Yeon Sang-ho
Yeon Sang-ho is a director, born 1978.
Animation came first, and it was not the friendly kind. Yeon Sang-ho made his name with two adult animated features, The King of Pigs in 2011 and The Fake in 2013, both close range studies of Korean cruelty, one about school violence and one about a religious swindle. Nobody who sat through them expected the next film to be a crowd pleaser.
The next film was Train to Busan, a zombie picture set almost entirely on a moving train, and it is the Korean genre film that broke through internationally. He released the animated prequel Seoul Station the same year, and it is the more pessimistic of the two by a wide margin.
Since then he has worked fast and unevenly. Psychokinesis, billed as the first South Korean superhero film, hangs a genre premise on a very local property dispute. Peninsula went bigger than Train to Busan and lost the confinement that made the original work. JUNG_E and Revelations pushed toward science fiction and religious horror with mixed results.
Television has suited him better than the sequels did. Hellbound, Parasyte: The Grey, Monstrous and The Cursed all keep hold of his actual subject, which is how quickly a frightened society will hand itself over to whoever is loudest. Born in Seoul in 1978, he moves between animation, film and streaming without changing register, which almost nobody else does.
Movies (13)
TV (5)
Where to start with Yeon Sang-ho
Train to Busan is the correct entry point and one of the few consensus picks in modern horror: a genre machine that keeps stopping to make you care about the passengers. Watch it before anything else, then watch Seoul Station, which covers the same outbreak from street level and withholds every comfort the live action film allows itself.
The King of Pigs is where he actually started and it is a hard sit, crude in its animation and merciless about what boys do to each other. Go there if the polish of the later work makes you suspicious of him.
On television, Hellbound is the ambitious one and the best argument for him as a writer, while Parasyte: The Grey is the more conventional thrill. Peninsula and JUNG_E are for completists: handsomely made, neither with the discipline of his best work.