Joon-ho already had a concept and storyline in mind, he was waiting on that burst of inspiration that would knit everything together into the cohesive whole he’d envisioned.

In the end, he settled on an investigative mystery thriller centred around a pair of bumbling detectives, played by Song Kang-ho and Kin Roi-ha. Park and Cho find themselves tasked to untangle a double murder case, but soon discover they’ve inadvertently stumbled onto the trail of Korea’s first documented serial killer.

Woefully ill-equipped for the job – as Memories of Murder repeatedly and hilariously makes clear – they do their best with the limited skills they possess to try and bring the culprit to justice. Even though the viewer often feels disappointed when a procedural tale ends without the perpetrator being caught, Joon-ho looked to one of history’s most famous unidentified killers for inspiration.

Upon a visit to London, the director was handed a copy of Alan Moore’s From Hell, which serialised the Jack the Ripper story in vividly intoxicating fashion. Joon-ho was already very familiar with the murderer at the core of the story, but it nonetheless helped him immeasurably in trying to find the right balance between Memories of Murders’ narrative thrust and its open-ended conclusion.

“It’s one of the great unsolved serial murder cases, so it’s an obvious precedent for the Korean case despite the very different context,” he explained to the British Film Institute. “I was curious to know how British authors had approached an unsolved mystery from a century ago, and I was very happy to find an entire Jack the Ripper section in one London bookshop.”

However, it was Moore’s work that captured his imagination more than the rest, which informed a major theme of Memories of Murder. “Reading From Hell was a revelation,” the filmmaker admitted. “Moore pushed me to start thinking less about the actual killer and more about the spirit of the times which produced the murders. Moore ultimately blames the age itself.”

Positing that background and circumstances are just as foundational for any serial killer as their desire to end a human life, Joon-ho took that sentiment and applied it to Memories of Murder, adding his own masterful flourishes in the process. Unfortunately, it remains unknown if they ever got around to seeing the tiresome 2001 movie adaptation starring Johnny Depp, which would have probably left him disappointed.

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