# The Housemaid (하녀) (1960 film)
**The Housemaid** (하녀) is a 1960 South Korean black-and-white feature film directed, written, and produced by Kim Ki-young (김기영), in which an unstable housemaid destroys the middle-class family that employs her. It premiered on November 3, 1960 at the Myeongbo Theater in Seoul, runs 111 minutes, and stars Kim Jin-kyu, Lee Eun-shim, and Ju Jeung-ryu.[1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048) • [2](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833) Widely regarded as a masterpiece of Korean cinema, it was ranked first in the Korean Film Archive's 2013 and 2024 polls of the greatest Korean films and was registered as a National Registered Cultural Heritage in 2024.[3](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20240531071500005) • [4](https://www.hankyung.com/article/202412122088H)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director, writer, producer | Kim Ki-young (1919–1998), who also edited the film[1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048) • [5](https://history.chosun.com/history/popup.jsp?id=20141204_0001) |
| Release | November 3, 1960, Myeongbo Theater, Seoul; black and white, 111 minutes[1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048) • [2](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833) |
| Cast | Kim Jin-kyu (Dong-sik), Lee Eun-shim (the maid), Ju Jeung-ryu (the wife), Um Aeng-ran, Ahn Sung-ki[2](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833) |
| Box office | Over 100,000 tickets sold; one of 1960's biggest Korean box-office successes[6](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/inFocus.jsp?blbdComCd=601018&mode=VIEW&seq=371) |
| Restoration | Digitally restored in 2008 by the Korean Film Archive with Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation; premiered at Cannes Classics[7](https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/3156076) |
| Critical standing | First place in the Korean Film Archive's Korean Film 100 in both 2013 (jointly) and 2024[3](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20240531071500005) |
| Heritage status | Registered as a National Registered Cultural Heritage in December 2024[4](https://www.hankyung.com/article/202412122088H) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
Kim Dong-sik (Kim Jin-kyu) teaches music at a textile factory and supports his pregnant wife (Ju Jeung-ryu), a daughter with a leg disability, and a young son, Chang-soon (Ahn Sung-ki, as a child actor). Exhausted by sewing work to pay for the family's new two-story house, the wife asks Dong-sik's piano student Kyung-hee (Um Aeng-ran), a factory worker, to introduce a housemaid. The maid (Lee Eun-shim) moves in.[1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048) • [2](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833)
While the wife is away visiting her family, Kyung-hee confesses her love to Dong-sik and is rebuffed; the maid, watching secretly from outside, then seduces him and becomes pregnant. The wife persuades the maid to induce a miscarriage by falling down the stairs. Having lost the baby, the maid grows violent and causes the son Chang-soon to fall down the stairs to his death. When she threatens to tell the factory everything, the wife sends Dong-sik to the maid's upstairs bedroom to protect the household. Dong-sik and the maid drink rat poison together; he breaks away from the dying maid, returns to his wife's side, and dies. The film then returns to its opening scene, in which the couple reads a newspaper article about a maid seducing the man of a household, and Dong-sik turns to the audience to say that this could happen to anyone.[1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048) • [2](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833)
## Production and style
Kim Ki-young based the film on a real incident from the 1950s and hesitated to make it for fear of censorship, proceeding only when artistic restrictions eased during the presidency of [Yun Po-sun](https://www.edgepedia.org/yun-po-sun).[6](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/inFocus.jsp?blbdComCd=601018&mode=VIEW&seq=371) He produced, wrote, directed, and edited the film himself, working through his own Kim Ki-young Production with Korea Literary Film Company.[5](https://history.chosun.com/history/popup.jsp?id=20141204_0001) • [2](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833)
