Editorials
‘Seoul Station’: Revisiting the Under the Radar Prequel to ‘Train to Busan’
In 2016, South Korean zombie movie Train to Busan gained international acclaim with a heartfelt tale of an absentee father reconnecting with his daughter thanks to a viral pandemic that turns their train ride into one of terror and survival. Recent news of its upcoming follow-up, Peninsula, makes it clear that it’s not your traditional sequel; it’s not a continuation of the story, but rather a new story told within the same universe. That doesn’t come as much of a surprise when taking Train to Busan’s prequel Seoul Station into account. Released in South Korea only a month after, this under the radar prequel drastically varied in style and tone, demonstrating a vibrant and expansive zombie-affected world to explore.
Written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho, Seoul Station sets its narrative right at the beginning of the pandemic in the heart of Seoul. Specifically, in the heart of the homeless population that’s taken up residence in Seoul’s major railway, which happens to offer express service to Busan. It’s only this setting that serves as the connective tissue between films, though, as the plot follows Hye-sun and the two men trying to reconnect with her after the outbreak separates them.
Hye-sun is a former sex worker living with her boyfriend, Ki-woong. He’s a bit of a screwup, and due to financial issues, Ki-woong plans to pimp Hye-sun out for money. Understandably, she’s less than thrilled with the notion. When a mob of infected homeless separates them, the rest of the narrative plays out against the familiar backdrop of a city under siege. The military rolls in and sets up quarantine procedures, installing roadblocks and obstacles that keep the lovers apart. Joining Ki-woong in his search for his girlfriend is Suk-gyu, Hye-sun’s estranged father. Nothing like an apocalyptic threat to bring a family together, right?
Right off the bat, it’s clear Yeon Sang-ho had a very different angle of humanity to explore with this prequel, and it’s not just the animation that gives it away. It’s that he’s framing the outbreak through the perspective of society’s most discarded and forgotten members. A teen runaway turned sex worker and her unemployed boyfriend are the protagonists. Early warning signs of a severe viral infection go unnoticed or disregarded because people turn a blind eye to the plight of the homeless. At the other end of the spectrum, Yeon Sang-ho paints authority figures with a cynical brush. The police and military are more interested in self-preservation than helping those most in need.
With both Train to Busan and Seoul Station, Yeon Sang-ho challenges the very notion of a modern family. In the former, it centers around a divorced father unused to being in his daughter’s life. In the latter, it features a teen struggling to survive on her own. She has no parents. A twist in the final act reveals Suk-gyu not to be the caring father he pretends to be, but a violent pimp determined to make her suffer for escaping him in the first place. Both offer up an emotionally gut-wrenching conclusion for its central characters.
The prequel, however, has a much grittier edge.
Zombies tend to serve as undead placeholders to reflect social issues or societal fears, and with the Train to Busan universe, Yeon Sang-ho is crafting a scathing and complicated South Korean zombie apocalypse with multiple angles of exploration. Each entry tonally and visually different from its predecessor, but with commonalities between them. Whereas Seoul Station took a hard stance on authority and the military, Peninsula is set to explore things from the perspective of a former soldier that heads back into the ravaged Korean peninsula. It’s this cultural examination that makes these films so engaging. Yeon Sang-ho isn’t reinventing the zombie movie wheel, but his approach still makes it feel fresh regardless.
By now, Train to Busan is being heralded as a modern zombie classic, but the underseen Seoul Station is just as worthy of praise. Considering Peninsula is set to arrive this summer, there’s no better time to catch up.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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