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The feature film debut of South Korean filmmaker Jason Yu, Sleep comes with big praise from Parasite director Bong Joon-Ho, who calls it “the smartest debut I’ve seen in ten years.”
And that debut horror film arrives this week. Magnet Releasing will unleash Sleep in theaters and on Digital on September 27, 2024.
The film stars veteran actors Lee Sun-kyun (Parasite) and Jung Yu-mi (Train to Busan) as a couple whose newlywedded bliss transforms into a nightmare when the husband’s new sleepwalking problem turns dangerous.
“I think it was two things,” the filmmaker said of landing on horror for his feature debut. “First, was that the subject matter itself sort of dictated itself into becoming a horror genre story. I couldn’t really see it any other way: a sleepwalking husband is wreaking havoc on the household. It felt suitable to become a horror film.
“Although, as an audience member, I wasn’t really a big fan of horror films at first just because of how easily scared I am,” Yu confesses. “Just the lingering after-effects that I had to suffer through each time my friends dragged me to a horror film. I think because of the traumatic experiences during my teens, I kind of veered off and veered away from watching horror films that much. But then, when I realized that Sleep had to be a horror film, I really had to do my homework.
“Catching up on all the great horror films, I realized that I really love the genre. And even now, even after creating Sleep, it’s my favorite genre. Now, it’s the only genre that I actively seek out and catch up on all the films that have been released.”
“The second one was that this is more of a Korean industry thing, I think,” Yu continues. “Before directing Sleep, I was an assistant director. Unlike the States, an assistant director in Korea is a very temporary gig. They are aspiring directors who wish to direct one day. So what we have to do in between projects that we AD is write our own screenplays, hoping that they’ll get picked up by a studio and one day we will be able to direct. I think it’s still valid right now, but at the time, there was this rumor or an axiom that to get a film made to successfully debut, what you have to do is create a horror film. Because there is always an active demand, at least in Korea; despite its quality, there is a market for it in Korea. So, if you create or write a horror screenplay, there’s a higher chance of it getting picked up by the studios. Although I don’t think I was very conscious of that when writing Sleep, maybe it had subconsciously driven me towards that genre. I’m not quite sure.”
There’s a subtle narrative structure at play in Sleep, with the wife’s fear prominently explored in the first half before the second half sees the husband afraid. Jason Yu reveals that structure “came quite late during the screenwriting process. And before that came to be, I wasn’t very passionate about the story because before I found that aspect about the screenplay, it was very gimmicky, I felt. The story. It was just about sleepwalking symptoms of the husband, the wife being terrified. The next night, there’ll be even severe symptoms, as well as severe and dangerous things happening. Then, the wife becomes terrified even more. I felt it was very repetitive, boring, and gimmicky.
“But I realized that the film is not really about the terrors of sleepwalking, but the reactions of Soo-jin, the wife character, to that and how the relationship changes because of this. When I discovered that thread, I realized that’s what the film’s about. That’s when I garnered a lot of passion for the project. And when I was really able to flesh out what the story would be. When I did that, it’s pretty much what you see on the screen. So after discovering that aspect about the story, I think I wrote it pretty quickly, and it never really deviated from that structure till the end.”
Also subtle but effective in Yu’s debut is the use of the camera and how it tracks the emotional and psychological state of its central characters. “I think the rule we set for the cinematographer was that we can’t really rely on the location or the visual aspects of the location because it’s very simple and bland,“ Yu explains of the camerawork. “We made it so that it feels like a real Korean household, and usually, they’re very almost sterile and bland. The structure is like a box-like structure that you can’t really do anything. There’s no depth to it. So that was a struggle for the cinematographer and the production designer who really wanted to make the film as visually beautiful as possible.
“But they had to meet me halfway because I was striving for realism. It had to feel like a home just to enhance the horror of it. The rule of thumb was to follow the psychology of the protagonist and their relationship and really just try to find ways to enhance and capture how they’re feeling and if there’s even a shift or a slight shift in their psychology or their relationship. Try to really capture that in the most effective way possible.”
Yu continues, “I guess as much as I relied on the two veteran actors’ performances, I really relied on the cinematographer and the production designer to effectively capture these performances because I felt that that was pretty much more than half of what the film could offer. We didn’t have a lot of changing locations. Because of that constraint, I think we really worked hard on trying to, how should I say, try to give every shot and every beat an intention. I think because of how they say a constraint is a form of liberation of everything; we try to cram as much as we can into everything in a single shot. Every prop or every camera move or every point of edit, there has to be a purpose to it just because we didn’t have a lot to work with.”
In studying horror for his debut, Yu did find inspiration for Sleep. He tells Bloody Disgusting, “I think I learned from almost every horror film that I had watched trying to prepare for Sleep. But the ones that stand out are The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby. After watching the film with the audience in film festivals, the most frequent question I get asked is, were you inspired by The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby? At that time, I didn’t think I was, or during pre-production at least, or writing the film, I didn’t really think I was. But after the fact, I realized that I was very influenced by those films. It would’ve been almost shameless to say that I wasn’t.”
Because he’s become such a fan of the genre, we can likely expect to see more from him in the future. “I would love to do more horror in the future,” Yu says. “I have a couple of projects that I am passionate about, and one of them is a horror. Not unlike Sleep, but I think it’s slightly bigger in scale. I think I’m slightly better at it now than I was when I was making Sleep. So I really want to hone my craft and my prowess as a horror filmmaker and give it another go.“
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