Yeon Sang-ho sleeps soundly at night – no bad dreams, no night terrors, thank you very much. “When I get to bed, I’m just completely exhausted,” the 47-year-old South Korean director says with a grin. “When I sleep, the next step is just I wake up. So I never dream or have nightmares.”

This must have come as a relief given he has spent a decade contemplating zombies on and off following his 2016 mega-hit Train to Busan.

It is late afternoon when we meet on the windswept sixth-floor terrace of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palais. In just over six hours, Yeon’s new zombie film Colony will receive its world premiere in a Midnight Screenings slot, echoing the unveiling of Train to Busan a decade ago.

Yet any thought that he is simply retreading old ground should be dismissed; Colony injects the genre with something fresh and frightening.

“The starting point of making this movie was not to make a zombie movie,” Yeon says. “It was about dealing with the potential fear of our time, and for me, it was about the high-speed exchange of information, which leads to collective consciousness.

“I wanted to make a movie about this problem, and at one point, I realised that the genre that could adequately represent this would be the zombie genre.”