Your Train to Busan Viewing Companion

            There tends to be a divide between horror fans and horror skeptics. As someone who, as I’ve mentioned multiple times on this blog, only crossed that divide in recent years, movies like Train to Busan fascinate me endlessly. But genre is only one of the divides this film crosses.

              The movie follows single-father and businessman, Seok-woo, as he takes the train with his daughter, Su-an, to drop her off with her mother in Busan. The train leaves the station just as a zombie outbreak takes hold across the country, and the train is overcome with the ravenous undead. Seok-woo and Su-an are locked on the train with the zombies barely contained in the adjacent cars. Seok-woo has no idea how he’ll ever bring his daughter to safety, but if either of them are going to make it out alive, he’ll have to learn to depend on the other passengers.

               The film is designated as a horror film, but I’d classify it as more horror adjacent than straight horror. More analogous to something like World War Z than anything by Wes Craven, which makes it a lot more accessible to non-horror fans. 

    Part of the reason for the success of this film is the way it knows how to make the full use of its premise, both as a playground for chaos and as a reflection of human values. You especially see this echoed in the way the movie uses the language of cinema. Train to Busan understands how to make a tense situation that much more tense in how you frame the elements onscreen, in the information you're providing for the audience.

Part of the reason why the movie works as an action-thriller is also that there is a near constant supply of puzzles for the characters to work through: do I dare try to get close enough to the zombie horde to close the door to keep us safe knowing that if I step on a bag of chips, we're all zombie food? You are always at the edge of your seat waiting to see what choice the characters are going to make--and whether they will pay a deadly consequence for it. And the movie slides effortlessly between modes of suspense and moments of heart-pumping thrills which makes for a very satisfying meal of tension. 

With heart-racing scenarios like this, you want your characters and your audience to feel overwhelmed, but it can be easy to become so enamored with the scale of the wall they're being forced to climb that you give your characters no agency--nothing to work for--which severely depletes the tension of the story. The situation is almost always at its best when you give your characters a thin window in which to operate, the narrowest of bullseyes they could try to hit, so that you are always intimidated by the impossible odds but also furious if they don't try to eliminate the problem.

   And this has all worked to great effect. A lot of voices have called it one of the best zombie movies ever made. Jason Gorber wrote that, "Train to Busan is a tremendous achievement, a genre film that works in beautifully archetypal ways. It takes the elements of genre filmmaking to tell a story of interconnected characters, the way that the best of these films do. Far more than just a series of slaughterings, the film transports its audience through an emotional voyage that provides some deadly fun with emotionally charged drama."  

    Train to Busan is also one of those rare non-English films to hit big with American audiences, My friends who didn't go to film school ask me what I think about Train to Busan in a way they don’t with films like Monsieur Ibrahim. I always appreciate when I observe this phenomenon because I believe any society benefits from exposure to the art of a language, country, and/or culture that is different from its own.

If you haven’t caught the bug yet, fear not, this is a safe space. I’m not going to judge, but I am going to spend the next 4,000 words selling you on why Train to Busan should be on your list.

              I call this essay a “viewer’s companion” because the range of dialogue I want to survey is kind of large. I want to first focus on why trains are such a fascinating stage for this film. Then there’s the genre lens—how do horror films at large treat their subjects, and how is this horror film unique in its presentation? I also want to try unpacking the zombie metaphor, and I want to do so from a few angles. And because we like character arcs here at Films and Feelings, we’re also going to do a little bit of that. Here we go.

 

              Why Trains?

              I feel there’s an expectation for me to contextualize this movie in the framework of the history of zombies on film, but I’m not going to do that. At least, not yet. Instead, we’re going to start by talking about trains onscreen (seriously) because the choice to set the story onboard a passenger train is one that really shapes the film.

Titanic (1997)

           Modes of transport make for powerful backdrops in films when they become active agents of the story. In theory, you want your characters to undergo some kind of emotional journey—to arrive at a place different from where they were at the start of the narrative—and underscoring a character’s internal journey with a physical journey is an effective way to communicate that.

    Trains make for a rich stage for the drama to unfold because you can give your characters more moving room than you can with, say, a van or even an airplane, all while still preserving that sense of claustrophobia. Characters who are trapped on a train can still have room to go off on their own and get into trouble without escaping the tension.

              A passenger train is a frightening stage for a zombie breakout if you give the scenario more than two seconds’ thought. How do you get away from the zombies when you’re all locked in the same cage speeding 130 mph down the track? Traveling through a train is also a fairly linear process. What happens if you have to get from one car to the next to save your family and there are a whole bunch of zombies in the middle? You can’t very well go around them. You’ve got to just run through and hope for the best.

