Many current prominent South Korean filmmakers, including directors Im Sang-soo, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook, claim Kim Ki-young as an influence on their careers.

[5] At Pyongyang National High School, Kim showed exceptional talent in music, painting and writing, and his studious nature earned him the nickname "Professor of Physics".

[5] When he failed to gain admittance, Kim moved to Japan, planning to study and save up money to reapply for medical school.

Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930) and Fritz Lang's M (1931) made a particularly strong impression on him, and their influence was to show in his mature film style.

[6][15] With the success of this first film, Kim was able to direct his second feature, the historical costume drama Yangsan Province (also 1955), again using primitive equipment obtained from the U.S.I.S.

Although Kim claimed to have based the film on a traditional song he learned from his mother, no exact source for the story has been found.

Yoo Do-yeon called the film a "work of bad taste," and Heo Baek-nyeon said that it "debases the dignity of Korean cinema.

"[15] As his only surviving film of the 1950s, Yangsan Province sheds considerable light on Kim Ki-young's early career.

[15][19] Other motifs that were to be explored in depth in Kim's later work can also be found in Yangsan Province, such as animal imagery, particularly the use of hens as a representation of fertility and sexuality.

In 1957, Kim was living near the red-light district of Yongsan, and the atmosphere of this neighborhood influenced his films, A Woman's War and Twilight Train (both 1957).

[21] 1960 was a critical year for South Korea, marking the end of the rule of Syngman Rhee through the civilian April Revolution.

During this time, filmmakers took advantage of the relaxation of governmental control over the film industry to create several boldly experimental works.

Director Yu Hyun-mok's film Aimless Bullet (1960) dates from this period, as does Kim Ki-young's major breakthrough, The Housemaid (also 1960).

[2][6] The film is a domestic thriller telling of a family's destruction by the introduction of a sexually predatory femme fatale into the household.

[2][23][24] The Housemaid marked Kim's full break with realism, the main style of Korean cinema at the time, into his own version of expressionism.

[13] Kim solidified his break with cinematic realism by following The Housemaid with two more films exploring styles and mixing genres, radically new for Korean cinema at the time.

[12] The Sea Knows (1961) transcended its roots in the standard anti-Japanese World War II film to become a distinctive examination of humanity, sadism, greed, lust for power and sexuality.

[9] Goryeojang (1963), dealt with a similar subject matter as The Ballad of Narayama (1983), directed by Shohei Imamura, a filmmaker with whom Kim has often been compared.

[27] Some of the characteristic traits of Kim's mature style, first seen in these three films, are gothic excess, surrealism, horror, perversions and sexuality.

Because of the poor state of the local film industry, cinema attendance in South Korea had dropped drastically since its high-point in the 1960s.

The resulting film, Love of Blood Relations (1976), transcended the bounds of propaganda by portraying the communist agent as one of Kim's typical femme fatale characters.

"[38][39] An examination of environmental, religious, social and sexual taboos, the film culminates in a scene of necrophilia that Paquet calls "one of the most shocking, brazen sequences ever shot by a Korean filmmaker".

Tokyo International Film Festival programming director Kenji Ishizaka recalls that Kim's way of writing a screenplay was to walk away from home for three months.

[40] South Korean film critic Lee Young-il remembers that Kim's shoes were never shined, and that one of his few material pleasures was gourmet coffee.

Kim Ki-young's unconventional and nonconformist nature also prevented him from participating in South Korea's mainstream film industry.

[41] The only official title he held within the film community was member of The National Academy of Arts, which he joined in 1997, and he did not cultivate friendships with journalists who could further his career.

The last of the Housemaid trilogy, Woman of Fire '82 (1982) is an even more radicalized and baroque retelling of the same basic story he had filmed numerous times in the previous two decades.

[43] With his profile again high in Korean film society, Kim's work began to attract international attention.

[45] Before Kim started work on the film or attended the festival, he and his wife were killed in a house fire caused by an electrical short circuit[9] on February 5, 1998.

[47] Park Chan-wook names The Housemaid as one of the films which most influenced his career, and says of Kim Ki-young, "He is able to find and portray beauty in destruction, humor in violence and terror.