This All of Us Are Dead article contains spoilers.

As anyone who has watched Zombieland knows, different zombie dystopias have different zombie rules. The zombies in All of Us Are Dead follow basic zombie rules (e.g. mindless, undead creatures hungry for brains), with a few quirks thrown in for good measure—most especially the inclusion of the “hambie” and the focus on students as undead. “We see many films about zombies, but only a few have students as main characters. In an enclosed space like a school where teenagers are clustered, they have to survive on their own,” said All of Us Are Dead director Lee JQ of what sets the Netflix series apart from other zombie fare. “They have to run away from friends becoming zombies. These aspects can make this show different from other zombie films, and make it interesting and fresh.” Let’s discuss the strengths, weaknesses, origins, and exceptions of the undead in All of Us Are Dead…

All of Us Are Dead Zombie Strengths

Zombies in All of Us Are Dead have a heightened sense of smell and hearing—while this is mostly a strength, as it can be used to hunt prey, it can also technically be a weaknesses when there is a loud sound or heightened smell, as is the case when a thunder and lightning rainstorm descends upon the school. (This is somewhat reminiscent of the zombies in terrible horror flick Patient Zero.) The undead in the series are also super strong, and more or less impervious to damage—these are not slow zombies of Shaun of the Dead. Gwi-nam falls off buildings no less than three times, and keeps on trucking. When we see Nam-ra after the time jump in the final episode, her sunken eye seems to have repaired itself, suggesting some kind of regenerative capability.

As we learn later in the series, those affected with The Jonas Virus, as Lee Byeong-chan and Detective Jae-ik call it, are medically dead. Their heart stops, but the virus stimulates their brain stem and moves the body. We see some hints that physically weaker humans, like Cheong-san’s mom, make for physically weaker zombies, but the bone-crunching flexibility of the zombies (Lee had the cast work with a choreographer and dancer to create the undead’s eerily clunky movement) and their determination to eat brains make them much scarier than their human hosts ever could be.

All of Us Are Dead Zombie Weaknesses

While the All of Us Are Dead zombies have heightened smell and hearing, they lose a degree of vision in the process. They’re also pretty dumb, and can be easily tricked by humans working together with a solid plan. As in other zombie stories, taking out the brain stem—with a bullet or by bludgeoning, takes out the zombie altogether.

How Are the All of Us Are Dead Zombies Created?

“We live in a system of violence. A nobody like me can’t change the system. That’s why I decided to change my son.”

One of the less intriguing subplots in All of Us Are Dead is the “mystery” of how the zombie virus was created. It all connects back to one man: Lee Byeong-chan, a scientist who used to work for a pharmaceutical company before he was fired and found a job as the science teacher at Hyosan High. When Lee’s son is bullied to the point that he attempts suicide, the teacher develops a substance that he thinks will make him more capable of fighting back. Unfortunately, it, um, turns him into a zombie. Lee’s son is Patient Zero, and his wife quickly follows. The scientist experiments on them for more than a month before the virus eventually spreads, and he is confronted by Jae-ik. Honestly, this guy is the worst. Though he seems to have a slight change-of-heart after being bitten, telling Jae-ik about the laptop with all of his information, he remains relatively remorseless for the horror he has unleashed.

All of Us Are Dead Hambies

“If this virus manages to learn the human mind, a new breed of human will be born.”

All of Us Are Dead throws an In the Flesh-like twist into their zombie story: some humans respond differently to the Jonas Virus. Rather than being turned into a zombie, they are half-human, half-zombie, or a “hambie,” as Dae-su decides to call it. These hambies are something new (“You know how students are not children but not yet adults either? I’m like that. I’m neither a human, nor a monster,” says Nam-ra), with all of the strengths of a zombie while holding onto their brain function. They are hungry, but they more or less keep the personality that defined them before they were infected withe the virus. This leads to horrific consequences when applied to Gwi-nam or even Eun-ji, who have a lack of empathy for other people and use their increased physical might to kill and eat, but allows Nam-ra to help her friends survive using her hambie senses.

Where do you think All of Us Are Dead’s zombies fit into the undead pantheon? Let us know in the comments below.

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