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James Mottram

Yeon Sang-ho sleeps soundly at night – no bad dreams, no night terrors, thank you very much. “When I get to bed, I’m just completely exhausted,” the 47-year-old South Korean director says with a grin. “When I sleep, the next step is just I wake up. So I never dream or have nightmares.”
This must have come as a relief given he has spent a decade contemplating zombies on and off following his 2016 mega-hit Train to Busan.
It is late afternoon when we meet on the windswept sixth-floor terrace of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palais. In just over six hours, Yeon’s new zombie film Colony will receive its world premiere in a Midnight Screenings slot, echoing the unveiling of Train to Busan a decade ago.
Yet any thought that he is simply retreading old ground should be dismissed; Colony injects the genre with something fresh and frightening.


“The starting point of making this movie was not to make a zombie movie,” Yeon says. “It was about dealing with the potential fear of our time, and for me, it was about the high-speed exchange of information, which leads to collective consciousness.
“I wanted to make a movie about this problem, and at one point, I realised that the genre that could adequately represent this would be the zombie genre.”
In the film, a vengeful scientist (Koo Kyo-hwan) unleashes a virus that rapidly turns the infected into flesh-eating monsters. As the virus spreads through a Seoul shopping centre, the building is locked down, leaving those trapped inside, including a biotech professor played by megastar Jun Ji-hyun, to fight for their lives.
The twist – or one of them – comes as Koo’s scientist injects himself with the antidote.

A hive mind born of modern anxieties
Without giving too much away, the zombies here are far removed from the undead monsters that shuffled their way across screens in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the landmark 1968 film that launched the genre.
In Colony, the creatures evolve into a hive mind of sorts, mutating like a virus as they learn to share information. Meanwhile, the humans trying to survive – some of them, at least – start to behave like monsters.
“What I wanted to depict was that the zombies are starting in a very primitive state, and then they quickly evolve. Then, opposite to that, you have all the human beings who actually start in civilisation, and they quickly go back to savagery. I wanted to show how much people can decline,” Yeon says.
For the filmmaker, this “hive mind” is the perfect analogy for our increasing addiction to social media and the potentially damaging effects of artificial intelligence.
“When you have a lot of points of view on social media, they really spread very rapidly, and you just realise that consciousness is ruling everything,” he says. “All this technology is evolving very rapidly, and that was a great influence on my movie.”

AI has been a huge topic of the festival, not least with Steven Soderbergh openly using AI tools to generate sequences for John Lennon: The Last Interview, his documentary about the former Beatle’s final press encounter.
Yeon feels that with AI, “you have more and more information accumulating and growing rapidly”, which is somewhat detrimental to our mental health. “In that sense, it really helped me create the zombies.”
Despite this advanced tech, one can easily look at Colony and think of Romero’s second zombie outing, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, which was similarly set in a shopping centre, as well as his less appreciated Land of the Dead from 2005.
That story, which shows how the zombies gain levels of cognitive intelligence, “really was a great influence on Colony”, Yeon says.
Flesh, blood and the avant-garde
Yeon also deliberately moves away from Romero’s stance on slow-moving zombies. Here, alongside some impressive make-up and prosthetics, the very physicality of the extras playing the zombies is remarkable, as they gyrate and twist their bodies, often smashing into doors and windows as they feverishly try to claw their way towards any available human flesh.

In the past, Yeon has worked with breakdancers and stunt performers when creating his zombies. This time, he chose an avant-garde dance troupe.
“I needed people who would move as a group,” he says. “There were three teams, so I wanted them to move collectively. The metaphor I used was 10 fingers playing the piano. It’s not because they have to have the same movement. Each of them had a role. I was really satisfied with the result.”
Romero was not the only cinematic influence on Yeon’s film, especially as the zombies spit a white substance.
“In the beginning, we didn’t know what colour it would be,” says Yeon, who then thought of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien and that film’s visceral colour scheme. “Inside, you have the white substance … I thought that it created a very intense colour, intense feeling, so we did a lot of tests with the make-up team, and that’s why we decided to choose the white and red.”

While early critical reviews have been mixed, Colony certainly marks a shift from Train to Busan, in which passengers were trapped on a speeding locomotive with the undead.
“The message of Train to Busan was the extreme capitalist society that we live in,” Yeon says.
Ironically, that film became the capitalist’s dream; Train to Busan was such a hit that it generated a prequel (2016’s animated Seoul Station) and sequel (2020’s Peninsula), while the remake rights were sold to Hollywood.
“I think they really tried to do a remake, but actually the remake rights came back, so I’m not really aware of the status now,” Yeon says.
Life beyond the undead
For the moment, Yeon has no plans to return to the zombie genre. His next project, due on Netflix in July, is Human Vapor, an eight-episode science-fiction crime thriller he co-wrote. Directed by Shinzo Katayama, the series stars Shun Oguri and Yu Aoi in their first live-action appearance together in over two decades.

Inspired by Ishiro Honda’s 1960 film The Human Vapor, the show marks the first collaboration between the streaming giant and Japan’s famed Toho Studios. “It’s a completely different project compared to what I used to do,” Yeon says.
He is also completing post-production for Paradise Lost. “It’s a Korean low-budget movie that will be really deep and dark, also a human drama,” he says. The intimate project is an extension of themes he explored in his 2025 film The Ugly.
Inspired by Asian directors such as Edward Yang De-chang and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Paradise Lost is another AI-adjacent tale, about a mother who uses AI to resurrect her dead son – only to have her actual boy return years later.
Yeon says his coming projects “are quite different from one another” and that there will not be a zombie in sight.
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How Colony features a new kind of zombie to reflect modern fears

A still from Colony.

Jun Ji-hyun in a still from Colony. The film’s director, Yeon Sang-ho, shares how modern concerns about the negative effects of AI and other advanced technologies on society inspired his new zombie horror film.

Yeon Sang-ho attends the 79th Cannes Film Festival for the screening of his new movie, Colony, on May 15, 2026. Photo: Reuters

(Front row from left) Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok, Jun Ji-hyun and Koo Kyo-hwan in a still from Colony.

Yeon’s zombies in Colony are far removed from the archetypal undead in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead; they move quickly, gyrating their bodies as they claw their way towards human flesh.

(From left) Kim Shin-rok, Shin Hyun-been, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Jun Ji-hyun, and Yeon Sang-ho arrive at the premiere of Colony at the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 2026. Photo: AP

Ji Chang-wook in a still from Colony.

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Jun Ji-hyun as biotech professor Kwon Se-jeong in a still from Colony (category IIB, Korean), directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Koo Kyo-hwan and Ji Chang-wook co-star.

Ji Chang-wook plays a security guard in a still from Colony.

Koo Kyo-hwan (centre) as vengeful scientist Seo Young-cheol in a still from Colony.

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Director Yeon Sang-ho of Train to Busan fame explains how AI and social media anxiety inspired the zombies in his new horror film


Director Yeon Sang-ho of Train to Busan fame explains how AI and social media anxiety inspired the zombies in his new horror film.


How Colony features a new kind of zombie to reflect modern fears

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Director Yeon Sang-ho of Train to Busan fame explains how AI and social media anxiety inspired the zombies in his new horror film

Director Yeon Sang-ho of Train to Busan fame explains how AI and social media anxiety inspired the zombies in his new horror film