K-Drama Rewind, All of Us Dead: When bullying breeds monsters in Netflix's zombie horror

If there’s one thing South Korean shows don’t shy away from, it’s bullying.

It’s never limited to high-school jocks, petty taunts, or humiliating punishments such as forced sit-ups in a hallway, as seen in many Hollywood portrayals. In Korean shows, bullying is brutal and graphic. Every line is crossed; it doesn’t stop at verbal abuse. Series like The Glory expose bullying for what it truly is—physically and mentally scarring. In the revenge-fuelled drama, a young girl is assaulted: pinned to a chair, burned with a hot iron, and later raped.

Years later, she returns to wreak havoc on those who stole her childhood.

Bullying in films and television tends to follow familiar narrative routes. In some stories, it is flattened into a mean-girl caricature—cruel, but ultimately harmless. In others, survivors are allowed growth and agency, finding ways to fight back or reclaim control. A darker route turns the bullied into violent delinquents, unleashing such extreme vengeance that any sympathy for them is deliberately erased. And, all too often, the bullies themselves are reframed as heroes—redeemed easily, sometimes with nothing more than a belated apology, if at all.

All of Us Are Dead chooses the darkest of these routes. The Netflix dystopian drama’s premise’s first scene sets this up clearly: A boy is brutalised on a rooftop and thrown over the parapet. The perpetrators are frozen with worry that they’ve killed him, only to realise that the boy is now a monster, created by his father who was tortured at the sight of his harrowed son being bullied, assaulted, day after day. He creates a virus, where fear melds into rage. We watch the ‘progress’ as he monitors the effects through dimly lit videos of his bloodied wife and son in chains.

Much is made of the divide between the ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’, and of the idea that the weak must ultimately fend for themselves. In this worldview, rage curdles into physical violence—and the consequences are catastrophic.

The city is plunged into a zombie outbreak, while the narrative stays tightly focused on a group of high-school students, underscoring a blunt truth: adults created this mess, and the children are left to survive it. It’s an audacious premise, and one that largely lands.

Amid the teeth-gnashing and gore, the show also takes on an inordinate number of issues—academic pressure, teenage pregnancy, martial law, and the moral dilemmas that surface during a catastrophe. The group of survivors include: Lee Suhyeok (Park Solomon), Nam On-jo (Park Ji-hu), Yoon Chan-young's heroic Chan-seong, whose relationship with On-jo is one of the most watchable part of the series. And there's Nam-ra (Cho Yi-jhyun).

It repeatedly returns to a central question: how crises expose the monster within, whether or not one has been bitten. For instance, in one particularly searing scene, Chan Seong is devastated when he realises that his mother is now a zombie, and he almost fights others who have the unfortunate job of trying to end her. The cries are piercing: 'Omma, omma' he yells, while realising that he's lost the last semblance of his world. His rage instincts kick in, but mixed with raw, profound grief. In another scene, On-jo is faced with a similar reality, as her father sacrifices himself to save her. Little by little, the children lose pieces of themselves, as they watch their loved ones, and even their classmates die.

But the distinction between this pure-hearted group of survivors and the others is clear. One classmate Yoo In-soo as Yoon Gwi-nam, a bully, turns into a half-zombie, half-human element, and continues his pursuit of vengeance, literally following 'an eye for an eye' modus operandi in the show.

As a bully, he's just plain murderous.

Yet, lines blur, when the show ultimately collapses a crucial distinction. The bullied and the bullies alike are transformed into the most vicious monsters of all. The second, is understandable. But, the depiction of the first, remains rather problematic and unsettling. The show’s narrative fissures become impossible to ignore in a storyline involving blackmail after a sexual assault.

It is deeply distressing to watch: She is held by boys and stripped. Suheyok, who will later become part of the survivor gang, charges in to rescue her. Yet, after the heroic rescue, the severely battered girl mumbles that she would rather be ‘left behind’, as it gets worse tomorrow, and he obliges.

 He leaves her behind.

The zombie outbreak takes place, she is bitten, and becomes a curious case of neither human, nor zombie. But, she’s a monster now, ready to kill everyone who wronged her. She is portrayed as almost psychotic and frenzied, as she rushes to obliterate phones that have the assault video in question.

She sets the school on fire, while revisiting each moment that she was taunted and tortured. She doesn’t get to be a part of the survivor group and add any weight to the story: Instead, she is just a murderous zombie, and even her predator has a stronger storyline to contend with. She is almost animalistic in nature, as she chomps through a fish in an aquarium, slaughters the teacher who ignored her bullying complaints.

 The show grants rage, but never dignity.

 There is no justice for her, and her tormentors face no meaningful retribution either. What remains is a deeply troubling narrative that unintentionally reinforces a familiar stereotype about women and survivors of assault: rage is the only language left to them, and even that must be monstrous. Whatever the show’s intent—whether to critique institutional failure or dramatise the catastrophic consequences of bullying—the message that lands is unsettling. It doesn’t expose cruelty so much as absorb it, turning trauma into spectacle.

And in doing so, it crosses a line it never quite knows how to reckon with.