Scarier Than Grudges: "Price Per Square Meter" and the Bloody Fairy Tale of "Dream Home" [Slate]

Real Estate Prices That Turn Even Exaggerated Carnage Into Reality
A World Where Homes Devour Their Owners

Movie 'Dream Home' Still Cut

The essence of 21st-century urban horror stories lies not in grudges, but in the price per square meter. Director Pang Ho-cheung's film "Dream Home," which premiered in Hong Kong in 2010 and arrived in Korea after 16 years, enacts this chilling truth like a bloody ritual. The tools are brutal and the attitude is cynical. While the hellscape depicted may seem like an exaggerated fantasy, the moment it overlaps with the scenery of Seoul, it becomes a chilling parable.

Before the massacre begins, the film overwhelms the audience with dry statistics. "In 2007, Hong Kong housing prices rose by 15%, with the price of a 600-square-foot (about 17 pyeong) apartment exceeding 7 million Hong Kong dollars (1.24 billion KRW). ... In this crazy city, anyone who wants to survive must be crazier than the city itself." This serves as an indictment defending the protagonist Lai (Josie Ho), explaining why she becomes a monster.

Movie Still Cut from "Dream Home"

Labor cannot keep up with the speed of capital. In this cruel ecosystem, diligence is merely another word for incompetence. Lai scrapes together money for an apartment, even squeezing out her father's hospital bills, but fails to secure a contract due to the landlord's unilateral price hike. At the end of her despair, she devises her own real estate strategy. Remembering that the price of a house plummets if someone dies there, she decides to turn a perfectly normal apartment into a haunted house through artificial means, so she can snatch it up at a bargain price.

Objectively, the narrative's plausibility is full of holes. A frail woman slaughters burly men, and even as the entire apartment complex screams, the police never come. Paradoxically, it is the weight of reality that fills these narrative gaps. While viewers may grimace at the brutal massacre, it is hard to shake off a strange sense of d?j? vu. The methods of murder may be unrealistic, but the desperate longing for a home is all too real.

The murderous housing prices are not simply the result of supply and demand imbalance. They are a structural product of the government's high land price policy, monopolies by conglomerates, and the symbiotic relationship with the Triad demolition contractors. The violence of the thugs who drove Lai's family out during her childhood is a decisive scene exposing the barbarity of this system. For her, securing a home becomes a primal trauma, imprinting the idea that one must trample others to achieve it. Her murders are not mere madness, but the internalization of structural violence instilled by the city.

Movie Still Cut from "Dream Home"

To survive, Lai adopts the grammar of the perpetrator. Just as capital drives out natives in the name of development, she slaughters her neighbors in the name of survival. The transformation of everyday items-like vacuum cleaners, door locks, and toolboxes-into murder weapons is deeply ironic. Tools meant to protect the home become instruments of destruction. It is a chilling metaphor for how capitalism turns ordinary individuals into contract killers for the system.

Whether Lai's plan succeeds or fails is irrelevant. The real horror lies in the very process by which the meaning of "home" collapses. In her attempt to lower the apartment's price by turning it into a physical haunted house, she herself becomes a walking weapon, her soul consumed by the logic of capital. Can a concrete box purchased at the cost of one's dignity truly be called a "sweet home"? What remains after wiping away the blood is not solace, but a profound sense of emptiness.

This is why, despite its loose plausibility, "Dream Home" reads like a weighty sociological report. The killer's rampage is not an individual's aberration, but an inevitable tragedy birthed by the system. In a city hurtling toward catastrophe aboard the train of desire, can we truly say we are any different from Lai? In a world where people do not own homes but are instead devoured by them, this film stands as an apocalyptic testimony to that inverted reality.