Animation
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
When you’re in high school, almost everything seems like a matter of life and death. What if the cool kids don’t like me? What if my crush doesn’t know I exist? What if I flunk another algebra class? What if they serve meatloaf in the cafeteria again? My life will be so over!
And then zombies flood the halls and start eating faces, and you realize that you might’ve been a little overly dramatic.
Well, admittedly, attending Hyosan high school can be kinda dramatic and pretty terrible, even without the zombies. Yoon Gwi-nam and his little clique make sure of that. Gwi-nam has bullied fellow students to the point of suicide: Indeed, one of his victims disappeared after a rooftop confrontation with Gwi-nam and his bully buddies, and the school’s whisper chain alleges that the boy killed himself.
The truth, it would seem, is darker than that. And a clue hides in the offices of Lee Byeong-chan, the school’s science teacher and the father of the boy who disappeared.
Oh, the “clue,” a hamster, looks sweet enough at first. But when a girl stuck her hand a little too close to the furry rodent, the monster bit her. A few days later, she was the one doing the biting. And ripping. And tearing. And eating.
Both the hamster and the girl were infected with a new, and quite lethal, virus—one so determined to spread that it’ll force its host to gnaw on any living thing in its way. And indeed, when the outbreak erupts during one seemingly ordinary school day, most of the school is seemingly infected before the next passing period.
But a hardy band of resistors is ready to beat back their bloodthirsty one-time peers and survive to the final bell. They include Nam On-jo, a pretty girl with a wealth of survival knowledge and a crush on Lee Su-hyeok, who in turn likes Choi Nam-ra, the school’s chilly student body president. Lee Cheong-san also survives the first onslaught; he’s known On-jo since they were both kids, but he’s beginning to take a liking to her in other ways, too.
Oh, and Gwi-nam is a first-wave survivor as well—and hardly humbled, despite being clearly only the school’s second biggest threat these days.
Yeah, bullies will be bullies, even in the midst of zombie invasions. In some ways, high school never changes.
All of Us Are Dead presents itself as a coming-of-age zombie apocalypse story—a genre that has more company than you’d think. The show became the second South Korean show to become a No. 1 Netflix hit in North America. It has earned applause from both critical and commercial circles, and it may have more on its mind than just the ripping and rending of flesh: how bullies can make monsters, for instance, or how secrets can fester.
But let’s not overthink this: All of Us Are Dead is all about the blood.
This series takes about as much joy in mutilating living, screaming bodies as the zombies do themselves (if zombies could feel joy, that is). High schoolers become mere vessels for squirting hemoglobin and mottled peopleburger.
And in addition to all the inherent zombie-eating-people problems a show like this entails (or entrails?), it also has most of the more common coming-of-age, high-school-is-a-difficult-time sort of problems, too. Teens may need to fend off flesh-eaters every minute or two, but their own hormones are still in play. Storylines involve teen pregnancy and online shaming, with one girl being forced to remove her top for an internet audience in the first episode. (Her critical areas are covered.) And we hear (or see in the subtitles) plenty of swearing, including the f- and s-word.
Yes, All of Us Are Dead may be more than skin deep. But it’s the skin—removed in chunks—and the underlying tissue and blood and goop that stops us … dead. It’d be nice if all of us watched something else.
A bullied student falls from a city rooftop and bounces off the pavement below. But the fall doesn’t kill him: He’s still very much alive—and suddenly very vengeful—when his father visits him. And when the son begins to show an interest in chomping on his dad, Pops takes a Bible and beats the boy to death with it. (Or so he hopes.) Later, a very aggressive hamster bites a student, turning an ordinary day into the high school’s worst since finals week.
The first confrontation, on the rooftop, is really hard to watch. The boy is beaten pretty horrifically by a bully (at the orders of another). The bully may fracture the victim’s arm by stepping on it (we hear what we would assume are bones grinding), then steps on the side of the boy’s face, where eyes pop and the jaw nearly dislocates before the high schooler fights back ferociously. But the boy careens off the roof before he can do any real damage to his attackers, hitting the side of the building, then a sign before coming to rest in the street below. In the hospital, the boy is conscious, but he’s covered in a number of injuries as his father talks with him.
“Either I die, or they die,” he tells his father. “It won’t get better until someone dies.” And then he asks, “You want to die, Dad? Should I kill you?” After the father apparently kills his son in the hospital, he drags the body out in a suitcase. But when a hand and arm flop out of its tiny cubby, the hand suddenly animates and grabs the father’s wrist.
A student is attacked by the zombie hamster, which draws blood from one of her fingers. The school’s science teacher (and, as we learn later, the inventor of the virus) hears about the wound and chains the student to a radiator, injecting her with drugs in the hope of reversing the zombie virus. It doesn’t work: The student breaks loose and bites the medical attendant, who then attacks students.
The zombies seem to like eating faces and necks in particular. We see them rip open their victims at the cheeks and jugulars, leaving trails of blood and gore. The contortions people go through as they transform into zombies isn’t attractive, either: Limbs pop at unexpected angles. Blood pours from the nose. Necks contort.
Someone runs headlong into a wall. A girl prepares to commit suicide by jumping from a rooftop. (She’s interrupted when zombies and students start smashing out of the windows just below her.) Another student allegedly tried to kill himself, but didn’t. A group of bullies forces a female student to take off her top, then makes another student record her to post it online. (She’s rescued, but she slinks back and unbuttons her top again, telling her would-be savior that if she doesn’t do what she’s told, the bullying will just get worse.) A bully scrawls sexual insults on the back of a girl’s white shirt. Girls and boys crush on each other: Rumors circulate related to sex, porn and suicide.
We see Bibles and crosses. Students run through a posh gated community to get to school faster. Teens trade insults, both in jest and in earnest. People comment on various smells, including someone’s stinky feet and how some people seem to smell like corpses. Characters say the f-word at least 13 times (as translated in the subtitles) and the s-word another 10. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ssed” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused once.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
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