A Remodeled Beauty

A family is cursed: their firstborn daughter is born with the face of a cat. Her plastic-surgeon father swaps her at birth with another infant and walks away. Twenty years later, the cat-girl comes back, demanding he fix what he’s done. Adapted from a manga by Japanese horror master Kazuo Umezu, the film casts Yu Ji-in—one of the decade’s great screen beauties—and hides her under cheerfully grotesque makeup for most of the runtime, making her final unmasked appearance hit that much harder. Director Jang Il-ho, a veteran of Shaw Brothers co-productions, brings a brisk, pulpy snap to the material: the effects are gloriously bargain-basement, miles from the technical polish of better-known Japanese horror, but the premise—a surgeon who treats beauty as a defect to be corrected and then runs from the fallout—cuts deeper than the threadbare production suggests. Digitally mastered in 2026 by the Korean Film Archive. Digitization sourced from the 35mm original negative, the only known surviving film element, which is missing the sixth reel containing approximately 11 minutes of footage.