The film is frequently described as expressionist. A university course syllabus on classic Korean cinema lists its use of German-expressionist visual methods as a defining feature, and architectural scholarship treats it as a key record of 1960s Korean housing space.[8](https://www.kocw.net/home/common/contents/syllabus/1492001_2024052414233422.pdf) • [9](https://kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART001656062) The two-story house itself functions as a psychological instrument: the Busan International Film Festival's catalog notes that its neo-gothic visual style and ominous mood invite comparison with [Michael Powell](https://www.edgepedia.org/michael-powell)'s *Peeping Tom* and [Alfred Hitchcock](https://www.edgepedia.org/alfred-hitchcock)'s *Psycho*, both made around the same time.[10](https://biff.kr/eng/html/archive/arc_history_view.asp?kind=history&m_idx=18429&pyear=2015) Sound is central as well: scholarship on the film identifies dissonant, atonal music and off-screen sound as the devices through which the maid's desire and the family's anxiety are expressed, in contrast to the lyrical piano playing that stands for the family's middle-class aspirations.[11](https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/landing/article.kci?arti_id=ART001648296) • [6](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/inFocus.jsp?blbdComCd=601018&mode=VIEW&seq=371)
The film departs from the melodrama conventions of its day through its framing devices. It opens with the couple reading a newspaper report of a maid's seduction of her employer, and closes with Dong-sik addressing the camera directly, telling the audience the story could happen to anyone; a Google Arts & Culture exhibition by the film historian Kim Dong-hyun describes these prologue and epilogue as marking the film's mixture of fact and fiction.[2](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833) • [12](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/UAWhNODrZvcE2w?hl=ko)
## Themes and reception at release
The film dramatizes the anxieties of a rapidly modernizing society. Its characters, a rural-born working woman and a householder striving to join the middle class, reflect the conditions of early industrializing Korea, and the two-story house stages a claustrophobic domestic suspense.[13](https://koreafilm.co.kr/movie/housemaid1960/housemaid60_2.htm) Contemporary commentary reads the film as exposing how fragile the new urban middle class's position was: the Segye Ilbo's history of Korean cinema describes it as revealing that everything a family built over ten years could collapse because of one maid, and notes that applying horror and thriller conventions to the family melodrama was a pioneering move that succeeded commercially as well.[14](https://www.segye.com/newsView/20190704515143)
Contemporary critics were divided. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture records that some praised the film as a noteworthy experiment with meticulous direction, while others dismissed it with labels such as bizarre taste, exaggeration, and an excess of the grotesque. The film critic Lee Yeon-ho later argued that these features should be read not as simply anti-woman but as stylized and over-coded in Kim Ki-young's own colors, and that what matters is what the distortion says.[1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048)
Commercially, the film sold over 100,000 tickets and became one of the year's biggest box-office successes.[6](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/inFocus.jsp?blbdComCd=601018&mode=VIEW&seq=371) One Korean film-history site gives the figure as 220,000 admissions, the year's highest for a Korean film; the discrepancy between the two figures is unresolved in the sources.[15](https://seore.org/w/%ED%95%98%EB%85%80%281960%29) For Lee Eun-shim, the association with the cursed-out character proved difficult to overcome; after two commercial failures she left the screen early.[6](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/inFocus.jsp?blbdComCd=601018&mode=VIEW&seq=371) • [16](https://koreafilm.co.kr/movie/housemaid1960/housemaid60_4.htm)
## Restoration and later standing
The original negative was found in 1982 missing two of its reels; a 1990 print with English subtitles, prepared for overseas festivals, supplied the missing footage.[13](https://koreafilm.co.kr/movie/housemaid1960/housemaid60_2.htm) In 2008 the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) restored the film digitally with support from the World Cinema Foundation, the foundation led by Martin Scorsese, and the restored version premiered in the Cannes Classics section on May 21, 2008.[7](https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/3156076) It subsequently screened at festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Busan International Film Festival, and the Criterion Collection released it in the United States as part of Scorsese's World Cinema Project.[6](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/inFocus.jsp?blbdComCd=601018&mode=VIEW&seq=371) • [17](https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-housemaid) KOFA issued the restoration on DVD in 2009 and, in 2014, as its first Blu-ray release, with commentary by the director Bong Joon-ho and the critic [Kim Young-jin](https://www.edgepedia.org/kim-young-jin) on the 2009 edition and by the director [Park Chan-wook](https://www.edgepedia.org/park-chan-wook) and the critic Lee Dong-jin on the Blu-ray.[18](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/kofa/publication/dvds/PB_0000000084) • [19](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/kofa/publication/dvds/PB_0000000103)
