The Korean Zombie Trilogy
Peninsula, Train to Busan and Seoul Station makes three instalments in the Busan Saga.
Yeong Sang-oh released Train to Busan upon the world on 2016 but few people know that the filmmaker was more famous for its career in animation before this mainstream success. Song-oh majored at the Sangmyung University in European Painting before beginning his trail in the small world of animated movies in Korea. Kings of Pigs, his first anime feature, got screened in Cannes. The director then went on to direct The Fake, while, according to him, numerous productions companies approached him to make a live-action film.
Sang-oh was known for his dark, gritty tales and social commentary. King of the Pigs confronted bullying head on while The Fake was about false prophets and religion. This explain why his third movie, Seoul Station, was an animated feature imagining that if some zombie-type virus were to befall upon the homeless of Seoul Station, no one would notice. The director thought this might help him tackle the inaction of government in front of catastrophe but also show the class divides which would operate even through such events
Much like Denis Villeneuve’s movies starring Jake Gyllenhaal Prisoners and Enemy, Seoul Station was in truth made before Train to Busan but released after the successful blockbuster, leading to advertising claiming it was a prequel to the zombie train flick. This also explain why the budget of Seoul Station was only 575,000$. Still, Sang-oh had always dreamed, he one day would be able to travel the world pretty much like his idol Satoshi Kon had done beforehand, on the sole merit of his animated flicks.
And in truth he did.
Reading interviews of him from before Train to Busan, you can clearly see the director didn’t think he could handle a live-action movie. Still, it’s through Seoul Station development that Train to Busan came to life, organically. Sang-oh placed his story in the famous train station for one simple fact only, homeless people pretty much like anywhere else on the globe tend to orbit more around train stations, and with him trying to have hobbos as heroes for his third feature, the location seemed a given.
The natural step would become: But what if the Zombies got on one of the trains? Sang-oh wondered about this while making his third film, and having done this three times already, drawing, directing and everything else, the filmmaker was beginning to think maybe directing a live-action film would be less tiresome. Truth is, NEW, the production company behind Seoul Station wanted him to do this leap of faith.
Train to Busan working title was Busan Bound and the idea behind it was simple, a man was trying to reunite with his wife while taking a trip on a train which would then become invaded by zombies. We know now the story evolved to be one of a divorced father trying to get his daughter back to her mother and being forced onto her train because of a zombie invasion. Through this, we witness different people dealing with the situation, be them rich folks preparing for their first born, a teenage baseball team or a corrupt old man.
The movie’s premise was written by Sang-oh himself who then gave it to a writer to further elaborate. Its budget? 10 million dollars, which is quite a sum for a first film. Still, we have to remember that Sang-oh wasn’t inexperienced, he had three films under his belt and a few other shorts. As a filmmaker trying to tackle the zombie genre, his main question remained: how would he be able to make Korean audiences accept a fantaisy flick?
According to him, public would flow into theatre to watch white American caped crusader but should a Korean director try and produce a genre movie, this would surely not end well. As an example, for himself, Sang-oh decided to try and copy Bong Joon-oh the Host, emulate its typically Korean settings, so that audience member would recognize one another in the bunch of characters presented to them on the screen.
Also, to try and get zombies right, he decided on going the Zack Snyder way, reading through many interviews of him you’ll hear him state he wanted to copy the introduction of the 2004 reamke of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. He also changed his zombie design, making them unable to see in the dark, taking inspiration in bone-shattering movement and having overwhelming horde so as to recreate the fear such a creature should inspire in the hearts of the viewers. The fact that he saw Train to Busan as a follow-up to Seoul Station, whether the public had seen it or not, enabled him to explain why corpses could run, in the filmmaker’s mind they were still fresh.
According to the director, shooting went smoothly, thanks to most of his crew already liking his previous films and trying to put him at ease in front of this newly discovered task. Still, listening to some interviews, you can clearly see that Sang-oh didn’t see any difference in the production process, except maybe for the fact that he hadn’t to draw 30000 frames by hand by himself. Actors say the shooting was physical and watching the small making of which exists, you can clearly witness them running through long distance.
Funnily enough, the wagon sequences have all been shot in a fake wagon next to which LED screens showed a moving background so as to make spectators think the train was in motion, a process the Disney+ Mandalorian tv series would become notorious for, some three years later.
Still, nothing could have prepared Sang-oh for his first live-action success which began right after the film’s premiere at the Cannes Festival. The director appears to have been overwhelmed, and also a bit scared. According to him, Western critics tended to point out societal matters he tried to tackle throughout his horror piece, while to him and to Korean critics, Train to Busan was just a fun movie with a weak societal commentary.
Truth is, Sang-oh feared if he were to make another film more political, audiences would not follow him.
Because there can be no exception, Sang-oh thought of Peninsula while scooting location for Train to Busan. It was through rotten decorum he saw but couldn’t use in the movie that an idea came to him: in a devastated Seoul, a young girl is riding a dump truck crushing hordes and hordes of zombies. This would not be the first instance of a movie being thought of from a single image. Another inspiration for Peninsula was the second half of the Akira anime adaption, in which soldiers enter a devastated Tokyo. Sang-oh thought of the world which would exist after Train to Busan, of an outsider venturing into this desolate place, discovering its hidden rules.
This helped the director do two things. First, he would not have to redo a zombie invasion, (after all he’d already made two films about this) but it would also enable him to tackle a totally different genre: post-apo. Sang-oh wanted to pay homage to Mad Max 2, scratch that, to the whole Mad Max franchise, so he devised a story in which a man enters a quarantined South Korea only to discover society has now turned savage.
According to him, while watching many different post-apocalyptic flicks, this was the most interesting part of it, discovering characters and rules. Also, after having done a movie he thought violent and terrifying, Sang-oh wanted a movie families could go and watch together, for Sang-oh think of family as an entity which can save us from the collapse of civilization, a unit which isn’t solely define by blood.
With a budget slightly bigger than the one he had for Train to Busan, Sang-oh shot 67 days across three months with most of the crew of his previous zombie film returning, trying to recreate a fallen Seoul which would amaze both parents and children. For this movie, the director relied heavily on CGI, something he did not see as a problem since he had a pretty long background in animation, and animation is animation be it 2D or 3D. Also, he tried to implement more action sequences, to make this a grand spectacle.
It’s funny reading through Western interviews always wondering if the introduction of the movie, which takes place in Hong-Kong and has spoken English in it, was intended as a way to market the movie to Western audiences. As if Train to Busan had needed that. Truth is, the Hong-Kong sequences never were shot in Hong-Kong, but on Korean soil, except for a few shots which were the results of the director of photography travelling to the town, alone.
Still, the release couldn’t have fallen in a more complicated place, with the Covid pandemic spreading across the globe. Despite all of this, Sang-oh, the producers and his team decided to keep their released schedule, even though it meant not premiering the movie at Cannes. The filmmaker had thought of his movie as a way to make audience return to theatre, as a movie which could solely be enjoyed on a big screen, and what better way to show his dedication than through a pandemic where escapism was very much needed.
For you see, Sang-oh designed his third zombie flick around one idea. Even through the darkest of times, a glimmer of hope can reside.
Next week Friday is fiction Friday, hope you’ll be there to read my short story The Babe.
Interested in Asian movies? You may like the piece I wrote on the Project Duel or the Live-Adaptation of Alive or the History behind Singapore only kung-fu film.
More into Zombies? Here is the making of Goal of the Dead and a History of the Zombie figure.
