All Of Us Are Dead may have premiered on Netflix just a week ago on Jan 28, but it has already hit 124.79 million hours viewed for the week of Jan 24 to Jan 30, 2022. As of Feb 2 (Wed), it had skyrocketed to number one on the streamer’s top 10 list for non-English language TV shows.

In a report by streaming analytics firm FlixPatrol, it snagged the top spot in 58 countries including South Korea, Australia, Japan, Kuwait, Germany, Canada and Singapore.

Apart from the apocalypse, the series also delves into issues commonly faced by school youths, like bullying and violence, social hierarchies, and the downsides of social media. There’s also mention of teenage pregnancy.

In an exclusive roundtable discussion (via Tatler Asia), director Lee Jae-kyoo shared that these issues “are not just confined to the school space. But because our backdrop is a school, it might seem like a school story. I think these conflicts between genders and classes and different hierarchies appear everywhere and in all corners of the world. It just shows through at the school because that’s the setting.”

He adds, “But after you’re done watching, I think you will believe that these are actually universal themes that we can all resonate with. I thought it was a fresh approach to put these immature adolescents against zombies on a school campus.”

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The young cast, most of whom are in their early twenties include Park Ji-hoo, who plays a firefighter’s daughter and Yoon Chan-young, who stars as her childhood best friend and has secretly been crushing on her since young. Then there’s Cho Yi-hyun’s aloof and smart class president Nam-ra as well as Park Solomon, who is cast as the athletic heartthrob and former bully Soo-hyuk.

Other stars include Yoo In-soo, Kim Byung-chul, Lee Kyu-hyung and Jeon Bae-soo. And if you’ve been a fan of the hit Netflix show Squid Game, then you’ll spot a familiar face — actress Lee Yoo-mi who took on the role of Ji-yeong or player 240.

But unlike her endearing character in Squid Game, she plays the privileged and selfish student Na-yeon here (in the pink sweater), who looks down on those from backgrounds she considers beneath her.

There’s a lot of blood and gore to be expected, so much so that director Lee decided that they had to build a set of their own. During a virtual press conference (via GMA News), he revealed, “When we looked into the set, it was like one hundred metres wide. It was basically like a four-story school building inside the set and we would just be there all the time.”

With the set design, the director also shared that it felt like they were at a school but a “gloomy” one.

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Unlike other plots where the characters are clueless about zombies, the characters in All Of Us Are Dead are aware of the concept of the undead and kind of know what they’re in for. In the trailer, Yoon Chang-young’s Cheong-san mentions that the situation is like ‘Train To Busan’, hinting that zombie movies exist in their universe.

With the webtoon published in 2009, the team wanted to weave modern elements into the live adaptation to realistically portray what Korean youths of today go through, including the current high school culture, the use of social media, and drones.

All Of Us Are Dead is now on Netflix.

This article was first published in The Singapore Women’s Weekly. 

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