In 2007, the Korean film industry hit the skids. Overproduction resulted in a glut of shoddy movies and only 10% of films were turning a profit. Things looked bad, but then two low budget movies released in early 2008 became massive word-of-mouth hits and turned everything around. One of them was The Chaser. It shouldn’t have been good. Starring two mid-list actors, directed by a first timer who was best known for winning an award for his short film in the Mise en Scene Genre Short Film Festival, and based on the real life serial killer, Young-cheol Yoo (convicted of 20 murders in 2005), it looked like little more than an exercise in pointless gore. But in the hands of director Na Hong-Jin and his two actors, Ha Jung-Woo and Kim Yun-Seok, it turned into a thriller so tense that it felt like it was directed by a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and a pit bull.