Recap "All of Us Are Dead" Episode 2

At the risk of sounding silly, here goes: Not a lot happens in this episode of All of Us Are Dead. This is despite the fact that shit keeps happening, non-stop, pretty much from start to finish. It’s just that virtually all of it can be described with the phrase “Zombies attack, students flee for their lives.” Hey, if it ain’t broke, right?

We’ll start with one of the few things in the episode that can’t be described that way: a flashback during which we see how science teacher Mr. Lee created the zombie infection running rampant across the school. (And elsewhere, as we’ll soon see.) While being interrogated by cops over his abduction of the school’s Patient Zero, Hyeon-ju (Jung Yi-Seo), Lee recalls an experiment in which terrified mice were observed attacking cats rather than cowering in fear due to a chemical response that flooded their system with testosterone. He explains to a diary cam that he isolated that hormone, enhanced it, and injected it into his badly bullied son in hopes that he, and eventually the other scared and victimized people of the world, would fight back. Unfortunately, he didn’t count on it turning the kid into a ravening undead killing machine who also infected his own mother. (That’s right: Testosterone causes zombie-ism!) Ah well, science is a fickle mistress.

Anyway, Hyeon-ju has been brought to the hospital, where she promptly zombies up and unleashes the infection there. Which might be a good thing: The city’s 911 dispatchers have been ignoring calls from the school reporting the zombie outbreak as pranks—the school’s sniveling principal actually tells the police there’s nothing to worry about, despite English teacher Ms. Park’s statement of the obvious fact that “It’s mayhem out there”—but when they hear such calls coming from the hospital, they sit up and take notice. 

Back at the school, we mostly follow a group of kids that includes main characters On-jo, Cheong-san, and Su-hyeok, as well as withdrawn class president Nam-ra (Cho Yi-hun), high-strung pink-sweater-wearing Na-yeon (Squid Game veteran Lee Yoo-mi), Cheong-san’s buddy Gyeong-su (Ham Sung-min), and On-jo’s best friend I-sak (Kim Ju-a). They battle their way from one empty classroom to the next, fleeing each time an infected person pops up among them, whether that’s a gym teacher who joins them while denying he got bitten or I-sak, in deep denial about her own bite wound. I-sak’s death deeply affects On-jo, as does the disappearance of Su-hyeok during a frantic run through the halls (he hides out in the art classroom). In the end, thanks to some quick thinking by Cheong-san, the kids climb to relative safety in a classroom that contains Ms. Park, who’d previously hopped on a loudspeaker in an attempt to calm and rally the survivors—except for Cheong-san, who gets tackled out of the window by a zombie, his fate unknown. (Somehow I think he’s gonna pull through, at least for the next episode.)

There’s other gaggles of kids here and there: a pair of bullying victims on the rooftop, one of the bullies stuck in the cafeteria, a cigarette-smoking bad girl named Mi-jin (Lee Eun-Saem) in the ladies’ room, a pregnant girl who wandered off campus before the outbreak got out of control, and members of the archery team wielding arrows that, somehow, actually seem to kill the zombies even without a headshot. And On-jo’s dad, an EMT, is called to a zombie emergency too. But that’s the basic gist of it.

Now comes the big question: Is All of Us Are Dead good horror filmmaking? I’d say no—but with a big fat caveat, so don’t get mad at me just yet. Frightening the audience is the lifeblood of horror as a genre, and I said in my review of the All Of Us Are Dead Episode 1, there’s nothing here that’s actually scary. Gross and violent? Absolutely. Thrilling and chilling, in a Halloween haunted-house kind of way? Sure. Keep-you-up-at-night, jumping-at-shadows scary? Not from where I’m sitting.

You could maybe make an argument that, insofar as the apocalypse is a frightening concept, all zombie apocalypse films are frightening on a basic what-if level. But when you get to the point where the characters themselves are doing light comedy about how this is just like a zombie movie—Cheong-san compares it to the Korean zombie blockbuster Train to Busan—that end-times fear is pretty much evaporated.

Ah, but is All of Us Are Dead good action filmmaking? Here I’d have to say that the answer is yes. I mean, what else can you say about a show that revolves around kill-or-be-killed battles in enclosed spaces like classrooms and hallways, like it’s Oldboy or a Marvel/Netflix show? So what if the protagonists are students rather than vigilantes, and the enemies are ravening zombie hordes rather than armies of goons? The underlying principle is the same.

And to their credit, directors Lee JQ and Kim Nam-su have a knack for filming frenetic action that makes great use of its environment. Think of the big opening battle in the cafeteria that kicks off this episode, a magnificently choreographed long take that captures dozens of bodies doing battle as tables and lunch trays fly and water rains down from the sprinkler system, making even just standing up a challenge. And there’s something almost graceful about the way the zombies propel themselves through glass windows through the air to the ground below. Everything is so high-energy that when things calm down long enough for the surviving kids to regroup in various empty classrooms, you might feel the need to catch your breath too.

Reimagining the zombie film as an action subgenre is nothing new, of course. Zack Snyder did it way back in 2004 with his Dawn of the Dead remake, which combined a legitimately terrifying opening sequence with a shoot-em-up climax. The Walking Dead, World War Z, Army of the Dead, the feudal-Korean Netflix zombie series Kingdom—all of these have crossed the action-horror streams. If All of Us Are Dead is going to distinguish itself from the pack, all it really has to do is stay inventive with its staging and  kinetic with its camerawork, while hopefully fleshing out (no pun intended) its core characters. Maybe you can teach an old zombie new tricks after all.