neighborhood gossip, and write all night in the dark. South Korean film critic Lee Young-il remembers that Kim's shoes were never shined, and that one of his few material pleasures was gourmet coffee. Kim Ki-young's unconventional and nonconformist nature also prevented him from participating in South Korea's mainstream film industry. The only official title he held within the film community was member of The National Academy of Arts, which he joined in 1997, and he did not cultivate friendships with journalists who could further his career. Nevertheless, since the early 1960s, Kim Ki-young's status as one of the greatest and most original Korean film directors had never been in doubt. His stylistic preoccupation with sexuality, horror and melodrama had earned Kim the nickname, "Mister Monster" from his admirers. However, by the 1980s Kim's career had fallen into neglect. His continued fascination with B-movie exploitation themes as well as the increasingly obsessive and subversive nature of his films resulted in his isolation from the film community, and in financial failures at the box-office. The last of the Housemaid trilogy, Woman of Fire '82 (1982) is an even more radicalized and baroque retelling of the same basic story he had filmed numerous times in the previous two decades. By the mid-1980s, Kim's film output had slowed and finally stopped. In the early 1990s Kim's work began to be rediscovered by South Korean cult film fans who discussed his films through the Internet and exchanged hard-to-find copies by videotape. Noticing this growing domestic Kim Ki-young cult, the Dongsung Cinematheque, an art-house theater in Seoul, programmed a retrospective showing of Kim's films. With his profile again high in Korean film society, Kim's work began to attract international attention. Five of his films were screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 1996. When Kim Ki-young's career was highlighted at the second Pusan International Film Festival in 1997, his work found enthusiastic new audiences in the international film community. The strongly positive reception of Kim's work by international audiences surprised the festival organizers, who immediately began receiving requests for overseas retrospectives of Kim's career. With this renewed interest, Kim began work on a comeback film to be titled Diabolical Woman. The Berlin International Film Festival invited him to attend a showing of his films in 1998. Before Kim started work on the film or attended the festival, he and his wife were killed in a