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Phenomenal
I went into this show with my expectations below ground and holy hell I was taken aback by this show in such an unexpectedly good way.The production, story, cast, acting, etc. blew me away. Right from the start of episode 1, the creep factor was so high and this show is a prime example of proving you don't need over-the-top gore, special effects, or jumpscares to make something scary. True to its meaning of "People are hell" !!!!
One thing I want to praise the most, despite being said already, is the actors of Jung Woo and Seo Moonjo. They took their role and OWNED IT. Lee Dongwook and Yim Si-Wan killed it (pun intended).
This is a good watch for anyone who wants to experience a psychological horror mindfuck that will keep you glued to the screen.
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Scary but brilliant
This movie is one of those movie that can make you squeamish and helpless, especially since the background felt as if it was a living character, as if you are watching while expecting an impending horrible car crash about to happen.The ambience and the music is absolutely wonderful, and the cinematography is brilliant. "Eden Studio", the place where the main character lived in, is a horrible place and the series did a great job in showing it. It emphasizes the feelings of the main character towards a place, including its dingy walls and dirty background, as well as the offensive and the mentally unsound inhabitants. In a sense, Eden studio is like one character encapsulating the helplessness of the main character's flight.
Throughout the series, I sometimes find it hard to watch because I felt really bad for the main character. He is someone who has a lot of pride, and struggles to make his bread due to his literary career and would feel relatable to everyone starting out in life. We can see how he is a flawed character with a lot of anger and suppressed feeling as he grew increasingly isolated in the place he lived in, with his girlfriend treating him coldly and his coworkers bullying and humiliating him. Moreover, his only place of solace, Eden studio further exacerbates this condition by being so claustrophobic and morally unsafe.
The way the movie is set is like a horror movie, with a lot of suspense as you await the main character's unraveling sanity and the evil that exist in the studio.
Lee Dong Wook's acting is superb, it is amazing how he is able to be so creepy while still being so charismatic and handsome. I especially like the interactions between him and the main character and how he is trying to mold the main character into him. However, the situation the main character is put in is similar to how a toxic relationship works- he is isolated and was gaslighted several times (by the inhabitants and his own girlfriend), and was made to question whether he is overthinking and overly sensitive, and each of his step is controlled (as he had no financial independence).
It is a very good psychological drama in all aspects, and bordering that of a horror movie.
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I really wasn't expecting it to end so good.
This is basically another memorable Dong Wook role, seriously, those last two episodes the way he was acting, was just incredible!
Si Wan too was just so good in the last two eps and they were brilliant, no doubt.
This drama is on par with Save Me as far as I'm concerned because the role played by Lee Jung Eun of the eccentric building owner Eom Bok Soon was just a beautiful performance like the cult leader preacher from Save Me. Honestly, it will give you chills and creep you out but the actor she played it so naturally. We all know an ahjumma like that right, nosey, and no respect for privacy and always making you uncomfortable and making you feel bad for something completely rational, basically the ultimate gaslighter.
But okay, I already said this before, it's not perfect and in the middle it sort of lost its place, for about two episodes but I don't need perfection.
I'm glad that they took a risk making something that would make some people uncomfortable because it's not a chaebol romance or comedy action procedural, they made something serious. That alone is commendable. But then they chose the right cast and except for the lull in the middle everything else was done well.
The plot twists were clever and unique. The dialog was brilliant! ! The camera work was ART and it's all so realistic the ambiance becomes a part of the storytelling. So, yes. I'm really happy with the way it ended.
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it could have been so much more.
