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Bong Joon-ho is having a big year. The Snowpiercer and Okja filmmaker became the first Korean filmmaker to take home the Palme D'or at this year's Cannes Film Festival for his extraordinary thriller Parasite, and with significant awards buzz ahead of the film's US theatrical debut, he might next become the first South Korean filmmaker nominated in the Best International Film category. The Alamo Drafthouse (which shares the same owners as Neon, the distributor of Parasite) just named one of their theaters after him. Even his older films are in the news cycle again after South Korean police finally caught the culprit that inspired his 2003 murder-mystery Memories of a Murderer.

But while Parasite is steadily ramping up to awards season, the filmmaker is already hard at work on his next projects. Ahead of Parasite's US theatrical release on October 11, Collider sat down with the filmmaker, and while he's not giving away any secrets about what's coming up next, he did tease two very different developing projects: a Korean horror movie and an English-language, true story-inspired drama.

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Image via CJ Entertainment

Bong said,

"I had a great time working on Parasite so I want to work on films on the scale of Parasite and Mother, one in Korean and one in English. The Korean project is kind of like a horror film. Of course, I’m working on it so the genres will all be mixed but if you had to choose one genre it would be along the lines of horror. And for the English project, it began with a news article I randomly came across on CNN in 2016. It’s a small realistic drama piece."

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Image via Netflix

If that horror movie description has you curious (and after his work on The Host and Snowpiercer, it should,) the filmmaker shared a few more details on the project during a Q&A at the University of Texas last week.

"I don't know if you can call it horror, because in all my films the genre is ambiguous. But if you have to describe it, it's 'horror-action' and a disaster that happens in Seoul. I've had this idea since 2001, so I've been developing it for 18 years, and now I have an obsession. I really do have to shoot this movie... To give you one hint, it's not a film you can shoot in NYC or Chicago: it only works if all the pedestrians on the street have the same skin tone."

What does it mean? Why did it take 18 years to develop? And why does it have to be set in Korea? Knowing the filmmaker's knack for secrecy (Quentin Tarantino wasn't the only filmmaker to pen an anti-spoiler letter at Cannes, Bong also wrote  "a word of pleading" to critics and has done a great job of keeping the film's twists and turns under lock and key,) we won't get those answers for quite some time.

For now, at least we know the filmmaker is hard at work on new projects, and believe me, once you see Parasite, you're going to be doubly glad to hear that.

For more on Parasite check out the links below: