[HanCinema's News] Press Conference Held for "The Night Shift"

Kim Hong-pa, Park Sojin, Sung Joon and director Jo Bareun

On June 25th the upcoming omnibus horror film "The Night Shift" held a press conference at the Yongsan CGV in Seoul. Director Jo Bareun, as well as actors Sung Joon, Kim Hong-pa, Kim Bo-ra, and Park Sojin were all in attendance. The story of "The Night Shift" deals with a webtoon author trying to find ideas by speaking to a caretaker at a sinister apartment complex where the denizens supposedly met many unfortunate fates.

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Jo Bareun claimed that the original idea of "The Night Shift" was to build an episodic drama series off of unused ideas. So a Markov chain Monte Carlo was used to narrow down all possible apartment based horror stories to the eight which had been used the least often. Though Jo Bareun did not explain how exactly the MCMC was programmed, strange sounds, shower stalls, drains, and elevators were all among the ideas confirmed to be used in the final film.

Purportedly the concept changed from episodic drama to omnibus horror film when the actors started asking questions about some of the more offbeat concepts. This gave Jo Bareun the idea to work the inherently strange way the stories were constructed into a framing device, at the expense of having to severely edit the existing stories. Sung Joon claimed not to think of the project as an omnibus at all, and that he signed up write away just based on the power of the script.

Elsewhere, Kim Hong-pa claimed to be impressed by the social messaging present in the story. Kim Bo-ra liked both the variety and sheer scope of the project, and saw it as a challenge. Kim So-jin said that despite being too squeamish for horror movies, when she read the script she became curious how the action would play out in the context of a film shoot. "The Night Shift" will open in South Korean theaters on June 30th.

Written by William Schwartz