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Among the many things that Korean cinema has become known for the world over is its ability to work across genres. Beyond staples such as melodrama and gangster thrillers, local filmmakers have stretched out into more ambitious fare and one style of film that has become increasingly prominent over the last few years has been the disaster film. This summer welcomes two new additions to the genre, TRAIN TO BUSAN and The Tunnel, with another, Pandora, currently in post-production. But it wasn’t that long ago that the genre was completely alien to the industry.

 

 

Following a decade of rising commercial prospects and expeditious technical improvement, the disaster film, an expensive mode of filmmaking that is open to only the largest and most successful film industries, suddenly became a viable option for the Korean film industry towards the end of the naughts. After years of big thrillers and high-concept genre mash-ups being paraded as tentpoles of the year, the prospect of effects-driven spectacle was no longer a daunting one for local filmmakers.

 

Yet, behind the obvious razzle-dazzle and sensory thrills of the genre, disaster films also provided something uniquely appealing to Korean viewers, as they offered a reminder of some of Korea’s difficult social episodes, whether the construction failures of the Sampoong Department Store and Seongsu Bridge or the manifold deaths owed to fires and all manner of poorly dealt with incidents. While reminders of a difficult history may not seem like a recipe for box office success, in Korea, films that have hinted at the dark underbelly of Korean society have time and again been shown to tap into a vein of discontent and a desire to release blocked pains.

 

Of course, the modern wave of disaster films in Korea didn’t just come out of nowhere. Big-budget experiments got started in 1996 with KANG Je-kyu’s The Gingko Bed, took greater strides in 1999 with KANG’s Swiri and continued to grow by leaps and bounds throughout the beginning of the millennium.

 

Beginning in 2004, with the release of TaeGukGi: Brotherhood Of War, once again by KANG, the industry began to show signs that it might be ready to tackle bolder kinds of big-budget genre filmmaking. It became even more evident that the industry could do just about anything in 2006, with the release of BONG Joon-ho’s The Host (2006), which was, among many other things, a large scale disaster film.

 

 

 

The real era of the disaster film dawned in 2009, when JK YOUN, previously a successful director and producer of mid-level comedies such as the Sex Is Zero films (2002, 2007), reached the big time with his ambitious tidal wave epic Haeundae, which soared to over 11 million admissions.

 

Starring SUL Kyung-gu, HA Ji-won, UHM Jeong-hwa and PARK Joong-hoon, the film combined classic Korean melodrama as it painstakingly developed the relationships between the members of a community in its first hour before turning on the fireworks with a tidal wave descending upon Haeundae, a popular beach area in the Southern port city of Busan, in its back half. It did so by deploying the most sophisticated visual effects witnessed in Korean films up until that time.

 

The tremendous success of Haeundae emboldened the Korean film industry and while it took a few years for the ball to really get rolling, by 2012 the industry was churning out a few disaster titles per annum. First among these was PARK Jung-woo’s Deranged in the summer of 2012. Featuring KIM Myung-min as a family man who tries to protect his family when a strange illness that causes thousands to drown sweeps Korea, the film was another solid performer, topping out at just over 4.5 million viewers.

 

At the very end of the year, KIM Ji-hoon’s inferno pic The Tower peaked at just shy of 5.2 million viewers. Another blockbuster with SUL Kyung-gu, the film detailed the chaos that ensues when a blaze sweeps the upper floors of a sparkling new high rise in Seoul and the firefighters who try to save the people trapped in the building. Like Haeundae and Deranged, much of the narrative is devoted to building relationships in the first half that lead to heightened melodramatic payoffs in the climax.

 

The summer of 2013 brought with it a number of quasi-disaster films, in BONG Joon-ho’s distopian sci-fi Snowpiercer and KIM Byung-woo’s The Terror, LIVE, as well as the influenza thriller The Flu. All three were released in August and while the former two struck gold at the box office, The Flu became the first (and to date only) disaster film that didn’t quite hit the mark. Featuring Su Ae and JANG Hyuk as residents of Bundang, a Seoul suburb, that is locked down when a dangerous virus quickly spreads, The Flu hewed close in tone to Deranged which may have given the impression that the film wasn’t presenting anything new. Still, the film did moderately well and ended up with just over 3.1 million viewers.

 

 

For a few years the disaster receded into the background as the years’ big-budget lineups were largely swallowed up by the incredibly successful trend of Joseon Era period films, which included Masquerade (2012) and Roaring Currents (2014). But 2016 sees the genre come back with a vengeance, claiming two of the coveted high summer release spots. These are of course YEON Sang-ho’s zombie blockbuster TRAIN TO BUSAN and the rescue drama The Tunnel. Also on the horizon, though the release has been unclear for some time, is Pandora, the new collaboration between PARK Jung-woo and KIM Myung-min.

 

Following the Cannes invitation, acclaim and commercial success of A Hard Day (2014), KIM Seong-hun returns next month with The Tunnel, which will feature HA Jung-woo as a family man who gets trapped inside a collapsed tunnel and fights for survival. BAE Doo-na plays his wife trying to connect with him from the rescue site and OH Dal-su is on board as one of the rescue workers.

 

Meanwhile, indie animation darling YEON Sang-ho jumps up to the big league with his first live-action film TRAIN TO BUSAN, following the events of his animated title Seoul Station, which serves as the closing film of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival later this month. Featuring GONG Yoo as a father accompanying his daughter on an express train from Seoul to Busan which becomes caught in a zombie epidemic, the film drew strong notices at the Cannes Film Festival where it screened in the Midnight Screenings section.

 

Time will tell how these films compare to previous Korean disaster films, both in terms of critical and commercial acclaim, but until now, it seems that the disaster film is a genre that Korean studios still have a lot of faith in.