TIME: Hellbound began as an 11-minute animation in 2003. Over Zoom and through a translator, Yeon spoke to TIME about adapting Hellbound from webtoon to screen, the continued rise in popularity for Korean content and the U.S. And a recent report of its title, Last Train to New York, has sparked controversy. An English remake of the film, led by director Timo Tjahjanto, is in the works from New Line Cinema.
His 2016 zombie thriller Train to Busan was a global hit, grossing $92 million worldwide. Yeon is no stranger to receiving widespread international recognition for his work.
In the week of its premiere, Hellbound was the most-watched non-English television series on Netflix and entered the top 10 in TV in 71 countries including the U.S., according to the platform. The series dropped just two months after the release of Squid Game, Netflix’s most-watched series of all time, and in a time of booming global interest in Korean content. Read more: Here’s Everything New on Netflix in December 2021-and What’s Leaving The story chillingly interrogates the extent to which humans will go to protect their beliefs-even if those beliefs prove false. Hellbound is gripping and provocative, a thriller that’s much more concerned with the psychology of the humans driven toward fanaticism than the action behind the otherworldly damnations. Led by Jung Jinsu (Yoo Ah-in), the cult-like organization The New Truth appears to be the only group with an inkling of an explanation to the horrific phenomenon. In Netflix’s Hellbound, humans receive decrees from supernatural beings about the date and time they are bound for hell-this journey takes the form of those aforementioned monsters burning them to crisps.