The inherent terror of zombie fiction stems from the fact that once a plague emerges, it spreads at an exponential rate, rendering containment a near-impossibility. In our current pandemic era, that idea has acutely unnerving resonance, and it’s exploited to suspenseful effect by All of Us Are Dead, writer Chun Sung-il and director Lee JQ’s 12-part Netflix series (out now) about an undead outbreak that originates from, and quickly engulfs, South Korea’s Hyosan High School. Primarily taking place inside that confined setting, and yet staged on an enormously monstrous scale, it’s a vigorous marriage of unholy horror and teen drama, the latter of which only complicates its protagonists’ attempts to survive what appears to be the end of the world.
The catalyst for All of Us Are Dead is teen bullying, and in particular the agony inflicted upon Jin-su (Lee Min-goo), which is so bad that his science teacher father Mr. Lee (Kim Byung-chul) attempts to counter it with an experimental drug that will bestow his son with enhanced strength. That plan, alas, goes horribly wrong, begetting a rageful virus that proliferates once an infected mouse in Mr. Lee’s school laboratory bites a young girl, who then gnaws on a nurse, who promptly runs amok in the hallways, chomping on others—thus initiating a cascading wave of pestilence. It’s a catastrophe that expands with swift ferocity and compels a group of kids to hole up in a classroom to figure out what’s suddenly happened, and how they might avoid the same fate as their now-ravenously hungry and roaring fellow students.
At the head of this makeshift class are Cheong-san (Yoon Chan-young) and On-jo (Park Ji-hoo), lifelong friends who everyone thinks are a couple, in large part because Cheong-san really does have feelings for On-jo. Unfortunately for him, though, On-jo has eyes for hunky Su-hyeok (Park Solomon), a reformed bully who appreciates On-jo’s interest but is actually smitten with aloof class president Nam-ra (Cho Yi-hyun). Theirs is a conventional high school romantic dynamic, and it’s complemented by a range of additional characters and conflicts, including the tension between Cheong-san’s mate Gyeong-su (Ham Sung-min) and snobby Na-yeon (Lee Yoo-mi, of Squid Game), the goofy rapport shared by heavyset Dae-su (Im Jae-hyuk) and loyal Wu-jin (Son Sang-yeon), and the uneasy partnership struck by Wu-jin’s sister Ha-ri (Ha Seung-ri)—an ace archer who’s just failed to qualify for the national team, thus costing her a shot at a college scholarship—and brash Mi-jin (Lee Eun-saem), who meet in a bathroom during the initial chaos.
All of Us Are Dead fleshes out its story with even more key players, including Cheong-san’s mom (Lee Ji-hyun), who runs a fried chicken restaurant named after her only child, On-jo’s firefighter dad (Jeon Bae-soo), English teacher Ms. Park (Lee Sang-hee), and—most troublesome of all—nasty Gwi-nam (Yoo In-soo), the right-hand henchman to Hyosan High’s chief bully. Gwi-nam, who tormented Jin-su as well as suicidal Eun-ji (Oh Hye-soo), is a tyrannical creep straight out of a Stephen King novel. After being caught perpetrating a heinous crime, he trains his vengeful attention on Cheong-san, culminating with a showdown in a school library on top of unsteady bookshelves that provide a bit of distance between them and the area’s speedy, single-minded zombies. In this sequence, as in numerous others, Lee JQ’s direction is fleet and serpentine, his camera zooming around physical spaces with a velocity that never hampers visual lucidity.
All of Us Are Dead’s carnage occurs in a variety of typical school locations (teacher’s offices, broadcasting rooms, storage closets, gymnasiums, tennis courts, the cafeteria), where its characters take reasonable, level-headed measures to protect themselves from imminent danger. Rarely does anyone do something head-smackingly stupid during this ordeal, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Chun Sung-il and Lee JQ’s series is a self-aware zombie affair, as proven by one student’s early reference to Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan. Later mayhem shot from soldiers’ POVs recalls Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies, while city scenes are reminiscent of Resident Evil, further highlighting the show’s upfront embrace of popular genre fiction, and its desire to have its heroes act, and react, in a manner that’s informed by their knowledge of zombie lore.
Teen romance, jealousy, rivalry, resentment and judgmental meanness all play fundamental roles in All of Us Are Dead, as do concurrent desires for acceptance, compassion and camaraderie. Given the origins of its zombie insanity, the series also functions as a portrait of how ignoring minor violence can lead to mass calamity. More timely still, some characters’ refusal to admit that they’ve been bitten—despite the hazardous ramifications that decision will have for those in their vicinity, once they turn into the undead—captures an all-too-familiar sense of people’s willingness to cling to delusions no matter the risks it poses to others. COVID-19 is only fleetingly mentioned during this 12-hour saga, but its specter looms large over the supernatural action, given how quarantine craziness, ruthless selfishness, and fear of widespread infection courses through its veins.
Part teen soap opera, part sprawling nightmare, All of Us Are Dead benefits from the sheer scope of its bloodbath. Every other scene is marked by dozens—if not more—of raving zombies racing through hallways, across fields and into barricades trying to satiate their hunger, such that its protagonists’ moment-to-moment predicaments frequently feel borderline hopeless. Chun Sung-il and Lee JQ keep the material flowing from one unique locale to the next, all while developing and intertwining their students’ fraught relationships, which mutate in even pricklier ways once a new strain of the virus surfaces—making detection more difficult, and also posing new survival challenges—and the military intervenes in a desperate bid to stop the contagion from consuming the country.
At a certain point, the proceedings do fall prey to a bit of exhausting repetition, vacillating as they do between teen squabbles and battles against swarms of voracious reanimated corpses who care only about sinking their teeth into necks, arms, and legs. Then again, All of Us Are Dead makes a compelling, and often thrilling, case that a viral apocalypse would ultimately become more than a bit monotonous—something that everyone in the real world can likely relate to right now.