           But trains also pose an interesting question symbolically in that they connote progress and industry. The invention of the train allowed huge numbers of people to cross great distances in record time, which fundamentally changed the way that we think about time and distance. Trains are even linked to the advent of the technology of film itself. One of the earliest films screened for the masses was the 1895 Lumiere Brothers production, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, a fifty second movie filming the arrival of a passenger train. Trains heralded an age of prosperity--they literally carried humans into the age of technological dominance. 

So there are obviously motivations and precedent for having this protagonist reconsider his place in the machine while on board this hallmark of technology and enterprise. It’s common for films (e.g. Jurassic Park) to take a “technology=bad” stance, linking a corporate lifestyle to selfishness or a lack of humanity, and Train to Busan is no different. Seok-woo has fallen prey to a certain mindset, that being successful in the field of work and business is the same as being a good person, which, of course, it isn't. 

    This is focalized through Seok-woo’s relationship with his daughter. He has taken her for granted for all her life, or at least the last several years, and when the zombies hit the fan, he is forced to confront how his business mindset is in conflict with the heart he needs to keep his daughter safe. He can't truly protect the thing that is most precious to him as long he holds on to his selfish mindset, and having him work through this character flaw aboard this symbol of industrial might can be a suitable vehicle for that. 

              There’s one shot in this film’s climax that I’ve always found particularly charged. After the train crashes just outside of Busan, you get these snapshots of the zombies leaping out of the ruins of the car in a frenzy to pursue the protagonists. Because they’re springing fully formed from the wreckage, the shot seems to visually suggest that the train is giving birth to these zombies, that these undead monsters are products of the machine.

    I’m reminded of a similar shot in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There's a scene where a train enters the scene carrying the lawmen tasked with capturing our heroes. The enigmatic lawmen spring forth from the train car, and it carries that same suggestion. In that film, the train symbolizes the industrial and societal progress that is eventually going to run Butch and Sundance out of the wild west, and so the audience draws a natural link between the two. I think there’s a parallel to be drawn between the train “giving birth” to the lawmen in that film and the train “giving birth” to the zombies in this film.

              And that is ultimately this film in a nutshell: an exposé on how corporate culture and technological advances have sapped us of our humanity, turning us into mindless predators out to turn more people into mindless predators.

    Another aspect of "travel" that film likes to dial in on is this idea that it's a basic human ritual that cuts across all life experiences. Any random slice of human folks aboard the same train compartment, they share no common background, ideology, or goal. Even occupying the same area while passing through these transient spaces, they would never naturally interact with one another, but put this unlucky bunch in a situation where they suddenly have to depend on each other, and suddenly their shared humanity becomes the only unifying factor. 

    That observation is the basis of something like LOST, and also something like Alfred Hitchcock's underrated piece, Lifeboat, which sees a random group of individuals trying to stay afloat in the same raft after their ship is torpedoed. This little trial becomes a sort of statement on the entirety of America trying to figure out how to put the pieces back together in the wake of World War II. 

    That also becomes the engine with Train to Busan and its protagonist. Seok-woo is a man of business who has only ever drunk from the fountain of other men of business. But toss him in a situation where he has to link arms with a wider swath of human experiences, and something remarkable might just happen.

 

              Everyone's a Gentleman Until the Zombies Start a-Chompin'        

“Busan” isn’t terribly unique for exploring the question of human goodness in the face of crisis. We’ve been here before many times. In horror films, you generally run into one of two viewpoints: 

           You have horror films that expose the futility of the impulse to help your fellow human. Sam Raimi’s 1981 film, The Evil Dead, follows a gaggle of brain-dead college kids, who on a weekend cabin excursion, recklessly awaken vengeful evil spirits which go on to possess each of them in turn. These demons can only be destroyed if you decapitate a living host, which puts the survivors in the uncomfortable position of having to gruesomely dismember their best friends. They’re naturally hesitant to do so, and so they are all killed off by the end of the film. (I think. I guess Bruce Campbell’s character comes back for the sequels. Somehow.) Horror films like this prod at our insecurity that maybe good manners won't save you come the apocalypse.

              And on the other end, you have horror movies that hold a mirror to the way modern living saps humans of their empathy, turning them into monsters. It’s part of our modern social contract to not butcher each other, and it’s the point of interest of many films to explore what could drive a person to unleash such unthinkable evil. This is where you get movies like The Shining which explores how isolation and alcoholism drive a man to try slaughtering his wife and kid while they’re stuck in an empty hotel.

