Recap "All of Us Are Dead" Episode 1

This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a hamster.

Netflix’s latest Korean import and a late entry in the waning zombie craze, All of Us Are Dead kicks off its undead outbreak with an unlikely critter: a hamster from a school science class. When it nips the finger of the female member of the school’s clique of bullies, it begins an out-of-control spiral of infection and carnage that turns the school into a maelstrom of panic, chaos, and killing within 24 hours. But the roots of this particular apocalypse go deeper than just one adorable hamster gone feral, and that deserves some unpacking.

Byeong-cheol Kim stars as Mr. Lee, a high-school science teacher with a problem: His son Jin-su is being horrifically bullied by a gang of sociopathic students. This premiere episode begins, in fact, with Jin-su getting the shit kicked out of him on a rainy rooftop, by kids who seemingly don’t mind if they break a few of his bones in the process, or worse.

Then something weird happens: The kid hulks up, more or less. He doesn’t turn green and musclebound, though—he contorts weirdly, his bones make strange crackling sounds, his eyes go red, and his whimpers turn to vicious snarls. In the process of fighting back, he basically flings himself off a roof and bounces his way down to the pavement below. 

Yet somehow, he survives, forcing his father to finish the job—or so he thinks—by bashing the kid’s brains in with a copy of the Bible. (For that matter, the opening sequence is partially illuminated by a glowing red neon cross, positioned near a swastika flag; this show’s attitude to organized religion does not appear to be particularly subtle.) Even after his father smuggles his corpse out of the hospital in a suitcase, the kid keeps on twitching and growling.

What follows is, more or less, a getting-to-know you episode of a high-school drama, as various kids do the kinds of stuff kids do. Our main characters include Cheong-san (Yoon Chan-young) and On-jo (Park Ji-hoo), a prototypically average boy-girl pair of neighbors, and Su-hyeok (Park Solomon), a handsome do-gooder who tries to rescue more victims from the bully clique (to which he once belonged) and on whom On-jo has a crush. They flirt, they banter, they trade insults, they complain about their teachers, they gossip about other kids, et cetera.

All the while, however, Mr. Lee is hiding the hamster-bite victim in his closed science lab, injecting her with benzodiazapine to slow the spread of the infection, though he knows he can’t stop it. “Don’t bother having hope,” he tells her, his bedside manner no doubt inflected by the fact that she was party of the bullying clique that caused his son to go “missing.”

At any rate, he greatly overestimates the sturdiness of the bonds by which he tied her in place, and while he’s off giving lectures about mankind’s inability to defeat viruses due to their indomitable will to survive, she escapes and bursts into another classroom. The concerned kids and teacher, Ms. Park (Bae Hae-sun), rush her to the infirmary, where she bites the nurse before getting rushed off to the hospital. While the kids wonder what the hell is going on, and the principal complains to Ms. Park that the incident could screw up the school’s evaluation, the infected nurse gets ahold of one of the other bullies and chews half his face off. 

From then on, it’s off to the races as the infected run full tilt from one victim to the next, pausing just long enough to take one or two juicy bites before moving on. The visuals here are impressive: a huge crowd of students pressed against the glass doors of the cafeteria hoping to escape the onslaught behind them, a cascade of bodies flying through broken windows to the ground below as one zombie after another tackle their prey. (This last bit prevents the suicide attempt of one of the bullies’ other victims, a girl they sexually assaulted with their camera phones recording. Like I said, they’re sociopathic.) The episode ends with one gnarly zombie preparing to sink his teeth into On-jo.

The problem for All of Us Are Dead, and zombie films and shows in general, is that the subgenre has long since separated itself from horror’s primary goal: frightening people. Oh sure, the contorting, blood-spurting zombies here may give you the heebie-jeebies, and the whole biting-people’s-faces-off thing is nice and gross, but at this point, when you’ve seen one zombie attack, you’ve seen ’em all. With the fast-zombie sub-subgenre in particular, the attacks are all staged with the high-octane, high-impact brio of action filmmaking, which has entirely different methods and motives than horror does.

Which, hey, if that’s your bag, baby, then great! Based on this premiere, All of Us Are Dead follows the unofficial mantra for Netflix programming: If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.

Are there hints that there may be more to the show than meets the standard-zombie-fare eye? I think there are. Certainly, what appears to be the underlying concept—a concerned parent concocted a zombie rage virus in hopes that it would help his outcast son defend himself against bullies—is a powerful one, if you’ve ever been bullied or are the parent of a kid who has. That it appears to have backfired horribly, leading to more and worse violence rather than less—well, there’s your social commentary about the inevitable endgame of redemptive, retributive bloodshed. We’ll see if this underlying theme, coupled with some pretty strong zombie visuals, is enough to keep the show up and running.