Stupid question, but I was a little confused by how the guy actually became a vampire? Was it from some sort of experimental drug? Or what I was thinking is that he accidentally got a blood transfusion from a vampire. I dunno...
shareBlood transfusion from a vampire. Although that's one aspect I was also doubtful of, because they never delved on that fact. Its like one minute he was human, the next minute he was voila! already a vampire.
B L A D E
Well from the conversation he had with his dad, it sounds like he got the Vampire virus from the blood transfusion.
shareSo there was another vampire? And why exactly he donated blood? This part just doesn't make sense.
I think there was no vampire virus. I think this is how the disease, he was infected with, reacted in his body. Once he was given the transfusion blood the disease backed off.
What he says to his father, that he was given a vampire blood, doesn't make it the correct answer. He may think this way, but it's not necessarily how it was. Sometimes we trust film characters too much on telling the truth.
He was sick for (presumably) months. He received a blood transfusion because the disease was progressing and he had lost a lot of blood. As soon as he receives the transfusion, he makes a miraculous recovery. I believe it was the blood transfusion.
shareWell vampires ill assume don't see too many of their kind. A vampire that donates blood would want the disease to spread. Then again who would they have left to feed on?
Its really a matter loneliness. Im assuming...
But thirst is a movie about vampires, so lets not get too logical.
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Yeah it true. If we identified who turned him then we have to go into that plotline and maybe Park didn't want to.
shareA vampire could of just gotten bored and donated his blood for fun....
He got the vampire-blood from the blood transfusion... simple as that... that fact that the blood couldn't completely cure him is the only real problem but hey everyone can have their own take on vampires....
I posted this on another thread but this is where it belongs:
Honestly we discussed this throughout the film. Was it the transfusion that contained the vampirism or was it the VE disease itself, laying dormant until the carrier had consumed blood?
But then surely one of the other 50 test subjects would also have been given blood as a means of trying to save them and would also have turned.
If it was the blood that contained the vampirism then maybe it had been engineered in an attempt to find a cure. But if this is the case then others after Sang-hyeon would be turned as well since they would have assumed this batch of blood worked.
Leaving the only other possibility being that that one blood pack came from a vampire... Bit lame for me.
None of the options is perfect but any could conceivably be the answer.
"If it was the blood that contained the vampirism then maybe it had been engineered in an attempt to find a cure. But if this is the case then others after Sang-hyeon would be turned as well since they would have assumed this batch of blood worked. "
That would depend on whether he was one of the early or late test subjects...if he was the last, or was in a "last batch" of subjects then it could simply have been that they tested him last and just didn't have the test subjects to try it on again at the time. I'm pretty sure it's a blood transfusion of Vampire blood, the immediate rationale that popped into my head was of a vampire looking to spread his condition around, sort of like an HIV positive person who has random, unprotected sexual encounters with people without ever telling them. Perhaps he was alone and simply wanted to know others like him were out there, or he's mentally ill and looking to spread his condition as far as possible. His reasons really are immaterial to the flow of the story since he's never in the film at any point.
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*+_Charos_+*
"I have often laughed at weaklings
who thought themselves good because
they had no claws."
It was a blood transfusion. First and foremost different blood types. Secondly he lost a lot of blood, not all his blood. So a random blood pack from a random "person" who has the vampire disease. Not that hard a concept to get really. The film was about a man who was as close a saint you could be then being corrupted. Do we condemn him for the actions he does while being corrupted? Or feel sorry for him because he went to do good and was corrupted by chance?
It isn't about who the vampire that donated blood was. Where the blood came from. It's about what happened when he contracted the disease and how we feel about it.
I've posted this time and time again cause people are all over the place with it, but here it goes again.....
"Dear Film Club Members,
I didn’t set out to make a vampire film. Having grown up in a Catholic family, I had a feeling that there would come a day when I would make a film with a priest as the main character. But what kind of priest would he be? What kind of things would happen to him?
One day, while watching old vampire films, a thought came to my mind. What would happen if vampire’s blood enters into the body of someone whose vocation has him living close to the cross? The thought developed like this: Why are priests only portrayed as the vampire hunters? What’s to say priests can’t be vampires?
Then I read the novel Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola. It is a story in which a man falls in love with a friend’s wife, and together, they murder the friend. How hard-boiled it was! So much so that it made me think, if I ever became a novelist it would be exactly the novel that I would want to write. But that novel had already been written by Zola, so what should I do? Turn it into a film…
That’s how the story of Thirst came into being. A priest most noble and pious, because of his very faith, volunteers for a human experiment to develop a new medicine. As might be expected, he contracts a dangerous disease. He needs a blood transfusion. But the blood that gets transfused must have been vampire’s blood. Because he so loved mankind, he unwittingly ended up turning into an entity that cannot but take and drink the blood of others. Then he gets invited to a friend’s house. Of course, it’s a dinner invitation, since the priest can no longer traipse around during the daytime. Of course, at that house awaits a beautiful woman. And again of course, she is the friend’s wife…"
-Park Chan-wook, director/screenwriter
Stand By For Action!
If I had read your first paragraph before seeing the movie i would probably hadgiven it a 10. Very well written explanation to think about.
shareThanks for posting the director's views, very interesting. Surprised to read that he had a Catholic upbringing.
I also thought there was more to it than just a pure vampire film - a bit like 'Let the Right One in' someone mentionned in a review.
The very last shot of the film is going to haunt me for a while. Gret stuff.
'Marxism is the opiate of the unstoned classes' - Art Kleps
Thanks for posting the quote, the Zola link was very informative. I was rather thinking of Cortazar's short story "Letters from Mother".
there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder
Straight from the horse's/vampire's mouth so to speak.
It also explained the surprise (for me anyway) of seeing a South Korean film with a Catholic priest as a protagonist, rather than a Buddhist monk. But investigating further revealed 11% of the population identify as Catholic and only 23% as Buddhist.🐭
As I understood it, he voluntarily agreed to get infected with a disease known to have no cure (why I can't imagine), and while in the stages of it ended up puking a lot of blood, dying, and then got a transfusion while trying to save him. I'm guessing it was during that transfusion that he was turned...
Now why he was the only one who was turned is left up to interpretation. We don't know if the other 50 or 500 (whatever the number was) were also given a transfusion or not, so whether it's religious or some freak random thing I don't think we actually know