             Between the two forms, I think we can already see that Train to Busan takes after the latter class. “Busan” comments on how society actively creates monsters by stealing their humanity, by looking at how crises reveal a person’s selfish or selfless tendencies. Once zombies infect the train, many characters immediately adopt an every-man-for-himself approach while others feel a natural kinship with the other passengers who are, after all, braving the same crisis. The film sets up this dichotomy by creating two groups of characters—those are altruistic, and those who are selfish—and having Seok-woo navigate the space between. 

    A valid observation concerning this film is that it's not particularly subtle in its treatment. Characters are easily sorted between two lanes--sympathetic, or not--and these alignments are telegraphed in the way they explicate their feelings out loud in the least uncertain terms possible. "You only care about yourself, and that's why mommy left." 

    But I'm at odds over whether or not this counts as a flaw versus a mere attribute. I see it as very similar to what we discussed in my Clash of the Titans essay--the real test of a film isn't always whether or not it's "complex" so much as whether it's coherent. This is especially true of mass-appeal films, which is what Train to Busan is aiming to be. And the thematic consistency is one of the film's strongest suits. We understand the relationship between action and consequence, and truth and theme, in how the film treats its characters.

    Seok-woo starts the film definitively in the selfish crowd. This group is headed by Yon-suk. Like Seok-woo, Yon-suk is a man of business, which partially explains his cutthroat, self-serving instinct. He not only looks out for himself exclusively, he also stokes paranoia in others as well. One of the most frustrating sequences in the film has Yon-suk scare an entire group of survivors into barricading the train car against the heroes with a crowd of zombies on their tails. This act will have dire consequences.

    In the altruistic group, you have the characters who become Seok-woo’s allies. There’s a homeless man who sneaks onboard the train at the start and is just looking for a quiet place to be left alone but also possesses a kind heart. You have a group of high school baseball players heading to an away game with their cheerleader friend (all but one of the players gets infected during the zombie attack at Daejeon station). But the most significant players are dedicated father Sang-hwa and his pregnant wife, Seong-kyeong.

If Yon-suk the businessman represents the character Seok-woo is, Sang-hwa represents the character we want him to be, certainly the character Soo-an deserves for a father. Sang-hwa is positioned as the foil to Seok-woo, which is interesting because Sang-hwa himself isn’t unerringly benevolent. Early on he casually threatens to punch Seok-woo in the face after he shows inadequate remorse for nearly letting them be zombified. But he has the thing that Seok-woo lacks, that being a strong moral compass and a concern for others.

           Seok-woo doesn’t actively begin to attain these characteristics until the stop in Daejon. This is where the passengers disembark with the promise of the military escorting them to safety only to find that the military has also been infected, leaving them to flee back to the train. A few things happen during this chapter that initiate Seok-woo’s all-important character growth.

              First, his own methods fail him. He tries to sneak out the back door so he doesn’t have to go into quarantine with all the other plebians, and this only puts him and Su-an in danger when he discovers that the zombies have taken over the station. Second, he sees firsthand that his approach only put him and his daughter in danger, and not just in the hypothetical danger she was in on the train. It is spelled out explicitly that he made Soo-an vulnerable to being taken out by the zombies. Soo-an is only spared because Sang-hwa is there to scoop her out of the jaws of the undead, and that’s the third thing: Seok-woo realizes he cannot make it out of this without leaning on the goodness of others, even those he considers “beneath” him. 

           From there, he allies with Sangh-hwa and the other survivors. He jumps from the camp of other businessmen to that of the working class, the homeless, and the young. One of the most memorable sequences of the film has Seok-woo and the others braving the zombie-infested train to rescue their loved ones after being separated during the massacre at Daejon. They ultimately succeed in this endeavor, but Sangh-hwa will have to seal their victory by sacrificing his life.

              Sang-hwa’s death is arguably the first death that hurts on a personal level. With the initial slaughter, and even in the massacre at the train station, our focus is more on the weight of the threat, the ravenousness with which the zombies mow down the passengers. Here, we see that threat starts to take a personal toll: we’ve lost a character that we care about.

            The irony is that being selfless isn’t the thing that cost Sang-Wah’s life. It was, as it is in most of the deaths in this movie, the selfishness of another character. This is that episode where Yon-suk has the entire car shut out the heroes as they are fighting off the zombies. Sang-hwa then sacrifices himself holding back the zombies while Seok-woo and the others break down the door. This becomes a recurring theme throughout the film. Many of the characters will choose to sacrifice their own life to protect the party, but the sacrifice was always necessitated by another character (usually the dude in the suit). 

