All Of Us Are Dead (Netflix)

This show deserves multiple trigger warnings for bullying, bullying of a sexual nature, sexual blackmail and extreme body horror. I expected the last one of those, it’s a zombie TV series, the others I will discuss relatively shortly but I need to say they almost made me stop watching and they’re not super-strong triggers for me, so if they are for you, I’d seriously steer clear.

Relatively hot on the heels of Squid Game Korea and Netflix gives us All Of Us Are Dead a zombie drama set, in part, in a high school but spreading into the wider city as well.

We have fast, smart zombies, always a lethal combination and the transformation is combined with spectacular body horror level contortions after someone is infected. The transformations en masse tick all the horror tropes, and impact, you’d want. But because the transformation takes a while from infection to turning into zombie it has moments of massive pathos as characters we’ve grown to like slowly change before our eyes.

The high school setting gives us other elements to the story. There’s bullying. Actually that doesn’t go far enough, there’s brutal, sickening, extreme bullying that nearly made me stop watching but I’m glad I persevered, although like a bad penny it keeps coming back in smaller doses and flashbacks that are probably harder to watch than the original incident. The bullying includes a group of boys who force a girl to undergo sexual exploitation and they blackmail her with video of it too, something that is somehow made worse by the zombie apocalypse. It’s really rough to watch, I feel like it’s to the show’s credit it doesn’t flinch from the portrayal of just how bad it is to be a victim of this sort of abuse, even in the face of a zombie apocalypse. (It would have been a whole lot more comfortable if they hadn’t included it though.) I’m assuming, since this has such a prominent part in the show, mainly in the early parts, but on and off throughout pretty much the whole season, that this is a really big problem in Korea. I know it is a big problem in other parts of the world as well, I just don’t know how I feel about seeing it here. Because of the unusual, even for me, way I’ve watched this show, it’s been really spread out over a few months, and some of the scenes still haunt me at odd moments. But, equally, they gave us a villain, in addition to the zombies, who it was easy to root against and never had any redemption. There is another villain who does earn redemption over the whole arc. While I can see this has value, and it’s hard, actually pretty much impossible, for me to understand how this played in Korea, it played hard in this household.

There are a lot of other little, and not so little, high school elements beside the bullying. Some are stories we’ve seen before, reused to the extent they deserve the label trope. Some might be tropes in Korean school dramas but are really alien to British watchers at least. There is, as with Squid Game, a fairly big emphasis on wealth inequality in a way I’ve never seen here. I’m sure British kids are bullied for differences in family wealth, just like they are for every other difference, but Squid Game was adults and it still seemed a huge factor of the plot of All Of Us Are Dead in ways it doesn’t here, as I understand it (I don’t have kids in school, I don’t teach in school, maybe my understanding is very flawed - I do pay attention to the news and what they have to say about bullying, and the nature of topics kids are typically bullied about, family wealth doesn’t seem to enter into the discussion). Again, we most definitely have poverty, people getting into debt and it absolutely sucks (although it’s tangential, there’s a discussion about how we don’t measure some aspects of poverty well here that highlights it to some extent). But it doesn’t seem to be as extreme as we’re shown in these series. I’m guessing it’s a reflection of a big issue in South Korean society. I’m not going to delve further, it’s hard to do so without spoilers, but there are more than enough bits that give us plenty of plot.

Hidden among the other gems, the school kids adapt to the zombie apocalypse really pretty well. There’s a scene where two cops are trying to get to the school, one is part of South Korea's intellectual elite (he’s also studying at Seoul University) and their journey is far more incompetent. It’s clearly played for comedy value but it works surprisingly well to a more general audience and it’s fun to see adults who ought to be competent doing so poorly compared to the kids. They also fight well. Not all of them are big, strong and capable but they’re mostly smart (or their stunt coordinators are) and they fight as a team, with the weaker ones taking smart defensive choices to stay alive or support the better fighters, equally the better fighters are always aware this isn’t a fight about defeating all the zombies, who are functionally infinite in number, it’s about survival for the remaining humans - the better fighters need to keep the others alive. It’s a small detail, it’s probably actually overdone on reflection, but it plays into the narrative of their competence and adult incompetence nicely. There are lots of other examples, but they would require spoilers.

The show takes the unusual step of basically wrapping up the apocalypse in episode 11 of 12. Rather than just going “and they all lived happily ever after” we see some survivors guilt, some PTSD, a lot of grieving and more. It makes for what ought to be a really hard to watch finale but we see enough time pass that we see them start to heal, recover. Not forget, but to start to live again despite what happened. It’s hopeful after all.

Overall, the story - I’m torn for a verb. I want to make a zombie pun like “lurches along looking for a brain” but that’s really unfair because it’s actually really well paced and smart. I would say “bounces” but that feels far too jolly for what is a really dark series like this, despite it’s relatively upbeat ending.

One of the smart things this does is have a barely plausible rationale for why there’s a weird zombie virus outbreak. Ok, that’s a lie. It’s mind-bogglingly implausible but there's just enough bits of sensible science strung together that I didn’t scream in pain at their setup, rather I took a deep breath and went with it because it was good enough and not totally horrible. Someone with a pretty decent understanding of neuroscience had been told “can you suggest how this might work to make zombies plausible, and make it fun, and what else could we do with it.” If you buy into the idea of zombies at all, what they suggest isn’t bad, which is better than so many zombie movies.

If you like dark horror, body horror and zombie apocalypse movies, this has a lot to recommend it. Just be careful with the bullying scenes.

Bechdel Test: Pass. The school kids are not quite evenly split, but there are a lot of girls and they talk to each other. They mostly talk about surviving the zombies-related things.

Ko Test: Null. The actors are all Korean, but depending on whether you watch it dubbed or with subtitles, you’ll either hear them talking Korean, as it was filmed, or English. But the Ko Test doesn’t apply for a series made for the Korean market.

Russo Test: Fail. We don’t see much in the way of sexuality, lots of running away from zombies, but what we do see is all straight.