A Treasure Trove of B-Movies
Gam Seongbeom scratched his cheek and said, “The phone won’t stop ringing with invitations to lunch, but not a single casting offer in sight.”
Do Jaeyeon shot back, “That’s because Lee Heeyoon’s age is so awkward. But at the same time, nobody can afford to just sit on a kid who’s obviously going places.”
“Tch, this is what, an empty wallet with a growing belly?”
He grumbled, but it was the kind of complaint any agent would kill to have. A steady stream of lunch invitations meant that plenty of industry insiders wanted an open relationship with Leader Actors. Everyone had their eye on Lee Heeyoon’s potential.
Gam Seongbeom jerked his chin at the stack of scripts piled on his desk. “Speaking of which, did he really read all of those? He keeps pestering me to bring back more.”
“Every last one. Why do you think the VP’s been eating samgyetang for lunch every day lately? The man has no energy left from reading scripts aloud with Heeyoon all day.”
“What’s wrong with him, why can’t he read on his own?”
“Oh, he can read alone just fine. He just gets bored. Heeyoon’s never been great at being by himself, you know.”
Do Jaeyeon answered as if it were nothing at all. Right on cue, the drained-looking VP Gam Soohan emerged from the soundproof practice room.
“You read through all of those?” Gam Seongbeom asked. “How were they?”
“Quite a few good ones, actually. Heeyoon liked them too. The trouble is, there’s no role in any of them that fits him.”
“There were all those school dramas. Even a teen romance or two.”
“There were. Plenty, in fact—but he’s too young for all of them. The actors in the running for the lead in that teen romance are barely mid-twenties as it is.”
It had been nothing short of a miracle that a drama like Garden of Manyusa happened to have a major role for a boy his age. Gam Soohan went on, “Theater, at least, has a few decent openings. He wants to audition for the Arthur Miller one. There’s an open audition coming up soon—and it’s a play Heeyoon has always loved.”
“Honestly, is this kid addicted to the printed word or what? Is there anything he hasn’t read?”
On the faces of the Leader Actors staff as they talked, exhaustion and excitement coexisted in equal measure.
And yet beneath that excitement, not a single one of them was taking the situation for granted. The market was that unforgiving, and they all believed the same thing: for Heeyoon to truly establish himself as an actor, he would need to build name recognition as an adult performer.
“For now, let’s make the open audition our first priority,” Gam Seongbeom said.
An actor who had just turned eighteen—a boy of sixteen by Korean age—needed at least a rough life plan to grow into an adult actor. But at the same time, everyone knew full well that Lee Heeyoon was no sprout inclined to grow in whatever direction the adults around him wished.
First priorities could always change. In the end, the boy would do exactly what he wanted to do.
I had been operating under a slight misunderstanding about Jang Chae-rin.
I’d assumed that bullying had cowed her into wanting only small, unremarkable roles.
It wasn’t that the bullying had no effect on her. But the plainer truth was that her taste was simply, genuinely unique.
Jang Chae-rin loved films that went beyond experimental and landed squarely on strange.
“Isn’t this one going to be amazing?”
The movie she shoved at us, eyes glittering, left me, Ki I-an, and Woo Woongbae—who had dropped by for a visit—considerably at a loss.
“So basically, the hand cream people keep losing—”
“—multiplies until it outnumbers the human population of Earth and rises up in revolt.”
“Oh.”
“It’s realistic horror, you know.”
Woo Woongbae, who could barely bring himself to say a harsh word to a girl, kept his mouth firmly shut. Ki I-an, her closest friend since their child-actor days, made an honest attempt to receive the pitch before retreating a full step. Then he turned to me.
“What about you?”
I believe very few films in this world are without value—not that I’d claim every film has value either—but I had no particular desire to watch this one.
“I don’t have time for stuff like that.”
“…Moments like this, I genuinely envy your personality,” Ki I-an muttered without quite meaning to. Woo Woongbae, silent this whole time, finally spoke up.
“Got any other movies?”
“Do I ever! Tons. This year is a golden age of experimental work, I’m telling you. Oh—how about this one?”
Something about humans turning into cheesecake, or a potted plant that comes back no matter how many times you throw it away. I glanced over the mountain of films Jang Chae-rin kept producing and shook my head.
“I’m busy. Not watching.”
“Then this one!”
She wasn’t giving up. The next film she held out to me was titled The Chain Letter.
According to her, it was about a ghost that clung to old-fashioned paper chain letters—until people started forwarding the curse en masse over social media, making it so easy to keep the taboo that the poor thing couldn’t do anything wicked for a good long while, and finally passed on to the afterlife in peace.
That one actually piqued my interest, and I watched it with real attention—which earned me a baffled scowl from Ki I-an.
“Why are you interested in this, dude?”
“Smooth out that frown. It’ll make you ugly.”
“You’re saying I’m ugly right now?”
“Are you satisfied with being not-ugly?”
I asked in all sincerity, and the other three—Ki I-an included—stared back at me with inexplicably grave expressions. What? What did I say? Sometimes even saying the right thing felt like a losing deal, purely because of this face.
Anyway, that movie seemed safe enough to watch.