    The movie's not terribly unique in this regard. But the film is really smart in how it exposes a very real evil that is latent in the human network while still centering on a cast of very likeable characters. It's not at all like Evil Dead where I just want the evil spirits to purge this group of dropouts. And this gives "Busan" a significant advantage over most other movies in this genre. Like, my heart hurts every time I see the poor train attendant who just tries to help that initial zombie victim on the train. And the kills don't get any nicer as we go on.

    And the way this movie pulls it off largely has to do with where it chooses to focalize the ills that elicit this catastrophe in the first place. The film is grilling a problem that is inherent in human society, but not in every human. All that is wrong in society is actually encapsulated in our film's protagonist. The movie takes a real risk in this way, but you can also often get away with making your protagonist kind of a turd if you surround them with likeable characters who help facilitate their growth. 

    Imagine, if you'd like, Seok-woo as Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Our protagonist in this film is also deeply unlikeable, and this mostly stems from his disdain for other people. But this becomes the basis of his character arc, which has him gradually awakening to both the worth of his environment and his own latent altruism, which is very similar to the situation of our protagonist here.

       The film’s final confrontation has Seok-woo, Su-an, and Seong-kyeong finally on the train car that will carry them to the safety of Busan, and it’s on this car that they encounter Yon-suk as a freshly turned zombie. In true hero fashion, Seok-woo faces off against Yon-suk, symbolic of him facing off against his own vices. He is able to toss Yon-suk off the train, but not before he is bitten. He’s allowed a few minutes to say goodbye to his daughter, who will now go with Seong-kyeong, before throwing himself off the train.  

                  This focus on systemic human selfishness is fairly commonplace within the genre of horror. What isn’t necessarily a given in horror movies is the protagonist, the vessel of human flaws, getting to move past their vices or human failings. As we discussed in our look at A Quiet Place, horror movies generally start from a place of cynicism, of saying what nobody wants to hear but what they can't really dismiss. Genuine growth is not at all a given within horror, and this is what makes it so special that Seok-woo is allowed to eventually make amends with this daughter, even if he has to sacrifice his life in the process.

               Alright, now we’re going to give a little of that historical context to film zombies.

               Social Turmoil and the Undead

    The first time I saw this movie was during the pandemic--during what I had really hoped were the waning phases of the shutdown but what I would come to see was still the early days. So, watching large parts of the movie--like the conductor's perusal through the abandoned train station--landed in a very specific way for me. But the situation also emerges from social anxieties that precede the COVID-19 epidemic.

    Film has all sorts of tools for imagining all the ways the world might shut down. There are, for example, similarities between something like a zombie apocalypse and the situation for Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The difference between "Body Snatchers" and zombies being that the former has been generally read as a critique of indifference, political inaction. The original 1956 film has been seen as an alarm bell for society's apathy toward McCarthyism. Zombies, on the other hand, they tend to describe something very different.

Just before the zombie outbreak on the train, some passengers watching the news view a story about the police quelling civilian riots. Understanding what kind of movie this is, we the audience immediately make the connection that this is the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, even if it will take the characters a little while to catch on. Seeing the “rioters,” an old lady watching the story mutters to her sister, “In the old days, they’d be reeducated.”          

              She is possibly referencing the dictatorship that covered South Korea through the 1980s, a time where the government was actively quashing civilian rebellion. This period was marked by episodes like the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 which saw university students pushing back against the martial law enforced by the country’s dictator. A few years later the country endured the June democracy protests of 1987, wherein the population of South Korea rioted against the military regime instituting the country’s new president. The aftermath of said protests lead to the country adopting the election-based government it knows today. It’s also worth remarking that Train to Busan was released amid the protests against then President Park Geun-hye, whose political misbehavings would elicit her impeachment in December of 2016.

Shortly after the film's zombie takeover on the train, we get this sequence where images of the country being flooded with zombies are overlaid with the government spreading this story about civilian protests. Note how much the carnage of the zombie outbreaks in Train to Busan mirror this description of the Gwangju Uprising.

“In the early hours of May 18, 1980, martial law was extended to the entirety of South Korea. Troops were sent across the country, with troops arriving in Gwangju and occupying local university campuses. Like many of their fellow citizens, students in Gwangju began to hold protests. The protests soon turned violent when the troops began to respond by beating students with clubs. When the situation escalated, more troops were sent into Gwangju — this time with machine guns. Students and the citizens who joined them in protesting were ruthlessly brutalized and murdered at the hands of their own armed forces.”