⚠️ contains heavy, albeit vaguely worded, spoilers for both SFH and Mouse, and minor spoilers for The Bad Kids. ⚠️it seems that everywhere i turn there are more and more plotholes to grab my attention when i am attempting to process all of this like a normal human being. i am failing, miserably, but i will continue to try anyway
i came into this show looking for the Hannibal-esque content, i will admit—i have mutuals that have been recommending this show to me bc they know how whipped i am for Hannigram (despite not having watched anything from the series. am i really gay if i haven't watched Hannibal, tho, can someone answer that question for me), and i was excited to see some of that here. it,,,,,, it fell flat, in a way? i wanted to enjoy this far more than i did but it refused to let me do so and that sucks, tbh
part of the reason, i think, is that Lee Dong Wook is simply not scary. maybe it's bc i've watched 20 episodes of Mouse and therefore have known a glimpse of true terror (despite the fact that it started to go careening downhill in the last 3 to 4 episodes—y'all know that OZ storyline was not necessary to the plot, own it) or maybe it's bc his role as the multi-layered Grim Reaper has embedded itself into my eyelids, idk, but Lee Dong Wook waving knifes and doing what appeared to be an attempt at a creepy smile just did not cut it for me (pun not intended). what he is, tho, is hot, and gay, and slightly unstable, and obsessed with the writer in Room #303. (throat-touching. throat-touching is gay af, ik what i'm talking about bc necks are the most attractive part of a human body after the hands. if you don't agree then fight me bitch) could have possibly f*cked me over/induced a fear of dentists in general by the time all of this was said and done (if it had been executed properly *cough*) but do we give a f*ck? we do not give a f*ck. would we like to be f*cked, tho? no comment
i don't want to say that i'd let Lee Dong Wook pull out my teeth and tie me to a chair for 5 minutes of ASMR reading material,,,,, but that is exactly what i'm saying in a way
on that subject of f*ckery (the act, not the behavior): personal headcanon that Seo Moon Jo and Yoo Ki Hyuk have hate-f*cked at least once pre-canon (bc, yk. apparent Frankenstein kink and all that? idk, it's just the vibes the two of them give off sitting in the back of a detective's vehicle with a needle stuck in someone's neck while the homoeroticism has just started to make itself known here) and both of them could really have cared less about the sex itself. rip Ki Hyuk, for such a hot man you could have had some good sex once in a while if you had held off on the garotting of a public figure for a sec—truly gone too soon 😔
but Im Si Wan, tho. i am going to be honest here and say that i knew him from his musical career with ZE:A but once again made the same mistake that i did with Junho and did not bother to check out his acting career. like with Junho, i am now attempting to rectify that bc i refuse to believe that this man filmed this almost immediately after being discharged from the military. i refuse. the casual disassembling of a man's morals contained in the pretty little tooth bracelet he carries around on his wrist that was given to him (with some kind of tenderness!!!) by his toxic ex-boyfriend is not something to be taken lightly and he,,,,,, he didn't. he put his entire soul into this sh*t, f*ck
the other inhabitants of Eden Gosiwon are not to be forgotten, however—Park Jong Hwan and Lee Jung Eun as the Byeon twins and Eom Bok Soon, respectively, stole the show almost as much as Siwan. (we need more women serial killers from the latter, pls and ty) Noh Jong Hyun as Kang Seok Yoon made me cry a bit bc he was soft and precious and made his entrance during the last three to four episodes and did not deserve what he received at the end of that
the OST was good as well! i can't say that it added anything to the show per say but it certainly didn't subtract from it—my personal favorites are Blow Off by Yoari and Strangers by The Rose.
but y'all. y'all. what the last 45 minutes of SFH did to me had me, to put it plainly, f*cking shook. who killed who? who was killing who from the moment this all began? whose voice were we hearing? once we entered the fourth floor,,,,,,, who was the "victim" in the end? is the psychopath dentist with a penchant for f*cking (or otherwise propositioning) his creations still alive or are we are all on a canon acid trip rn
when i sat on that for a few days, however, i realized what it reminded me of, and as it did the weaknesses of SFH became glaringly clear.
The Bad Kids employed a similar ending as SFH, except there was a sense of unease from the beginning with the former. the gaslighting was so subtle that you only realized it in the latter half of the show, and even then you were tempted to think that that's not really what they meant. i didn't really pick up anything that made me necessarily uncomfortable in SFH—even the "human meat" jokes felt typical and very trope-like—and the screenwriter's attempt to gaslight us in the final episode (again, pun not intended) worked for all of 24 hours. after that, it doesn't hold up too well. the mindf*ck in TBK is unparalleled bc of that, and serves as just one of the reasons i consider it to be a masterpiece.
SFH also, imo, could have done with some more backstory. from my research, Moon Jo was a character unique to the television series—he was billed as this serial killer with sinister motives, but we never really got to find out what those motives were. "we're making art. it's not just murder," he said, but where was the art? Mouse played into this aspect as well bc (iirc) Jung Ba Reum used to take pictures of his victim's bodies and had it up on his wall—there was a meticulousity to it that i can't get into at the moment, but it was tangible. he had something that he considered to be worth killing for, and all we got from Moon Jo was a barely utilized tooth collection and no proper explanation behind that sh*t, sksksksk
to make a long story short, it could have been more. and i hate saying that, bc ik how good of an actor LDW is, and ik how much effort Siwan put into this, but it wasn't enough. at its core, the plot was stretched too thin—as an adaptation of a webtoon that (i assume) had far more content, it did very little to convince me to read the source material.
do i regret watching this? no. will i watch it again? that's also probably a no.
