Park Chan-Wook’s fantasticly creepy vampire film was horribly overlooked by the Academy for a best Foreign film nomination. In recent years hollywood has been almost overtaken by the vampire film genre, but it took a Korean filmmaker to really get it right. The film looks fantastic, and the performances totally hit the mark. Of course, all of the usual themes are there, but the overriding theme that continues to be missed or dumbed down by American vampire films, is that of SELFISHNESS. Wanting to live forever, have super powers, and literally suck the life of others plays into our desire to feel special, powerful, evil, and thus sexy. Thirst fleshes out this nasty selfishness in such a skin crawling manner that it smashes other vampire films’ faces into a bloody pulp, and then pukes blood on their corpses.