The Scene Where Horn Breaks
The staffer watching the camera thought to himself.
He's actually insane.
It was his first time on a film set, and he couldn't tell if this was normal. Was this just how it worked? Were actors always this good?
Right. He's a different species altogether.
The dazzling celebrity who'd smiled so politely just moments ago, thanking everyone for their hard work—there was no trace of him now. In his place sat Horn, white hair soaked in blood-red red, staring blankly at the man in front of him.
"I believe you can do it. I know you will."
Lee Jeonghyeon, playing Dr. Kang Seok, delivered the line with unsettling smoothness.
"Don't disappoint me."
Whether they'd rehearsed the timing or this was pure improvisation, the two held each other's gaze for several long seconds.
Bang—!
And Horn shot Kang Seok.
Strictly speaking, it was Kang Seok's own finger that pulled the trigger—but the precise chain of facts meant nothing to Horn.
The instant the gunshot hit his ears, Horn knew.
This moment. This memory will follow me for the rest of my life.
"Hyung…?"
At first, Horn wore a somewhat bewildered expression. The deafening crack of the gunshot right in front of him. Scalding blood pouring out as if something had burst. Seok-hyung crumpling backward, boneless. Plenty of elements flooded his brain, but they all scattered and failed to cohere.
Unable to register the fact that Kang Seok has been shot, Horn simply sat there dazed for a moment. Then he saw Kang Seok vomiting blood, writhing in agony.
"Hyung. This…."
"……Ghhk."
"Is this another experiment too? Uh…."
Still seemingly cut off from reality, Horn instinctively pressed down on Kang Seok's stomach to stop the bleeding. The moment his hand met the blood-soaked flesh, hot liquid welled up even harder between his fingers.
"Horn, listen…."
"……."
"I think I'm dying soon…. Cough. Before I die, I wanted to see it… but I guess that was asking too much, huh."
It hurts so much more than I thought it would. It scared me.
Even now, Kang Seok cracked a joke, the corners of his eyes folded into a gentle curve. It was that tender smile that snapped Horn back to himself.
This could be the last time I ever see that smile. The thought consumed him.
"Why…?"
Only then did Horn start moving his hands in earnest, his face drained a ghostly blue. He tore off the white shirt he was wearing, twisted it into a makeshift bandage, and pressed it hard against Kang Seok's wound.
"It hurts. Horn…."
"Be quiet."
Horn's mind went white as a blank sheet of paper. Breathing in shallow, panicked gasps like a child gripped by terror, he had no idea what to do. Kang Seok was dying in his arms.
The movements of a child desperate to save his Seok-hyung were heartbreaking to watch.
"Why!! Why!!! Why are you doing this to me!!"
"……."
"F— it, don't just stand there staring—do SOMETHING!!"
Horn wailed like a child one moment, then screamed at the agents standing idly by the next. Somewhere in between, both their clothes had become drenched through with Kang Seok's blood. The heavy, blood-soaked fabric clung to him like a prison he couldn't escape.
Only then did Horn truly understand.
This person is really going to die.
Kang Seok is dying.
So in the end, you're abandoning me first.
"Why…?"
"……."
"What did I… do so wrong?"
At the whisper, faint as a breath, Kang Seok—still seconds from his last—smiled the smallest smile. His lips parted as if to say something, but no intelligible words came out.
And with that, Kang Seok's eyes closed for good.
This was how the script read: Horn screams while cradling Kang Seok, who has stopped breathing entirely. Jang Yoseok gathers up Horn, who has collapsed from exhaustion after so long. Jang Yoseok says, "The experiment is over. Returning to the facility," and the scene fades out—the screen slowly darkening.
"Uhng. Ughh…."
Horn wept, clutching the body of Kang Seok who would never breathe again. The mournful sound of his crying was as though he himself were dying—that was how much agony it carried.
One of the watching staffers rubbed the goosebumps rising along his arm.
Unbelievable.