At her core, Jang Chae-rin disliked human beings and adored the inhuman and despair alike. She loved things that skirted the very edge of taboo. The catastrophic, the doomed—that was her one true weakness.
After insisting the whole time that she’d watch nothing, the moment I showed interest in a single title, she began looking at me as a person with whom she could finally share her taste, and her eyes were sparkling.
“Want to come visit our agency sometime?”
“Isn’t your dad the only one there?”
“Yep. Want to come?”
“Even if I go, I’m not signing anything.”
“Aw…”
She deflated for exactly one second. Absurd. Then Jang Chae-rin bounced right back.
“Fine, no contract needed. Still want to come?”
“What’s there to see?”
“Whenever my dad finds a scenario that fits my taste, he brings home as many as he can. There might be something in there you’d like too.”
“Your dad’s on your side too?”
“Isn’t that obvious? My dad and I have exactly the same taste.”
At her words, I felt myself wavering a little. So did Ki I-an beside me. And without question, Woo Woongbae wavered the most of all. We set off for Jang Chae-rin’s agency.
Jang Chae-rin’s agency occupied a single floor of a shabby old building. Seeing it, I thought: wow, our company really is bold enough to be renting out a whole big tower. Not that it could hold a candle to the building I’d built for them in my previous life.
The moment we walked in, I got Jang Chae-rin’s father’s blessing and went straight for the scenarios.
This place was heaven for low-budget horror films. Occult, slasher, zombie—there wasn’t a genre they didn’t have, and nothing here wasn’t obscure. It wasn’t exclusively horror, either; there was a fair share of mysteries and the inhuman romances Jang Chae-rin so adored.
Of all these scenarios, how many would actually make it to production? I found myself hoping as many as possible would get made. The more films in the world, the better. Lots of people making movies meant the market was in decent shape, after all. If the market went bad, the people who made films would drift away in search of a living.
I dug through the scenarios one after another.
Most of my memories of films from before my regression had blurred, but whenever I came across something I’d seen, a hazy recollection would surface. The trouble was, nearly everything here was a film I had never once laid eyes on.
The moment I showed interest, Jang Chae-rin lit up and began pressing her favorite scenarios on me, one after another.
“This one’s about an exorcist who performs a rite over Zoom during the pandemic era.”
Unlike the pitch, it was terrifying from the very first page.
Even within that ocean of assorted horror, Jang Chae-rin’s own taste was clearly defined. Her taste was bizarre, yes—but every single one of her picks was impeccably crafted. Little by little, I came to trust her recommendations. Then Woo Woongbae spoke up.
“Hey. Posture.”
“Huh? Oh. Right.”
Whenever I sank too deep into a script, Woo Woongbae would toss me a one-line reminder to fix my posture. He was an actor, he said, so he ought to sit properly even in daily life. An actor with turtle-neck syndrome didn’t look beautiful on screen either. Fair point. I agreed.
Which is to say, the moment I catch myself in that posture, it means I’m interested.
So the instant I lifted my head, I found Jang Chae-rin watching me with a face full of hope. What outlandish story had she brought this time? My heart fluttered too… damn it. I’m being assimilated.
In any case, Jang Chae-rin handed me a single scenario.
“This one… I really, really want to see it get made.”
I sat with my back pressed against the wall to keep my neck from curving, and opened the script.
It was the grotesque story of a woman who, after receiving a skin graft from her brain-dead husband, fell in love with herself. Honestly? This one looked genuinely good.
There was even a role I could play. The woman begins raising the grafted skin as something separate from herself—and that separated skin grows into a third creature, neither her lover nor herself. A grotesque being that resembles her too much, and at times the man she loved; not herself, not her husband, and not a child either—some uncanny life form altogether its own.
Both the actor playing the husband and the actress playing the wife were written as characters in their mid-to-late thirties. And yet I genuinely believed I could take on the creature, because it was a role that was neither adult nor child—and its face never appeared, meaning there was no need for an adult to play it.
My voice still carried traces of a boy’s. Even after my voice changed, it refused to settle for quite a while. If I remembered right, I only acquired the adult voice I would use for the rest of my life around the winter I turned twenty-two.
Of course, any production company would hand the creature to an actor at least the leads’ age. But I found myself wanting that part. Badly.
Woo Woongbae had been reading over my shoulder, and he said, “…Huh. This is pretty good.”
The moment both of us gave our stamp of approval, Ki I-an—who’d been rummaging around for something he might conceivably play himself—came over to join us.
The three of us spread the scenario out between us and read it, hungrily, together. It was that gripping—gripping enough that we looked utterly ridiculous doing it.
Partway through, Ki I-an had to leave for a schedule, and Jang Chae-rin, the very person who’d invited us here, left first as well. Woo Woongbae headed home not long after. I stayed behind in someone else’s company, alone, waiting for Gam Soohan to come pick me up. Even Jang Chae-rin’s father showed a complete stranger like me how to lock up before he left.
So there I was, the last one in the office, finishing the scenario—when Gam Soohan arrived.
The second I laid eyes on him, I said it.
“Hyung, I want to audition for this.”