Somewhere between Antichrist, The Ice Storm and Adventures In Babysitting, the forthcoming Parasite (in cinemas 7 February) is however unlike any film of recent memory. The story of an impoverished family in South Korea who trick their way into a luxury house before discovering that there are further levels of desperate poverty, even below themselves, it weightlessly swaps goofball physical comedy for guts-out horror; gaping establishing shots for sodium-lit claustrophobia. Yet, for all its originality, these are tried and tested trademarks of Korean filmmaker Mr Bong Joon-ho’s, who previously shunted us into harrowing possible futures in Netflix dramas Okja and Snowpiercer. Here are a few more of the director’s tricks to look out for.

The director will drop a biblical rain on his actors, even on a day of clear blue skies. In his take on Godzilla, 2006’s totally brilliant The Host, lead star Mr Song Kang-ho grapples with an antique shotgun that has seized up in the rain. In Parasite, a drenched assault is witnessed through a window via an iPhone – glaze upon glaze upon glaze. The diagonal downpour in 2009’s Mother, meanwhile, feels like a curse.

In all of Mr Joon-ho’s films, a faint murmur of existential doom hovers above the action. In Parasite, it’s a flash-flood surging into Ki-jeong and his family’s basement apartment; in The Host, it’s Agent Yellow, the government-developed substance initially deployed to destroy the monster, that ends up poisoning the peaceful protesters instead (a nod, perhaps, to the filmmaker’s past as a student protester in 1990s South Korea, where tear gas was an almost constant presence). An ice age befalls the world outside of the Snowpiercer train – a perfectly hopeless backdrop to the bloody political siege.

Like the artificial rain showers in The Truman Show, Mr Joon-ho invites totally shocking shifts in mood. The most menacing moments in Parasite are upper-cut with the funniest, and even while The Host’s monster is vomiting out pelvises onto children, you’re inclined to feel sorry for it because of the film’s messages about the natural world. Just as an inkblot expands through an oil canvas, Mr Joon-ho’s films are intricate emotional journeys.

Mr Joon-ho uses tracking – where the camera pans horizontally with the action – to puppeteer mood swings. In Snowpiercer, we track alongside protagonist Mr Chris Evans in what feels like an endless carriage change (in Le Transperceneige, the 1982 graphic novel it is based on, the train comprises a staggering 1,001 cars) only to arrive in the presence of a steampunk Ms Tilda Swinton. In The Host, we track what looks at first like a gargantuan children’s toy, before the threat reveals itself to be something much worse.

In Mr Joon-ho’s dystopia, pets have evolved beyond domesticity. In Okja, giant pigs become a currency, in Barking Dogs Never Bite, killing canines offers temporary mental respite, and The Host’s fish is the hellspawn of chemical run-off. In mixing futurism with the mundanities of family dynamics and class war, the director pushes the creatures and places we take for granted into surreal – and often terrifying – territory.