The anatomy of a K-zombie: Can Cannes-invited ‘Colony’ carry the genre forward?

It’s the subgenre that just won’t die. Korean cinema and TV have repeatedly reimagined the living dead in the nearly five decades since the country's first zombie film was released in 1980. What began as a sporadic occult curiosity has slowly built into a sustained fervor for the subgenre, powered by the same qualities that have come to define Korean content: a high-concept spectacle, emotional urgency and tightly wound social commentary.

What constitutes zombie content, and indeed the Haitian Vodou-originating genre itself, is a tricky question. For instance, zombies are often portrayed as rotting, infectious beings — but are they dead or still living? Are they curable? Were they created by sorcery, disease or something else entirely?

There are as many answers as there are adaptations. Korean creators have commonly embraced familiar tropes — flesh-eating, infection by bite, mindlessness, ferocity and unnatural strength — while also making their zombies faster, more emotional and, at times, disturbingly close to the people they once were.

Next to lurch onto screens is “Colony,” the latest from Yeon Sang-ho, the filmmaker behind one of Korea’s signature zombie franchises, “Train to Busan” (2016). With the action thriller set for its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, now’s as good a time as any to revisit the undead titles that have kept Korea’s big and small screens pulsing.

The familiar instills fear: Settings influence worldbuilding

How do Korean zombies stand out? Some titles, like Netflix's “Kingdom” (2019-21), have the obvious historical element, letting the undead loose amid traditional costumes and scenery with period-specific social constraints. 

Set in the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), the two-part series follows a crown prince, played by Ju Ji-hoon, as he investigates a mysterious disease consuming both his father and the country while navigating the politics of the royal court.

Series writer Kim Eun-hee drew inspiration from entries in the "Annals of the Joseon Dynasty," the official chronicles of the Joseon-era kings, which recorded deaths from an “unidentified plague” across multiple reigns.

Then there's the modern urban landscapes of the “Train to Busan” universe, which also includes the animated prequel “Seoul Station” (2016) and the 2020 sequel "Peninsula." The first film follows office worker Seok-woo, played by Gong Yoo, who takes the high-speed railway from Seoul to the southeastern port city of Busan with his estranged daughter to see her mother. After a rapid zombie outbreak, he and the other passengers must fight to avoid getting infected.

Because so many people live tightly next to each other in metropolises in land-scarce Korea, many in high-rise apartments, their lives tend to be closely entangled. “That creates dense webs of relationships from the very beginning of the story, which makes it useful for building a narrative,” according to film and TV critic Kim Heon-sik.

Korean zombies also appear in other confined locations, such as trains and schools. Ma Dong-seok as Sang-hwa in "Train to Busan" uses his fists to bash zombies in a train compartment, while students in the Netflix series "All of Us Are Dead" (2022-) use classroom furniture and cleaning supplies to fend off infected classmates at a high school.

That zombies emerge in familiar places where people interact every day makes the horror feel more immediate and deeply unsettling, critic Sung Sang-min said.

“There is a realistic sense of fear in realizing that the places we pass through or spend time in every day can suddenly become dangerous — places where people can die,” he said.

That collapse of everyday life also makes the zombie genre well-suited for social commentary.

In “Kingdom,” the virus affects everyone, from commoners to “the ruling class and even the royal family, [and brings] the existing order crashing down,” Kim said. In many analyses, the zombies appear as a metaphor for the greed of the ruling class and its consequences.

While indie films like “The Neighbor Zombie” (2010) found modest domestic success, "Kingdom" and "Train to Busan" are widely credited with establishing the zombie subgenre in Korea. Part of it was the growing global reach of Korean content, in part due to the rise of streaming giants like Netflix, and subsequently, bigger production budgets. This has allowed creators to push beyond the genre’s earlier low-budget, campy B-movie aesthetic with more ambitious direction, visual effects and scale.

"Train to Busan," Korea's first blockbuster-scale zombie entry, drew more than 11.6 million admissions during its box office run. The film, along with “Kingdom” and “All of Us Are Dead,” included one of the genre’s most iconic images: hordes of zombies swarming toward survivors, a set piece made possible by larger production budgets.

Humanizing the once-human: An injection of empathy

Another huge change came in the form of a real plague: Covid-19.

The pandemic, which upended lives all over the world, also taught people that no one — family, friends and loved ones — is safe from a highly infectious disease. This injected a healthy dose of empathy into audiences and changed their expectations of the zombie genre, according to critic Kim.

One such humanistic approach is “My Daughter is a Zombie" (2025), adapted from a hit webtoon of the same name. The movie follows a devoted father, played by Jo Jung-suk, who hides and protects his daughter in the countryside after she turns into a zombie.

That marked a significant shift from earlier Korean zombie stories, which leaned more heavily toward survival narratives, Kim said.

“Once someone became a zombie, they remained one until the end and became something to be eliminated,” the critic said. “The mainstream format was a kind of disaster film about escaping so that wouldn’t happen.”

"'My Daughter Is a Zombie,' by contrast, resonated because it offered a message of hope: Even after being infected, a person might not fully turn into a zombie, and might even recover," he said.

Good zombie content captures the confusion of realizing these zombies were people once loved, Sung said. "These are not beings that appeared out of nowhere, but people who were once human. Once-familiar people turn on their heels and become beings that threaten you."

How these titles adapt to the changing times is part of what makes the zombie genre so enduring, according to Kim.

“In the past, zombie stories were treated simply as entertainment or horror,” Kim said. “Becoming a zombie meant being objectified, and the fear of that transformation kept the genre firmly in the realm of horror. Now, it has evolved toward humanism, family and even romance.”

In any case, zombie films and series appear to be here to stay. If the Cannes-invited "Colony," headlined by top stars Jun Ji-hyun and Koo Kyo-hwan, is any indicator, Korea has another new wave of the undead ready to swarm into theaters and TVs.

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]