When Train to Busan — Yeon Sang-ho’s taut KTX-set thriller about a girl dad’s (Gong Yoo) desperate quest to keep his daughter (Kim Su-an) safe in a burgeoning zombie apocalypse — was released in 2016, it became one of the first South Korean films to break through to a global mainstream audience. A decade later, the statuses of both the zombie genre and Korean pop culture in the West have evolved.
General audiences have mostly moved on from the zombie craze of the 2000s and 2010s, a diminishing interest no doubt partially fueled by oversaturation as well as by a global pandemic that made virus-related stories way less fun to watch. And Korean media is no longer niche in the U.S.; the East Asian country is currently producing some of the most popular stories in the world. 2022’s All of Us Are Dead, a zombie outbreak series set in a Korean high school, became one of Netflix’s most-watched series ever, proving that there’s still a hunger for zombie stories that hit on societal anxiety with brutal precision. Unfortunately, Colony does not.
It must be annoying for Yeon, whose explorations of society-level psychological horror have evolved in projects like Hellbound (2021-2024) and Revelations (2025), to constantly have critics and audiences compare his every project — often unfavorably — to that breakout film. But that’s the curse one must bear when you make a modern horror classic, and when it comes to Colony — which, unlike animated prequel short Seoul Station (2016) and live-action sequel Peninsula (2020), is his first original zombie tale in a decade — it feels particularly inevitable.
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