So there’s something really chilling about the in-universe government trying to disguise a zombie outbreak as the masses needing disciplining. Images of the masses devolving into a body of mindless destruction can easily speak to anxiety over the social conditions in which a given population might be moved to rioting.

Consider that zombies really began to take hold in American cinema with movies like Night of the Living Dead during the late 1960s, a time that was also marked by wide protest. Curiously, as America has slid into a phase of civil unrest in recent years, we haven’t really seen a resurgence of zombie-related media. Part of this probably has something to do with the fact that zombies have leaked into the mainstream on their own terms and redefined what the zombie even means. 

    The Walking Dead was one of the most popular shows of the 2010s, the zombies here standing less for civil unrest and more a quiet fear that modern convenience can be unraveled with a single crisis. You can find some media, like CW’s iZombie or BBC’s In the Flesh, that present zombies as an exploited underclass, but 21st century zombies have overall been relatively apolitical. 

    By finding popularity in a comparatively stable ecosystem, the connotation of the zombie has shifted from unrest to its exact opposite: boredom. Horror-comedies especially like Shaun of the Dead or Warm Bodies have commandeered zombie mythology to comment on how 21^st century living can sometimes feel more like a state of being undead, the inevitable result of a communal distancing that rises in the wake of millennial nihilism.

            Train to Busan kind of brings this full circle. The film comments on how modern living drains us of our humanity, but where this is mostly played as satire in films like Shaun of the Dead or Warm Bodies, Train to Busan gives the zombies back their bite. This it does by focalizing what specifically makes modern living not just numbing but dehumanizing. It’s not just mundanity that's the problem, but the way that corporate culture and the impulse to get ahead at any cost breeds monsters. Note the scene shortly before the climax when Seok-woo learns his company is in fact responsible for the virus that caused this disaster, the scene culminating with him tearfully washing his hands in the sink to scrub off the blood, symbolic of the blood on his hands from his reckless commercial exploitation.

              Train to Busan shows how larger institutions, be they corporate or government, disempower the individual. It’s only when people rediscover the safety of individual connection that they find true strength and resilience.

              Legacy

Train to Busan grossed nearly a hundred million dollars worldwide on a budget of less than ten million. Very respectable, especially for a non-English film, so naturally there’s been incentive to franchise the property.

           Train to Busan was followed by a sequel in 2020, simply called Peninsula. Despite taking place in the same universe, the characters from “Busan” are not even mentioned. Fitting, I suppose, seeing how the characters in this film are nowhere near as engaging as the heroes in "Busan." When I can bring myself to try remembering what even happens in this sequel, I mostly remember the lame plot contrivances. The survivors in this hellscape, for example, host these zombie gladiator games wherein the losers are all inevitably turned into zombies themselves, and not one person recognizes this for the containment issue that it is.

              Where Train to Busan has a very straightforward premise, the zombie outbreak feels almost incidental to the main plot. And where the emotional stuff is usually a pleasant surprise to people watching Train to Busan for the first time, the emotional bits in Peninsula feel forced and even intrusive. The human goodness piece is still there, nominally at least. In this film it’s the mother who makes the sacrifice play for her kids, though she is saved at the last minute from having to actually go through with it.

              New Line Cinema also is currently in the process of producing an English remake, Last Train to New York, and we’ll see what happens there. I don’t love the idea of Hollywood having to make a whole new version of a film just so American audiences don’t have to watch a film with subtitles (but I won’t deny that I actually prefer The Ring to the original Japanese Ringu, so I can’t say my hands are clean either). The universe is still trying to decide what to do with Train to Busan’s success, and while the efforts to franchise the thing have been predictably messy, I think we can take comfort in what we’ve got.

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998)

    The world has long used zombie lore and iconography to explore what it means to live in a world where the masses can suddenly lose their humanity and individuality. Again, it's peculiar that as the United States has in recent years confronted the monsters in its own systems, it hasn't really seen an upturn in zombie media. 

    But then, I suppose this only makes its embrace of something like Train to Busan--a vehicle for some other entity confronting its own internal monsters--makes sense. And perhaps it also brings up questions about whether or not this coping mechanism is just America digging itself into a state of avoidance rather than doing the hard work of personal reflection.

    But perhaps that deserves its own essay ... 

            --The Professor