This South Korean monster series in a high school is a world-beating piece of doomy existentialism. Bring on more of it
You’d think we’d be absolutely dripping in zombies by now, wouldn’t you? It feels a fairly obvious genre for TV shows to get into at the moment. After all, look where we are. We’re in the third year of a once-a-century pandemic that has ripped its way across the entire planet without pause, killing millions and devastating families. Sound familiar? Honestly, swap out a dry cough for a ceaseless undead thirst for human flesh and Covid is a zombie analogue.
It’s not as if we’ve been reluctant to use them in the past. The original Haitian archetype used zombies as a metaphor for the dehumanisation of enslaved people under French colonial rule. Over the years, Hollywood has dusted them off to symbolise everything from consumerism to McCarthyism to immigration to globalisation to emotional stuntedness.