**Critical rankings.** In 2013, a poll of 62 film professionals conducted by KOFA placed *The Housemaid* jointly first in the Korean Film 100, together with Yu Hyun-mok's *[The Aimless Bullet](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-aimless-bullet)* (1961) and Ha Gil-jong's *[March of Fools](https://www.edgepedia.org/march-of-fools)* (1975).[20](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/kofa/publication/books/PB_0000000058) In the 2024 repeat of the survey it again took first place outright, ahead of Bong Joon-ho's *Memories of Murder* and *Parasite*.[3](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20240531071500005) In December 2024 the Heritage Services Agency registered the film, alongside *Nagdonggang* (1952), *Money* (1958), and *[Seong Chunhyang](https://www.edgepedia.org/seong-chunhyang)* (1961), as a National Registered Cultural Heritage, describing it as a work that expresses the collapse of a family and the resulting fear through Kim Ki-young's characteristic grotesque mise-en-scène and dissonance.[4](https://www.hankyung.com/article/202412122088H)
**Influence.** Kim Ki-young returned to the story repeatedly, remaking it as *Woman of Fire* (1971) and *Woman of Fire '82* (1982) and using its ideas in *Chungnyeo* (1972) and *Carnivore* (1984); these are commonly grouped as the Housemaid series.[1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048) • [21](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/-gUxQ7Y6NgQA8A?hl=ko) Im Sang-soo directed an official remake in 2010, which premiered in the Cannes Competition.[22](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/features.jsp?mode=FEATURES_VIEW&seq=82) Bong Joon-ho has said that *[Parasite](https://www.edgepedia.org/parasite-2019-film)* (2019) drew in part on the class consciousness of *The Housemaid*, and he paid tribute to Kim Ki-young at the 2020 Academy Awards, as did the actress [Youn Yuh-jung](https://www.edgepedia.org/youn-yuh-jung) at the 2021 ceremony.[23](https://images.dongascience.com/uploads/article/pdf/202112/096-099_%ED%8A%B9%EC%A7%91_%EC%98%81%EC%83%81_%EC%86%8D_%EA%B8%B0%EC%88%A0_4%ED%8C%8C%ED%8A%B8.pdf) • [1](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048)
## References
1. [하녀, 한국민족문화대백과사전 (Encyclopedia of Korean Culture)](https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0079048)
2. [하녀 자료검색, 한국영상자료원 영상도서관 (Korean Film Archive)](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/library/search/vod/32833)
3. [영화인 선정 역대 최고 한국 영화 1위에 김기영 감독 '하녀', 연합뉴스 (2024)](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20240531071500005)
4. [김기영 '하녀'·첫 컬러 영화 '성춘향' 등 4편 국가등록문화유산 등록, 한국경제 (2024)](https://www.hankyung.com/article/202412122088H)
5. [아카이브조선 소사: '하녀' 개봉 (1960)](https://history.chosun.com/history/popup.jsp?id=20141204_0001)
6. [The Housemaid, Korean Film Council (KoBiz)](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/inFocus.jsp?blbdComCd=601018&mode=VIEW&seq=371)
7. [복원 공개된 김기영 '하녀' 칸 관객 탄식·폭소 쏟아져, 중앙일보 (2008)](https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/3156076)
8. [고전영화 감상과 비평 강의계획서, 목원대학교](https://www.kocw.net/home/common/contents/syllabus/1492001_2024052414233422.pdf)
9. [한국 고전영화를 통해 본 실내 공간 특성에 관한 연구, 한국실내디자인학회 논문집 (2012)](https://kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART001656062)
10. [The Housemaid, Busan International Film Festival archive (2015)](https://biff.kr/eng/html/archive/arc_history_view.asp?kind=history&m_idx=18429&pyear=2015)
11. [김기영 <하녀>와 임상수 <하녀>의 사운드 비교분석, KCI](https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/landing/article.kci?arti_id=ART001648296)
12. [<하녀>의 집 안으로, Google Arts & Culture (한국영상자료원)](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/UAWhNODrZvcE2w?hl=ko)
13. [1960년 故 김기영 감독작품 '하녀', 한국영화제작가협회](https://koreafilm.co.kr/movie/housemaid1960/housemaid60_2.htm)
14. [욕망과 파멸… '단란한 가정' 가면 뒤 중산층의 연약함 폭로, 세계일보 (2019)](https://www.segye.com/newsView/20190704515143)
15. [하녀(1960), seore 위키](https://seore.org/w/%ED%95%98%EB%85%80%281960%29)
16. [1960년 故 김기영 감독작품 '하녀' (배우 관련), 한국영화제작가협회](https://koreafilm.co.kr/movie/housemaid1960/housemaid60_4.htm)
17. [The Housemaid, The Criterion Channel](https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-housemaid)
18. [하녀 (1960) DVD, 한국영상자료원 발간물](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/kofa/publication/dvds/PB_0000000084)
19. [하녀 (1960, 블루레이), 한국영상자료원 발간물](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/kofa/publication/dvds/PB_0000000103)
20. [한국영화 100선: <청춘의 십자로>에서 <피에타>까지, 한국영상자료원 (2013)](https://www.koreafilm.or.kr/kofa/publication/books/PB_0000000058)
21. [한국영화의 괴물, 감독 김기영, Google Arts & Culture (한국영상자료원)](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/-gUxQ7Y6NgQA8A?hl=ko)
22. [Korean Films At Cannes/The Housemaid, Korean Film Council (2010)](https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/features.jsp?mode=FEATURES_VIEW&seq=82)
23. [영상 속 기술 특집, 동아사이언스 (2021)](https://images.dongascience.com/uploads/article/pdf/202112/096-099_%ED%8A%B9%EC%A7%91_%EC%98%81%EC%83%81_%EC%86%8D_%EA%B8%B0%EC%88%A0_4%ED%8C%8C%ED%8A%B8.pdf)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Psychological horror films › Psychological horror films, 1960s to 1980s*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license