Zombie Masterpiece ‘Train to Busan’ is Even Scarier in 2020

When Train to Busan premiered in 2016, it was immediately heralded as a horror masterpiece. The Korean zombie flick focused its gaze on the everyday people struggling to keep their loved ones alive in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. It’s intimate and terrifying and ultimately a powerful indictment of self-serving behavior. While the film was scary then, Train to Busan feels all the more terrifyingly urgent that we’ve lived through a global pandemic. From its recognizable portraits of mass panic to the horror of the word “quarantine,” Train to Busan just slaps harder in the age of COVID.

Written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho, Train to Busan follows a workaholic hedge fund manager named Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) who finds himself flailing as a newly single father. After completely botching his daughter Su-an’s (Kim Su-an) birthday, he reluctantly agrees to take the girl on the morning train to Busan to spend time with her mother. While the looming threat of the zombie pandemic is encroaching Seok-woo’s world on the fringes, it’s not until the train leaves the station that it’s clear all hell has broken loose. The rest of the film is a series of desperate attempts for our human protagonists to survive in the face of an unstoppable threat. The underlying theme? Empathy, not selfishness, is what separates humanity from the ravenous hoard.

Train to Busan has always been chilling, but now its imagery strikes new fear into my heart. That’s because so much of the film is familiar. From its opening moments — where a farmer shrugs off a warning about a chemical spill with the same bluster I heard so many folks write off the looming threat of COVID-19 six months ago — Train to Busan nailed the way pandemics spread psychologically. At first, apathy, then confused panic, followed by hysteria, and then ultimately, acceptance.

It’s this familiarity that makes Train to Busan hit harder in 2020. Instead of just being a brilliant zombie film, it’s also a startlingly accurate portrait of how society fractures in a pandemic. People behave with ruthless cruelty and they show courageous kindness. The wealthy push themselves to the front of the line for safety. Parents make sacrifices for their children. The uninfected fear infection with an almost rabid passion.

Train to Busan has become a modern classic because of the way it makes a national zombie crisis an intimate story. However, it will endure as a masterpiece of its genre because that attention to humanity inadvertently makes it a haunting funhouse mirror reflection of life under COVID-19.

NOTE: Train to Busan is currently streaming on Netflix, but it will leave the service on September 17. 

Where to stream Train to Busan