ALL OF US ARE DEAD. High School Meets the Undead

Netflix announced many productions from South Korea for the year 2022. Pop culture from this country has been successful in global markets. K-pop musicians are conquering the music world, director Joon-ho Bong won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival as well as an Oscar for the film Parasite, and series such as Hellbound, especially Squid Game, were among the most discussed productions online. I am, however, not convinced that All Of Us Are Dead will join this winning cohort.

Films and series related to a zombie invasion have enjoyed great popularity for years. It is enough to say that in recent years this genre was tackled by Brad Pitt in World War Z, the Koreans in the two-season Netflix series Kingdom, Jim Jarmusch in The Dead Do Not Die, and for many years AMC profited from The Walking Dead. The creators of the latest All Of Us Are Dead follow paths already paved by these titles and show no desire to redefine the story of the living dead searching for new victims to bite. The lack of innovative ambitions does not have to be a flaw, of course, as long as the story itself is engaging.

However, this is not the case with the Korean production. Twelve one-hour episodes drag on mercilessly, even though all the narrative blocks are seemingly in their proper places. All Of Us Are Dead is a series about a zombie epidemic told from the perspective of young high school students who led normal lives before the catastrophe. Some were school top students dreaming of entering a prestigious university, others were focused on romances, and some were delinquents seeking their next opportunity for trouble. And suddenly it all ended – it only took one mad scientist wanting to help his son deal with bullies to create a deadly virus in a private laboratory.

All Of Us Are Dead is thus a combination of a zombie apocalypse, a teen drama, and a journalistic commentary on the coronavirus pandemic. The creators do not delve deeply into political issues, yet time and again they introduce threads concerning the dilemmas of how to treat infected people and how to limit the spread of the plague. As for the teen drama, of course, the protagonists’ romantic dilemmas are brought to the forefront. Sometimes love triumphs, sometimes it is unrequited, but each time, as is the case in teenage years, the feelings are strong enough that they sometimes lead to irrational decisions.

The issues related to adolescent dilemmas are presented in a predictable yet natural way. In other words, the faces of the characters convey the truth of what they are saying. Good casting ensures that the young people genuinely appear as though they are experiencing all the struggles of adolescence firsthand. The problem, however, is that the writers also want to depict a zombie apocalypse, not just another school drama. All Of Us Are Dead fails in this regard because it is incredibly monotonous.

Although the monsters are excellently designed, and the sound design is polished, making the sounds of teeth biting into human flesh impressive, as well as the zombies’ growls, it is of little value since the characters’ escapes from danger are shown too frequently. Each episode largely consists of running through the school building, which becomes tiring at some point.

Indeed, one must respect the creators for their courage in systematically eliminating characters, as the deaths of main protagonists are always surprising, yet beyond that, the series eventually loses a real sense of threat. It feels as if there were no ideas for which direction to take the plot, so the focus was only on chases and fights with the infected. Perhaps if the series were shorter, it would work, but for a twelve-hour production, there are far too many such scenes.

I do not blame the writers for having their characters often act foolishly, as after all they are inexperienced and have never encountered this type of threat. I also do not blame them for designing the zombie epidemic in a rather classic way; not everyone has to have deconstructive ambitions. What I am frustrated with, however, is that a lot of money was spent on All Of Us Are Dead (or at least it seems so, as the production quality is high), yet there was a lack of creative ingenuity to tell more than just the story of a group running through school corridors being chased by monsters.