The Host is the top-grossing film in the history of South Korean cinema, and it’s not hard to see why. Unlike much of the Korean cinema that gets exported internationally, this is not an “art film,” even if the fact that it has subtitles relegates it to the arthouse circuit in the US. On the other hand, it is also more than a state-of-the-art monster movie: Asian patrons who came to see the giant, slimy, nasty, carnivorous beastie came back for repeat viewings because of the characters and the way they represent Koreans of their generation.

Documentary films about poets often fall into one of two traps: Either they assume that the poet’s life is primarily constituted by the circumstances of his or her social milieu—that is, by those famous people the poet slept with, fought with, or about whom the poet wrote nasty things; or they assume that each line of each poem has some corresponding reality in the biographical details of the poet’s life. The former assumes that the life of the poet takes place outside the act of writing, the latter that writing is simply a transcription of a poet’s experience exactly as it occurred.