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DAMN!!!!
Everything I thought I knew about the murderers was wrong!!! I love how this show kept me glued to my screen the whole time. The plot was so interesting and unpredictable that I could barely blink out of fear of missing something. I loved that we got to see two versions of the same story which added some clarity and confusion to the plot. And Moon-jo is alive in the end!!!! I know the police officer and Jong-woo saw him!!Lee Dong-wook and Yim Si-wan were the perfect casting for their respective roles. They both shone and brought out a darker side we were not used to see from them. Lee Dong-wook was fucking creepy, but damn he's so hot!!! His smile is always beautiful but that gorgeous smile of his was the most unsettling thing in this show. This man can act and does it so well!!! Yim Si-wan was also amazing and scary, especially when he was hallucinating and becoming violent. The other people living at the boarding house were extremely creepy, too. Interestingly, the only guy who did not creep me out as much was the gangster. That's definitely a red flag, lol. And Moon-jo likes feeding human flesh to others pretending that it's beef!!! And the teeth bracelets and rings were so damn creepy. I have no clue how many times I jumped out of my seat whenever Moon-jo charged towards someone.
I really recommend this show to anyone who likes thrillers and crime stuff like me. It's funny how the human mind works and Moon-jo wasn't wrong when he said those things about human nature to Jong-woo.
I was very excited for this show when it first came out and I was not disappointed, not even after rewatching it several times. Chef's kiss!!
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the reflection of this kdrama is spectacular!
Stranger From Hell, also called Hell is Other People, in analogy to the term used by the philosopher Sartre, is a psychological horror film that explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning to what extent the environment can influence and shape an individual's morality, since, according to Sartre's ideas, human beings tend to blame others for their own mistakes and character flaws, when, in fact, they themselves are responsible for them.Well, the drama tells the story of Jong Woo, a young crime writer who dreams of advancing in his career and moves from the countryside to the capital Seoul after getting an internship. In order to save money, he looks for cheap places to rent, until he finds a poorly maintained and old studio apartment with a very questionable room, in which a man had already committed suicide on the premises, and which, therefore, was at a price that fit his budget. From then on, this young man's life begins to fall apart, he soon realizes that his roommates are very peculiar; They are a guy who is always laughing in a disturbing way, another who is extremely perverted and wears an ankle bracelet, and also Moojon, a super charismatic and mysterious dentist who lives next door. In the first few days, he even tries to adapt to the routine, however, things seem too strange, continuing to hear noises, whispers and footsteps in the hallways at night, and with each passing day the feeling of being watched only increases. In addition, Moojon begins to demonstrate manipulative behavior and a certain fascination for the protagonist, starting a process of total distrust of Jong Woo with the residents, who seem to be undeniably suspicious.
As the story progresses, we discover how problematic they are. Moojon is a psychopathic maniac who likes to torture others psychologically and physically and who, with the help of his studio apartment colleagues, commits several murders and tries to form and find new people with a tendency towards madness and psychopathy, just like Jong Woo. It is worth noting how much the protagonist already showed toxic traits and aggressive episodes, such as during his military service, which reveals his tendency towards madness, since he does not show tolerance towards social conversions and others, such as his coworkers, relationships and even neighbors. In fact, dealing with people is not an easy task, especially knowing that each one has their own personality, way of acting and individuality, and this is normal, people are different and opinions clash. We see many problems in others, but have you ever stopped to think that for others, you are the other? Clearly our protagonist cannot digest this.
Then, things reach their peak when Jong Woo discovers a secret room in the building, where he finds evidence of horrible crimes that his neighbors committed, which makes him extremely paranoid about the situation. He tries to escape but cannot do so in any way, until he is forced to face them directly. Towards the end of the drama, together with a police officer who was working on the case, they technically manage to defeat the residents, who end up dying in the fight for various reasons, as if they themselves started to fight each other. HOWEVER, there is a big plot twist, when, after Jong Woo is hospitalized, the police officer goes to visit him and identifies the sound she was looking for: the movement of the teeth of Moojon's victims that he had given to the protagonist in the form of a bracelet. This same sound was heard by her when the pervert had been murdered, that is, Jong Woo was actually responsible for all the murders that happened, from that one to Moojon's, in which he presents several hallucinations as if they were really talking at the time. The kdrama ends with him writing "Die" several times. - You are the best work I have ever created. Even though Moojon has died, he still remains alive in Jong Woo. In fact, more than physical manipulation, the villain uses psychological manipulation and often presents himself in a subtle way, causing hallucinations and distortions of reality in the victim, mentally exhausting him to the point of making him question his sanity and actually freaking out.
