‘All of Us Are Dead’ revives the zombie thriller for an audience that’s lived through an outbreak

Hollywood has a long-standing love affair with zombies. In the gory, flesh-chomping tradition of George Romero’s 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead, zombiecore like The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later, as well as quirky zom-coms like Warm Bodies and Shaun of the Dead, continue to feed hordes of horror fans. But Hollywood is not alone in its love for stories about the undead. In recent years, South Korea has been tearing into the genre with international hits like Train to Busan, #Alive and Kingdom. With the release of Netflix’s zombified K-drama All of Us Are Dead, South Korea has added another gruesome global blockbuster to its canon.

In the coming-of-age apocalyptic thriller, a group of high school students fight to stay alive as a rage virus, created by a teacher to help his son stand up to bullies, ravages an entire city. While the series treats viewers to plenty of gore, suspense and super-fast zombies, it also masterfully explores themes like teen angst, toxic masculinity, bullying and social inequality. It’s the latest in a growing K-zombie repertoire, and the enthusiastic global response is a healthy indicator of our insatiable appetite for the genre.

South Korea’s success is remarkable considering that zombies aren’t part of traditional Korean folklore. While many cultures have their own version of the living dead — for example, Scandinavians have their draugr, Romanians fear the vampirish strigoi, and the Chinese have their hopping jiangshi — reanimated corpses were largely absent from South Korean entertainment until Kang Beom-gu’s 1981 film Goeshi (A Monstrous Corpse), the country’s first zombie movie.

“Zombies began to appear in Korean popular culture only recently, and it’s the result of being influenced by zombie films from the West,” says Cho Hyun-soul, professor of Korean oral literature at Seoul National University. Goeshi itself was a remake of the 1974 Spanish-Italian horror flick Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (Let the Sleeping Corpses Lie). However, Korea’s first attempt at a zombie movie was quickly forgotten. It wasn’t until 2016, with the release of the critically acclaimed Train to Busan by Hellbound director Yeon Sang-ho, that the living dead became a popular subject in Korean entertainment. Yeon, who cited Romero’s films and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later as sources of inspiration for Train to Busan, sparked newfound Korean interest in the genre, paving the way for similar tales to come out of South Korea.

The zombie myth first emerged in 17th- and 18th-century Haiti, where it was believed enslaved peoples of Africa who died by suicide, after enduring brutal treatment by French colonizers, were doomed to roam as soulless zombies. The myth would eventually evolve and be enfolded into the practice of voodoo. It's this version of the zombie that was first brought to the screen, in Victor Halperin’s 1932 film White Zombie. Later, Romero introduced the modern, cannibalistic zombie into American pop culture in Night of the Living Dead (though Romero didn’t call them zombies until his 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead). 

Thanks to Romero, these frightening, flesh-eating corpses represent the devolution of humanity into its most primal, savage form. Watching them feast on the living feels downright horrifying and repulsive, yet many of us are eager to devour the next zombie story that comes our way. So how can we explain our ongoing fascination with these undead predators?

Experts say that because zombies were once human beings, we often feel a deeper connection with them than with other types of monsters. We might recoil in horror, but that fear is often laced with sadness, sympathy and a sense of loss. “Most monsters are inherently ‘other’ beings or people drastically different from us. Zombies are our friends and neighbors, transformed simply and inevitably, but suddenly as different as can be,” says Brendan Riley, an English professor at Columbia College Chicago and a member of the Zombie Research Society, an organization of scientists, authors and academics dedicated to the study of the living dead.

Another answer lies in the constant reinvention of these semi-beings. Countless variations of the zombie have found their way to our screens over the years: zombies that turn back into humans (like Nicholas Hoult’s character in Warm Bodies), radioactive zombies (Fear the Walking Dead) and even zombies that solve crimes (iZombie and Zombie Detective). We’ve seen “running zombies, talking zombies, funny zombies, even romantic zombies,” says Luke W. Boyd, editor in chief of the Zombie Research Society, adding, “Zombies have been used, abused, deconstructed and reinterpreted so often that modern filmmakers are constantly forced to find new ways to make them fresh and interesting. And they’ve largely succeeded, which is probably why audiences never seem to tire of the genre.”

Filmmakers throughout the decades have experimented in many ways with these skin-suckling creatures, but one subgenre remains a particular favorite with global audiences: the apocalyptic thriller. The thought of getting ripped apart by ravenous creatures while the world nears its end is terrifying, yet there’s something strangely enthralling about watching it unfold on-screen. Zombie apocalypses, like the one in All of Us Are Dead, give us a vicarious thrill — seeing people struggle to survive as humanity teeters on the brink of extinction. With every character that turns into a zombie, we feel as if the stakes have been raised even higher. In a world where we’re all trying to survive a pandemic, and society feels on the verge of collapse, watching a show like All of Us Are Dead hits home like never before.

“I believe that our cultural fascination with the living dead lies primarily in fear itself,” suggests Boyd. “Whether that fear is the collapse of society or the inevitability of death, it will always be relevant. And perhaps zombies allow us a safe, exciting and fun way to contextualize and confront that fear.” 

Riley agrees. “[The zombie] embodies our fear that we'll fall into chaos and disorder,” he says. “The zombie in most films seems like a regular, presumably civilized, person who has shed the shackles of civilization and is wreaking havoc and causing anarchy. And contemplating the fall of civilization is compelling.”

In All of Us Are Dead, not only is that fear palpable, but it’s also compounded by the central storyline — students are trapped inside their high school during a zombie outbreak and are frantically trying to outrun, outsmart and outfight their zombified classmates. Given that humanity’s continued existence depends on the survival of our next generation, nothing screams “end of the world” more loudly than watching teens transform into zombies. When they realize that they can no longer rely on the police and other institutions to protect them, we desperately root for them to survive on their own. As we grapple with living in times of crisis off-screen, it’s easy for us to see ourselves in these characters.

South Korea’s zombie blockbusters deal with globally relevant themes — a key reason for the widespread appeal of zombie content in general. “Zombie stories resonate with audiences everywhere because they depict universal concerns we all struggle with,” explains Riley. According to Sung-Ae Lee, a lecturer in Asian Studies at Macquarie University, these thrillers provide social commentary on issues that affect South Korea as well as many other countries, such as anomie, urban isolation, political corruption and class struggle.

There’s also the visuals. Lee says high production values make for a slick, enthralling viewing experience. And according to zombie expert Choung Myung Seob, the fact that Korean zombies are always depicted as fast-moving “adds more suspense in the eyes of the viewer, he told Korea.net. And like the vast majority of K-dramas, Korean zombie thrillers rely heavily on melodrama to draw audiences in. Most zombiecore has an element of emotion — families literally torn apart, protagonists fighting to save their partners — but in AOUAD, the camera lingers longer on the characters' vulnerability, heartache and despair. It strikes a balance between heart-stopping action and slower-paced, poignant scenes.

All of Us Are Dead is proof that the zombie story is alive and well, and that South Korea is invested in reinventing it, building on the wave of gripping entertainment coming out of the country. Whether the trend will continue in the years to come is hard to predict. But considering the show’s monster success, it won’t likely be dying anytime soon — especially as the real world provides more inspiration than we bargained for.

This article originally appeared on Netflix Tudum.