‘Colony’ director Yeon Sang-ho wants to reinvent the zombie movie

The movie’s consequent commercial success at the time of its initial release felt like the start of something new for a subgenre that’s known, fittingly enough, for enduring cycles of decay and reanimation. Years of The Walking Dead and its spinoffs had a suffocating effect on zombie stories. Train to Busan arrived in that environment as a revitalizing tonic, brimming with urgency, populated by characters worth caring about, and driven by a fusion of relentless terror and white-knuckle violence. It’s the rare modern horror movie to have its cake and eat it too, as far as meeting nihilism with optimism; eventually, its positive reception begat a sequel, Peninsula (2020), which failed to set the world on fire but nonetheless worked as a standalone followup to Train to Busan’s genre-redefining effect.

Now, Yeon has unleashed a brand new zombie movie on the world: Colony, in which the story is, like Train to Busan, confined to a single space, but a considerably larger one—a contemporary skyscraper, where a bioweapon has been introduced to the unsuspecting population within that turns the infected into mindless savages. The wrinkle—because of course there’s a wrinkle—is that these “zombies” behave like ants, passing on knowledge gained in real time to their cohorts. The same trick doesn’t work twice on them, whether it’s using cardboard cutouts as decoys or masking one’s scent using perfume. Like Train to Busan, these aren’t George A. Romero’s zombies. Unlike Train to Busan, though, the monsters in Colony reflect a global anxiety over the rise and rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence.

With Colony releasing in U.S. theaters on Aug. 28, joined by Train to Busan having returned to the big screen on Aug. 14 in celebration of its 10th anniversary, I had the privilege of speaking with Yeon about the contexts in which both films are rooted, and about the undying appeal of zombie cinema.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Andy Crump: Zombies are really entrenched in horror and popular culture. Innovating on the concept is difficult, and rare. You've managed to tell a couple zombie stories now, between Colony and Train to Busan, that do innovate on zombies, and I'm curious what you see in them that makes them open for new interpretations and ideas.
Yeon Sang-ho: So, to give you a bit of context on Korean culture at the time when I made Train to Busan: usually zombie films have a core fanbase, but in Korea, 10 years ago, there really was no core zombie fanbase to speak of. For me, I knew it was not enough to satisfy only zombie genre fans, and that I had to incorporate different elements, such as action and human drama, to actually succeed. I think that has actually made (Train to Busan) stand apart from other zombie movies, and I think that's why international audiences actually found Train to Busan to be new and interesting. 

In terms of Colony, I was thinking of the latent fear of the modern era we live in. In our high-speed information area, which has given rise to AI and collective intelligence, I wanted to explore the theme of how individuality or individual thought is being eradicated, and I thought that I could explore that theme through the subject of zombies. The reason I think that the zombie genre has so much potential even now is that, yes, we can work with the subject of zombies, but I think it really is a matter of how we combine different genre elements to create something new. In that sense I actually do feel like there are endless possibilities for the zombie genre.

AC: Do you see zombies as something that self updates over time as human culture changes? I watched the movie and thought about the transmission of information, and how easy that is—especially in the context of right now, when we can send each other information or disinformation with the touch of our phone. There’s room for zombies to change as we change as people, and as our cultures change.
YSH: I do feel that way, especially, like you mentioned, with Colony; the way the zombies evolve is influenced by how AI is evolving as we speak today. It's really quite fascinating, because you see the speed with which AI is evolving, but then sometimes you’ll think, "Oh, wow, this is really coming closer and closer to human intelligence."  But also you see it make mistakes that humans would never make, and so there is that contrast that you see in the performance of AI. I was greatly inspired by that in coming up with the zombies in Colony, so I feel like there is a lot of potential for new zombie films to come about from that perspective. For example, right now, I'm imagining a zombie film that could be set in the genre of, say, a medical drama. So I think, combined with other genre elements, the zombie film is alive and well.

AC: I want to go back to what you said earlier about South Korean culture when Train to Busan came out. At the time, I’d never seen anything like it from South Korea before. It felt new in my experience with the country's cinema, going back to the early 2000s. Is there anything specific to South Korean culture at the moment that speaks to Colony, apart from the proliferation of AI? I wonder if, as an American viewer, there's anything that I'm missing.
YSH: I would say that, in terms of Korean culture nowadays, I think a lot of audiences who come to the movie theater are looking not just for the storytelling of a film, but are actually looking for more visceral, more experiential storytelling in a film. Of course, the themes of Colony do deal with AI versus individual thought, and collective intelligence versus individuality. But when I was making Colony, because of this development in Korean audiences, I wanted the film to be intuitively suspenseful and action packed. I feel like a film that is intuitively suspenseful is not just for the Korean audiences, but can resonate with international audiences as well. I want to mention that I’ve also recently worked on a Japanese TV series called Human Vapor, and that one really digs deep into Japanese cultural elements, and it's been quite popular in Japan, I think, because it really harnesses those cultural elements that you will only see in Japan—whereas there have been perspectives looking from the outside in where people couldn't understand the popularity because they don’t understand the nitty-gritty, fine details of Japanese culture. 

In that sense, I wanted Colony to be something that was intuitively suspenseful, and therefore has more international appeal and universal appeal. But I consider myself lucky to be able to work in both sectors.