Bloody Perfect: Taste the Pain
Isaura Barbé-Brown brings us the next post in her monthly column, Bloody Perfect.
In honour of Squid Game being a worldwide hit (and Gong Yoo being hot), I looked to South Korea for this month’s column. Specifically, Busan, South Korea.
If you’re azombie connoisseur, like I, then Train To Busan (2016) is no doubt in your zombie horror hall of fame already.
The film follows Seok-Woo (Gong Yoo); a ludicrously attractive dead-beat dad, who workstoo hard, pisses off his ex-wife and neglects his daughter Soo-An (Kim Su-an), who wants to spend her birthday with her mother in Busan.
Reluctantly, Seok-Woo forgoes his work commitments and takes his daughter on the morning train to see her mother, just as an unfortunate chemical leak at a biotech plant starts to take a hold of the country. Just before the train pulls out, a distressed girl with a bite on her leg, makes it on board. No one notices her (or rather everyone is busy aggressively minding their business) until the girl starts fitting between carriages. A few moments later, she is the infected undead, biting and chewing her way through the train carriage, creating new zombies as she goes. As you can imagine, a metal tube is not the best place to be trapped during a rapid zombie outbreak and the only hope is for the surviving passengers to get to the front of the train and put a door, or a carriage between them and the infected. Factions are made, lines are drawn, and, of course, one loud arsehole is willing to let everyone die to save himself. The stations are overrun, and the only place where the military have been effective in containment is Busan. So it’s full steam ahead, and all Seok-Woo can do is clench his sexy jaw, try to protect his daughter and fight alongside the friends he’s made along the way.
There isn’t a scene I don’t like in this film, and not only because Gong-Yoo has the chiselled face of an angel. My favourite however, comes right at the start of the outbreak. I don’t know what zombie classes these actors were sent to, but the transformations are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The contortions are jerky and impossible, their teeth are bared and gnashing and their eyes are milky white and fixed on flesh. This film has everything; zombies cascading like waterfalls; zombies linked together like a blanket of bodies being dragged behind the train; zombie piles; zombie swarms; zombies zombies zombies. But nothing is scarier than the moment it all kicks off and how quickly the situation becomes impossible, and how long it takes each individual to realise they are truly and utterly fucked. What do you do when you’re on a train moving at high speeds and there are monsters clambering over seats and each other to take a bite out of you? The only thoughts in my brain during my re-watch were this question… and what Gong-Yoo would look like in a white cotton shirt in the early morning as he stalks across the misty moors… But I digress. The answer to the former is…. I don’t know. You can’t jump off, you can’t stop the train, you can’t uncouple the carriages, weapons aren’t readily available, no one can help you and the only authorities are a train driver and a few train stewards. Honestly, I would have been tucked away in the train toilet hoping for the best. Seok-Woo, thankfully, is nothing like me. He does what you hope the hero does in every zombie flick. His handsome brain assesses the situation, he finds his daughter, he fights, he becomes a better, more beautiful person and no matter how scared he is, he never leaves a bare arm or leg hanging about to be nibbled on by accident.
This film is my zombie on a train survival guide. It should be yours too. All I need now are comprehensive ones about planes and boats and I’ll be set. I also need Gong-Yoo to call me… but that’s unrelated.
Isaura Barbé-Brown is a Hackney born and based actress. She studied at AADA in New York and BADA in Oxford. She has written for The BFI, Black Ballad UK as well as The Final Girls/Bloody Women and been a guest on The Final Girls podcast and the Evolution of Horror podcast. She has done talks at the BFI for their Squad Goals event and during their Love season with the Bechdel Test Fest on race in romantic films. Isaura has also been on panels for BFI Future Film, The Watersprite Film Festival and The Norwich Film Festival. Her acting work covers theatre, film, tv and voiceover. She has also written for short film, TV and theatre as well as short stories and poetry. You can find Isaura on Twitter and Instagram.
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