The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra

The first feature from exciting new Korean filmmaker Park Syeyoung, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra is an urban ghost story about the human encounters of an abandoned mattress and the strange mould growing on it. As the mattress is moved around Seoul and deteriorates, it becomes host to a mysterious creature who feasts on the vertebrae of its victims. Before his feature, Park Syeyoung was already known as a prolific maker of original short films, and in this programme we also present his first short Cashbag, a nocturnal tale of a young man on a desperate search for money.

The title stemmed from my time with an ace mattress. It was a good mattress and I paid some good money for it but it was so comfortable that whenever I woke up, my spine would hurt. Because this pain kept on repeating itself, I wanted to pinpoint the exact vertebra that was hurting and found out it was the fifth thoracic vertebra… Why was it always my fifth vertebra that hurt? Why not the third or the fourth? I think there was a creature in the bed, laughing at me, pricking at my spine every night. I threw the bed away but it disappeared overnight before the garbage-disposing people came over to pick it up. I wonder who took it and if their fifth thoracic vertebra hurt as well.

Director Park Syeyoung, from an interview with Asian Movie Pulse