Indeed, the plot goes beyond mere heinous homicides to reveal the psychological nature. “Strangers from Hell” is a literal portrait of our intense negative and intrusive internal thoughts, which, in order to live in society, we have to abstain from.
“It doesn’t matter what they did to you, but what you do with what they did to you” - Sartre
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This drama shows the ugly side of humans, to be exact, not understanding what a man is truly going through. (Judging a book by its covers) so it shows the consequences of it.
Give it a try! It’s awesome!
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unnerving, unsettling and uncomfortable
TW: this show has animal death, attempted sexual assault, and lots of blood/goreI honestly didn’t know what to expect with this show as I hadn’t heard much about it, but it really did exceed my expectations.
Initially I was drawn to this because *Lee Dong Wook* but if I’m honest, Yim Si Wan really did steal the show. His performance was fantastic and he really nailed that slow descent into madness; he managed to convey the real and terrifying aspects of depression, anxiety, paranoia and doubt. That combined with the PTSD of the character’s time in the army was absolutely perfect in the most devastating way.
The supporting cast were extremely unnerving; I’ll be honest, Lee Joong Ok’s performance as Nam Bok (ie. The Pervert in 313) made it very difficult for me to watch. He just oozed creepiness, and I have to give credit to the actor for managing to pull that off. Lee Jung Eun as Mrs. Eom was also a very unsettling performance; sickly sweet but pushy with a very dark side. I admit that the twins (played by Park Jong Hwan) was maybe my least favourite; there’s something uncomfortable about having a mentally disabled character as a villain, especially when the character is abusing animals – it just feels a little stereotyped and unfair. I will say that the characters of the twins were interesting in their differences to one another.
Lee Dong Wook as Moon Jo was mesmerising and terrifying. This was such a different role for me to see him in and he nailed it. He was absolutely fantastic opposite Yim Si Wan; I’ve seen some people argue about Moon Jo’s feelings towards Jong Woo, and I can see most points. However, my interpretation of Lee’s performance was an all consuming obsession with Jong Woo. It was uncomfortable but absolutely fantastic.
Ahn Eun Jin as the young police officer was a great choice; she managed to imbue the feeling of being a rookie but with a good head on her shoulders.
Stangers From Hell is an uncomfortable, unnerving and unsettling watch, and I absolutely loved it.
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i am so tired after this
This is the first time I've had this feeling of tiredness after watching a series.A feeling of having watched double the number of episodes. But this is positive because this oppressive atmosphere is desired by the series. From the start we dive in and find ourselves trapped during this week of horror in the life of Yim Si Wan (perfect performance).
Between work (brighter atmosphere) and the guesthouse (dark atmosphere), we find ourselves preferring neither situation because we are under constant pressure. Yim Si Wan's repeated breakdowns just make us doubt when the breakdowns will actually happen.
The only downside that we can find in the series is that the protagonist could and should have left this boarding house after realizing the situation.
The end of the series is the last nail in our hard journey in this oppressive series with a plot twist that leaves us perplexed in front of our screen.
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Horror that gets under your skin...
STRANGERS FROM HELL (Hell is Other People/ Tainuen Jiokida) based on a webtoon by the same name, was an excellent psychological horror drama, full of dark, gritty weirdness. It many ways it takes you down the rabbit hole, so to speak, delving into dark topics on the basis of human nature. Are we good? Are we evil? Perhaps there's only a fine line in between. Strangers from Hell showcases all that darkness of human nature and exhibits the increasingly troubled mind of our struggling young protagonist as he deals with other people, and their various forms of evil and darknesses.Everything escalates from there. And what we get is such a masterpiece, though one that might be difficult to stomach, as its themes get increasingly darker and darker. Suffice it to say there are many references of murder, torture, cannibalism, and other forms of cruelty that can make most of us a bit squeamish. The slow build up, jarred with occasional but shocking scenes of violence or the macabre, makes the whole experience rather tense.
As a whole, the show completed what it set out to do. Give us viewers a dismal and disturbing glimpse into human nature, as through a mirror darkly. It does so brilliantly. Combine the excellent cast and acting, great original soundtrack, with great story buildup, and elements that mix the mystery, crime, suspense, and horror genres, you get an utterly twisted journey such as this series. It definitely might not be for everyone, especially for the faint of heart. It gets under your skin.
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