The Piper
Korea’s take on the German legend
We’re all familiar with the German fairy tale: The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The city of Hamelin, dealing with a terrible rat problem, agrees to pay an itinerant piper if he is able to lure the rats out of the city and dispose of them. After he does so, the city fathers renege on the deal and he takes his revenge by luring all the children away into a mountain, never to be seen again. The story is an authentic bit of folklore dating back to the Middle Ages (when rats were probably a major problem) and was later collected by the Brothers Grimm and others.
The Piper, from South Korea, is a faithful adaptation of the folktale, transposed to a different locale but containing all of the key ingredients.
(Spoilers) At the end of the Korean War, an itinerant musician and herbalist is traveling through the countryside, taking his son to Seoul for treatment of a respiratory ailment. He wanders into a remote village, which doesn’t know that the war is over and seems unusually suspicious of strangers. The village headman takes him aside and gets him to agree to not tell his people about the end of the war. They all live in fear of ‘The Commies.’ which keeps them from venturing away.
The village is infested with rats, which are slowly eating their harvests, leading to starvation. The Piper volunteers to rid the village of the rats, by a combination of a potent herbal drug that attracts them and his music. While he is preparing this solution, he meets a young widow, and as he himself is a widower, he finds himself drawn to her. Unknown to him, however, she is being abused by the headman.
The Piper works his charms and leads the rats into a cave in the mountain, where he seals them in with a boulder. He returns, triumphant, to the village, only to find that he is accused of crimes and his payment is being withheld. The widow woman that he was falling for denounces him and he is mutilated and beaten by the villagers.
It turns out that the villagers are hiding a terrible secret and that the village headman is using the Piper as a scapegoat to hide the secret and maintain control. The Piper and his son are expelled from the village but the headman poisons their food, resulting in the death of the boy.
Distraught beyond sanity, the Piper plots his revenge. He rolls back the boulder to the cave and finds that the rats, driven by hunger, have turned to cannibalism. They pour from the cave, ravenous, heading straight for the village. Throughout the course of the night, they devour all the adults, leaving only the children alive in the morning. The Piper leads them, playing his haunting tune, into the cave and the film ends with the boulder rolling back over the entrance, sealing them in.
The Piper takes a while to get up to the main plotline, which isn’t all bad because it gives the viewer a chance to get to know all the main characters and to see the loving relationship between the widowed Piper and his ailing but charming son. This pays off when the film finally takes a hard turn into Horror, when the truth hidden by the villagers emerges and the fatal, brutal betrayal takes place.
I think that the habit of many South Korean genre movies – Horror, crime, science fiction, historical fantasy – of taking the time to allow the audience to get to know their characters is what elevates them from their Hollywood competition. Over the last twenty years, many of the best genre movies released have come from Korea and in every case, they are character-centric and imaginative.
A few other movies allegedly based on the Pied Piper legend were released recently, from what I could tell they were uninspiring horror movies that had only the most tenuous relation to the original folklore. I actually watched the first 20 minutes of The Piper (2023) and turned it off, it was so bad and obvious.
Korea’s The Piper, on the other hand, is an engrossing, imaginative yet faithful re-telling that delivers genuine horror in its final act. Very highly recommended.