South Korean entertainment has hit a global renaissance in the past couple of years. From 2015 to 2022, the streaming giant Netflix spent up to $700 million on content from Korea, and in 2022 alone it’s expected to spend $500 million on producing more shows and movies. There’s a good reason for this: audiences have been loving Korean television and cinema, which recently shows with the success of the smash-hit Squid Game. But if there’s a hidden gem that’s come out of this interest, it’s the zombie content.
From Train to Busan to Kingdom, which star The Silent Sea’s Gong Yoo and Bae Doona, zombies are having a comeback. Netflix’s newest venture is All of Us Are Dead, a twelve-episode show where a group of high school students finds themselves at the center of a zombie outbreak at their school. The show is adapted from a webtoon, a Korean comic intended to be read online, on Naver called Now at Our School, which was very popular during its online runtime. While the webtoon ended in 2011, Netflix ordered the show to be created in 2020.
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Spoilers AheadAll of Us Are Dead tracks a group of high school students who live normal lives as Korean teenagers. They meet at Lee Chung-san’s (Yoon Chan-young) mother’s chicken restaurant after school to eat, complain about exams and have crushes. Chung-san has a big crush on classmate On-jo (Park Ji-hoo), who does not seem to return his affection. There is also a staple character in Korean dramas about school life: the masochistic bully with a penchant for violence. This bully’s name is Yoon Gwi-nam, and he kind of the reason the zombie outbreak happens.
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These students’ science teacher’s son opens up the show. His son is mercilessly bullied by Gwi-nam and his followers, leading to mental health issues and other problems. One tragic night, he is thrown off of a building and dies. When his father visits him at the hospital, he discovers his son has turned into a zombie, and he takes him home. The science teacher’s experiments are left in his classroom at the school, so when a nosy student gets bitten by a hamster, Hyosan High School becomes ground zero, and the infection spreads outside the school’s walls.
It’s up to one group of students, including Chang-san and On-jo, to figure out how to survive and get out of high school. During the initial onslaught, a handheld camera shakily joins in on the chaos as the school descends into a state of chaos. Teachers try to discipline students who they do not realize are zombies, people are running away screaming, and the viewers are placed in the middle of it all. Referencing Train to Busan, a student realizes these are zombies and not their classmates anymore, and it becomes a show about violence, survival, betrayal, and faith in each other.
Typical zombie show tropes are also both defied and reinforced in All of Us Are Dead. These zombies become infected through the regular means seen on many other shows and movies: through a bite or blood transfusion. There are also sprinkles of romance throughout the show between the high schoolers, even after one of the girls, Nam-ra (Cho Yi-hyun), is bitten. Her love interest, Lee Soo-hyuk (Park Solomon), vows to stay with her and get bitten himself if it comes to it. There is also the classic evil governmental army involved in this show, as they are set up to be the antagonistic thorns to the protagonists.
Influences Within All of Us Are Dead
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And perhaps that influence from Train to Busan is there in All of Us Are Dead. Train to Busan’s zombies’ jerk with erratic movements, gutturally moaning and hissing as they hunt for their next victim. All of Us Are Dead’s zombies follow a similar pattern when it comes to their movements and actions, although they rely on their enhanced sense of hearing to track down their next meal. What makes All of Us Are Dead special, though, is the unique factor reveals itself about halfway through the show, creating something that may not have been seen before in a zombie show.
The show does shift its focus away from the high school at times for a much-needed breather, although the world outside has also been ravaged by the zombie outbreak. On-jo’s father, a local firefighter, launches a rescue operation after escaping from the quarantine facility he brought an assemblywoman to quarantine. A police officer and his subordinate try to find the science teacher’s laptop in the high school, as he managed to record his research findings. A YouTuber goes into Hyosan, which has been shut down and isolated from the rest of the country, thinking it is a zombie-themed amusement park and discovers it is the exact opposite of live entertainment.
There’s also the school’s archery team, which has just come back from competition to discover that all their classmates are dead. Archery has been a staple in Korean culture for over five thousand years, so it seems fitting that a classic bow and arrow becomes a useful tool for clearing out any zombies trying to attack them. At the same time, another classmate named Eun-ji, who is also a victim of Gwi-nam’s bullying and sexual assault, begins her path of revenge and redemption after wishing that everyone should die.
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The Snowball Effect
The show begins with a snowball effect. For about seven episodes the show is full of action, gore, violence, and daring acts of trying to get a cellphone or rescuing a friend. But as the students get weary with their situation and become a bit more complacent, the show starts to slow down, shifting its focus a bit more to the other situations going on outside the school. It begins to drag its feet, feeling repetitive around episode eight. The stakes can only go so high in a zombie show, and when there is a failure to introduce new conflict, the viewer feels just as weary as the students who are tired of running.
Revenge, teamwork, and faith in each other are the core themes of the show, and they are well exemplified by the students. The human antagonistic forces are driven by a sense of vengeance and circumstance, thus imposing a sense of violence that stems from internal desperation. But without each other and working as a singular unit, the students would be unable to survive in these circumstances. It is heartfelt and tender how these students care for each other and wish for simple pleasures they once had, like their mother’s salty chicken or a pack of instant ramen, and it offers a sense of hope for humanity when they stick together even as everything seems doomed.
It was a unique decision to frame this story from the perspective of high schoolers. While adults may supposedly make more levelheaded decisions and take authority, these students are supposed to be the future of their country. When faced with the thought that there may not be a future for them anymore if they are killed, they adapt. Even without an authority figure to lead them, they find their path and survive in a world even the adults struggle to live. Perhaps that is what it means to be human: finding glimmers of beauty and making bonds with others even in the most difficult situations. It is this upcoming generation that has to deal with a wide range of issues unlike anything seen before, so it seems fitting that they continue to survive due to their tenacity.
And, regardless of their age, they have faced a myriad of issues that are unique to their generation. These issues include black pornography, teenage pregnancy, and college entrance exams. The show’s failure, however, is when it pivots away from the students to the outside world. Their thread is the strongest one, something that ends up tethering the show to its soul. With the limited time given in twelve episodes, the weakest aspects tend to be when the camera turns to the government and military, who are trying to figure out how this even happened.
If there’s one thing certain: like Netflix’s other recent release, The Silent Sea, there are so many questions left unanswered with All of Us Are Dead. The original webtoon ran for two years, so there might be a lot of source material that can be made into a second season. The main cast of the show are all young emerging actors with a lot of talent to spare, and it would be a welcome sight to see them return. Until then, all twelve episodes of All of Us Are Dead can now be streamed on Netflix.
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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi
(41 Articles Published)
Writer, author, and aspiring critic. Find me @ashleynassarine.
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