This scene was the most emotionally demanding in all of Killing Horn. It had to convey, with full force, the tragedy of Horn—the scapegoat caught between Kang Seok's radically warped logic and the corporation that had stood by and allowed a capable doctor's choice to run its course.
It was an emotion far too dense for a child actor to carry. But not a single soul on set worried about Lee Yeonjae's acting ability. Everyone was barely managing to protect their own rice bowls—nobody was about to worry over the youngest actor ever to win Best Actor at Cannes.
That Lee Yeonjae could act was a fact everyone already knew. Which was exactly why the shock the staff felt now was the inevitable feeling of witnessing something extraordinary, even with all of that taken into account.
Isn't he going to dehydrate himself at this rate?
Lee Yeonjae, as Horn, was sobbing like a child, wailing with what looked like genuine anguish and confusion. Wandering, unfocused eyes. Eyelids rubbed raw from crying. Cheeks wet with tears. And through it all, his hands—whether consciously or not—kept working to stop the bleeding from Kang Seok's wound.
Obviously it's acting. Of course I know that.
There wasn't a staffer on set who didn't know it. And yet their eyes welled up all the same. A boy who had just lost the only reason he had left to keep going. The anguish pouring out of him was so vivid, so desperate, that some found themselves almost wishing he would just pass out already.
Shouldn't the PD cut by now?
To let the actor stay immersed in the emotion, the camera had been rolling continuously since the opening exchange between Kang Seok and Horn. Since Lee Yeonjae was still too young to handle live pyrotechnics, he'd mimed shooting Lee Jeonghyeon with a prop gun, and Lee Jeonghyeon had abruptly collapsed. Viewed coldly, it was an almost absurd, bare-bones setup—but the flood of emotion that followed crushed everyone watching.
The crying that had seemed like it would never end gradually subsided.
He's about to pass out, I guess.
The staffer who had started moving to begin wrapping the shoot froze solid the moment he looked at Horn.
…What.
Horn had stopped crying all at once. His cheeks were still wet with tears, but nothing more flowed from his eyes. He sat perfectly still, so motionless it seemed a fair question whether he was even breathing—not so much as an eyelash stirring.
As if someone had yanked the batteries out of a doll, Horn shut down everything at once—breathing included. The light drained from his eyes in a single, decisive instant.
"……."
At the sight of Horn looking so completely gone, silence fell over the entire set. The staffers and the other actors found themselves holding their breath along with him.
The silence, which felt like it might stretch into eternity, finally broke when Horn's eyes began to move—slowly.
He gazed for a moment at the body growing cold in his arms. Then he simply stood up.
Fainting was out of the question. Horn rose matter-of-factly and brushed off his knees. Checking whether his broken right arm had healed, he spoke to the extra actor standing nearby.
"Hey."
"…?"
"Take this back to my room. I'm heading straight to the experiment wing."
The extra, whose role called for standing silently without a single line, couldn't hide his bewilderment. When no answer came, Horn stopped rotating his wrist and scowled.
"You deaf?"
"…No. It's just, if you mean that…."
The extra's voice came out low and gravelly, roughened from hours of standing there without a word—which, as it happened, made him feel all the more like a tense, tightly-wound agent.
"Would it be easier if I told you to call it a corpse? Then do that."
"……."
The extra broke into a cold sweat trying to figure out how on earth to match the ad-lib. That was when Kim Seokjun, playing Agent Jang Yoseok, stepped in. Catching the dismissive look, the extra immediately bowed his head and stumbled backward.
Watching him go, Horn let out a quiet curse.
"F—. Guess only my words come through as f— to you people."
Jang Yoseok looked down at Kang Seok's corpse with a conflicted face, then turned his gaze to Horn. Checking whether his right arm had fully reattached, Horn looked impossibly, almost unnervingly fine.
"H. You…."
"No time. Get back to the facility. I need to confirm Seok-hyung's wish was actually granted."
