Born in 1978, Yeon Sangho is an animation director who recently moved to live action films. After graduating from Sangmyung University in painting, he made his debut in 1997 with the short movie <Megalomania of D>, made in stop motion animation. In 2003, he moved to more traditional animation techniques with his third short <The Hell>, which won Asian Ghost Award at the Short Shorts Film Festival Asia. After he set up his own animation company Studio Dada Show in ...More

Born in 1978, Yeon Sangho is an animation director who recently moved to live action films. After graduating from Sangmyung University in painting, he made his debut in 1997 with the short movie <Megalomania of D>, made in stop motion animation. In 2003, he moved to more traditional animation techniques with his third short <The Hell>, which won Asian Ghost Award at the Short Shorts Film Festival Asia. After he set up his own animation company Studio Dada Show in 2004, his following short <Love is Protein> was screened in Competition section at the Curtocircuit International Short Film Festival of Santiago de Compostela and invited to the Mauvais Genre International Film Festival in Tours, France. His debut feature <The King of Pigs> won the NETPAC Award, the CGV Movie Collage Award and the Best Director Award from the Director's Guild of Korea at the Busan International Film Festival in 2011 and was later screened at the Cannes Film Festival. His next feature <The Fake>, which dealt with religious cults in Korea, fared even better, garnering enormous acclaim around the globe and plenty of festival invitations, starting with a spot in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Vanguard Section. Right after the release of his zombie apocalypse animation <Seoul Station> in 2016, he made his live action debut with <TRAIN TO BUSAN>, which indirectly follows up on the events of <Seoul Station>. The film would benefit from positive word of mouth following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival to rack up 11 million admissions in Korea and become one of the most successful Korean movies in foreign territories, prompting Hollywood to set up a remake. Following this success, Yeon came back in 2018 with the superhero blockbuster <Psychokinesis>, another live action film that challenges film genre conventions. After assuming producing duties on the animation feature <Princess Aya> (2019), he then returned to the universe he created with <TRAIN TO BUSAN> with <Peninsula>, which introduced a new story with new characters, set 2 years after the events of the previous film. Benefitting from a lack of new Hollywood releases while cinemas in territories relatively safe from the Covid-19 pandemic were in desperate need of blockbuster titles, the film topped the global box office that summer, with a total worldwide haul of more than USD 50 million. After a first experience in 2018 with <Face>, Yeon moved to webtoons in earnest when he wrote the story for the dark fantasy series <Hellbound> (2019-2020), based on an animation short he made as his graduation project in 2002. In 2020, Yeon also made his debut in TV series, with his scripts being used for the horror series <The Cursed>. Netflix offered him the opportunity to turn <Hellbound> into a series, which Yeon directed himself and was made available on the streaming service in 2021. Meanwhile, his other TV series, <The Cursed>, received the film adaptation treatment with <The Cursed: Dead Man’s Prey> (2021), directed by Kim Yongwan, whereas his earlier critical hit <The King of Pigs> was remade as a drama series in 2022. After penning the occult horror series <Monstrous> for the local streaming service TVing, Yeon went back to the film director’s chair with the Netflix original film <JUNG_E>, and he is also currently working on a Korean series adaptation of the Japanese manga <Parasyte>.Less