Yeon Sang-ho's Colony releases August 28

Yeon Sang-ho's new zombie movie Colony will be released in cinemas on August 28. The film, co-written with Choi Gyu-seok, stars Gianna Jun as an ostracised biotechnology professor and Koo Kyo-hwan as a terrorist who unleashes a virus.

Colony is a standalone story with no direct link to Yeon's previous hit, Train To Busan. It unfolds in a confined Seoul tower, a setting the director compares to Die Hard's Nakatomi Plaza, where survivors must contend with a unique zombie outbreak.

The Swarm Intelligence Zombie

The zombies in Colony possess a terrifying new trait. While they are fast and confused by darkness like those in Train To Busan, these infected can communicate with each other using swarm intelligence. This concept, applied to train AI, reflects the film's themes.

"We all live in a very high-speed, exchange-of-information world, so there's an ever-growing, rapid collectiveness," Yeon told FilmStories. "Our individuality becomes less and less important. I wanted to represent that in a film."

The director explained that the zombies' collective, optimised system can be outsmarted by human unpredictability. The chaos of different voices among the survivors becomes an advantage against the hive mind.

Protecting the Minority

Yeon Sang-ho drew from biology for the film's core idea. He learned that groups of organisms create mutations to survive a discovered weakness. He compares this mutation to societal minorities.

"You have to protect the voices of the minority in order to survive," Yeon said. He wanted to depict the collectiveness of the zombies against the isolated, outcast professor played by Gianna Jun.

The film also reflects post-COVID anxieties about contagion and takes aim at AI's single-mindedness. "When you push the high-speed exchange of information to the extreme, you have AI," Yeon said, calling the loss of distinctiveness "dangerous."

Influences and the Next Project

The director cites several influences on Colony. He is a big fan of George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead and also references Die Hard, The Poseidon Adventure, and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

Yeon's next film will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September. Titled Paradise Lost, it is co-written with Ryu Yong-jae and adapts Oh Seong-eun's novel Black Inferno.

Paradise Lost involves a mother who uses an AI-generated version of her missing son. Yeon says the film, while featuring AI, is more focused on exploring the darkness of the human mind. "For me, this darkness is very specific to human beings," he said.