rule of Syngman Rhee through the civilian April Revolution. In 1962, another military authoritarian, General Park Chung-Hee, would ascend to power and rule South Korea for nearly two decades. The short period of relative freedom between these two administrations was known as the Second Republic. During this time, filmmakers took advantage of the relaxation of governmental control over the film industry to create several boldly experimental works. Director Yu Hyun-mok's film Aimless Bullet (1960) dates from this period, as does Kim Ki-young's major breakthrough, The Housemaid (also 1960). A lurid, expressionistic melodrama set in an eerie house, involving sexual obsessions, murder and rats, this is the first film in which Kim's mature style is fully evident, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest Korean films ever made. The film is a domestic thriller telling of a family's destruction by the introduction of a sexually predatory femme fatale into the household. A composer has just moved into a two-storey house with his wife and two children. When his wife becomes exhausted from working at a sewing machine to support the family, the composer hires a housemaid to help with the work around the house. The new housemaid behaves strangely, catching rats with her hands, spying on the composer, seducing him and eventually becoming pregnant by him. The composer's wife convinces the housemaid to induce a miscarriage by falling down a flight of stairs. After this incident, the housemaid's behavior becomes increasingly more erratic. She kills the composer's son, and then persuades the composer to commit suicide with her by swallowing rat poison. The film ends with the composer reading the story from a newspaper with his wife. The narrative of the film has apparently been told by the composer, who then warns the film audience that this is just the sort of thing could happen to anyone. The Housemaid marked Kim's full break with realism, the main style of Korean cinema at the time, into his own version of expressionism. The plot, themes and even character names set out in The Housemaid were to be revisited by Kim repeatedly in his later career. Besides the first film, the official "Housemaid Trilogy" consists of Woman of Fire (1971) and Woman of Fire '82 (1982). Also, at least two other later films—Insect Woman (1972) and Beasts of Prey (1985)—are, in some ways, remakes of The Housemaid. By using the story as