Yeon Sang-ho: how South Korea’s zombie king skewers society with his violent horror

The director behind modern classic ‘Train To Busan’ serves up ‘Colony’ – another blood-soaked spectacle for genre fans to savour

Z ombie movies aren’t supposed to make you cry. And yet in Yeon Sang-ho’s breakout live-action debut Train To Busan , about a young workaholic father (played by Gong Yoo) protecting his young daughter (Kim Su-an) from a national outbreak on a packed train, tears flowed as much as blood. It was undeniably Train To Busan ’s moving emotional content that helped it stand out from the flesh-eating crowd.

Acclaimed South Korean auteur Yeon Sang-ho has made all sorts of films to date, from grim animated features to superhero flicks, but it was Train To Busan – which premiered to raves at Cannes Film Festival 2016 – that put him on a pedestal with countrymen Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Na Hong-jin. With new K-horror Colony , he’s returning for his fourth rodeo among the living dead.

Importantly, Colony isn’t tied to the Train To Busan universe, as were the animated prequel Seoul Station (2016) and stand-alone sequel Peninsula (2020). Nevertheless, it is another expertly made mix of bodily carnage, muscular action and unexpected sentimentality.

Talking to NME via Zoom from his home country, the director thinks he knows why zombies have ruled horror for well over two decades now as the mainstream monster of choice: “Even as time changes, [zombie movies] always represent the fear we experience at that specific moment. That is why they always feel very fresh.” In our post-pandemic world, it’s hard not to agree. Yeon’s films are almost eerily prescient in their depictions of society riven by paranoia and life-threatening disease. During politically fraught times, survival horror taps into something both primal and contemporary that sparkly vampires and ghosts simply cannot.

Colony – about a biotech terrorist unleashing a pathogen at a science conference in order to improve humanity – is, like The Towering Inferno meets Die Hard (with zombies). The vast majority of the action – and this film is action-packed to the rafters – takes place in a commercial tower block, with survivors banding together to outwit not just the hordes of drooling ghouls but also Koo Kyo-hwan’s maniacal yet perversely utopian baddie. He’s more than just an outcast scientist wreaking havoc. He’s infected himself with the virus and can telepathically communicate with the undead. Hans Gruber could never. Warming to the topic of the zombie movie’s uncanny ability to reflect modern times, Yeon adds: “My movie Colony is more about our current society, in which you have the confrontation between individuality and collectiveness – the universality of collectiveness.”

Originally, he had no interest in making another zombie film at all, but the story he wanted to tell – about the slow weakening of personal identity in an age of digital overload – seemed a natural fit. “Only after discussing it with my co-writer Choi Gyu-seok, who worked with me on [ Netflix show] Hellbound , [did I decide to do it],” he says. “We wanted to go deeper into this theme of collectiveness. We realised the high-speed exchange of information going on nowadays leads to the erosion of individuality in human beings.”

Critics have long picked up on what they see as Yeon’s pessimistic outlook. His animated features Seoul Station , The King Of Pigs and The Fake all present darker visions of life, but he doesn’t agree that qualifies him as one of modern cinema’s miserabilists. “I don’t think I’m pessimistic. I’m not pessimistic in real life… There is a famous Japanese author I really like [called Keiichiro Hirano]. I will quote what he wrote in the introduction to one of his novels [ Tale Of The First Moon ]: ‘All human beings have inside themselves a demonic side. In order to speak or see the humanist aspect of oneself, we also have to go deep through the demonic side we all have in us.’” This literary influence – Yeon also namechecks surrealist author Kafka and Greek fabulist Aesop during our chat – is apparent in Train To Busan , Seoul Station , Peninsula and Colony , as well as his other works, in that they often have characters making difficult choices with dangerous outcomes for themselves and others. That darkness within can energise a person or lead to their destruction.