"……."
Horn was moving to brush right past the speechless Jang Yoseok when he stopped short. He tilted his head, then poked Jang Yoseok on the cheek. Once. Twice.
"Just so we're clear—don't you dare toy with me using that."
A playful smile hung on his lips as he said it.
"……."
"If I go to your room after the experiment's over and that thing isn't there, every last one of you dies. Got it?"
Horn smiled and pointed at Jang Yoseok's cheek. Jang Yoseok, dazed, followed the gesture and raised a hand to his own face. When he touched his cheek, a small amount of blood smeared onto his fingers.
Detonating it in this state wouldn't cost him his life—but that wasn't the point. The message Horn had just delivered was crystal clear.
I can kill you all now.
Jang Yoseok looked down at Kang Seok's body lying on the floor.
"Is this… what you wanted?"
No answer came to the question posed to a corpse. And because it looked so much like his own future, Jang Yoseok let out a low groan and closed his eyes.
"…Cut!"
Even at the PD's loud call, no one could quite let the tension go. Most of them looked lost, unable to process what had just happened. As everyone stood in the stillness, barely breathing, Lee Yeonjae quietly moved.
"Excuse me, Writer-nim."
"Y-yes? Oh—uh?"
Lee Yeonjae approached the main writer, who was still standing there in a daze.
"I got too immersed… I added more ad-libs than was probably appropriate. I'm sorry for changing what was in the script without permission."
"Oh… no. Oh my, no, Yeonjae. Don't worry about it. I loved it. Truly."
The main writer shook his head frantically. Actors ignoring a writer's script and changing the story on their own was, at any point in a career, an unpleasant experience. There were writers who despised even a single stray ad-lib.
Just now, Lee Yeonjae had walked off under his own power instead of fainting, exactly against what the script specified. It was a total disregard of the script. And yet the main writer clasped Lee Yeonjae's hands tightly in his own.
"Yeonjae. Thank you…."
It was a feeling too large to be fully carried by words. The writer had just witnessed the moment his own character became complete. Having written for so long, he knew better than anyone how rare it was to experience this.
"No one but you could have played Horn. Thank you, truly."
At the heartfelt thanks, Lee Yeonjae smiled gently.
"I'm relieved you weren't upset. So—do we not need to reshoot it as written?"
"I prefer the revised version. PD-nim, what do you think?"
At the writer's call, the PD cut in as if he'd been waiting for exactly this.
"We're going with this version, obviously! Thank goodness you approve too, Writer-nim. Yeonjae, seriously… how do you act like that?"
At the praise, Lee Yeonjae only quietly lifted the corner of his mouth. Seeing him look completely fine after shooting such a grueling emotional scene, the PD let out a satisfied laugh.
Perfect. Let's keep the momentum.
He was just thinking they should resume filming immediately, without losing the flow—
—when a massive man came striding toward them. The PD instinctively stepped back before realizing it was Lee Yeonjae's manager.
"PD-nim. Writer-nim. I'm sorry, but would it be all right to take a short break before we continue shooting?"
"Ah… yes, of course. We have plenty of time, so that's fine, but wouldn't it be better to keep rolling straight through? Picking the emotional line back up from scratch will be hard on the actor."
Ahn Jinbae shook his head at once.
"No. He needs rest. I'd ask for your understanding."
Perfectly courteous—and utterly immovable. The PD found himself nodding before he knew it.
Wow. He really looks after his actor, huh.
He'd heard Lee Yeonjae's manager was famously overprotective, but apparently the rumors were true.
Rest? For what? The kid looks perfectly fine to me.
It was just as the PD turned his head, thinking this, that he saw it.
Lee Yeonjae, smiling like a doll, entered his field of view.
…Huh?
The PD's mouth fell slightly open.
Oblivious to any reaction around him, Ahn Jinbae gently lifted his actor's chin. And met a pair of vast, empty black eyes.
"Actor-nim. Breathe."