The Jason Hahn Files: Is Netflix’s Zombie Series All Of Us Are Dead Made By Someone Who Really Hated High School?  

I know some people say the best years of their lives were in high school — those sunlit years of youth, smooth skin and unbounded promise before unhappy marriages, weight gain, hair loss, mortgages, ungrateful children and, in the case of my friend Marko, four spectacularly expensive divorces, grabbed hold of them.

Me — I could wait to leave high school. I won’t say I was unhappy, but I wasn’t terribly happy either. But this much I know, whoever that kid was who grew up and decided to make All of Us Are Dead — that dude must have really hated high school.

“Oh my God!” Amanda cried the other night in the middle of Saffy’s latest Korean Netflix obsession. She sank deeper into the couch, practically stuffing a cushion into her mouth to keep from screaming, her eyes never leaving the TV. “What is this?! Oh! Oh!”

On the screen, a high school student lifted her head from the stomach of someone we can only presume she must not have liked very much. From her blood-soaked mouth dangled loops and loops of glistening intestines. One look and you could tell she was a zombie and here, when I wasn’t flinching with the graphic horror of the scene, a part of me couldn’t help but admire the professionalism of the show’s make-up artists.

“I am obsessed with that show!” Barney growled, his absurdly sculpted biceps flexing as he bit into his Shake Shack burger. “I hated every single second of high school and I wish there’d been a zombie outbreak at my school! So many people I would have pushed out the window!”

“But they don’t die though, even when they hit the ground,” I pointed out. “They just get up and lurch on to their next victim.”

Barney thought about this for a moment and then he shrugged. “Whatever. They’d still be revolting, rotting corpses.” For a moment, I felt sorry for his old classmates. For all I knew, they grew up to be respectable doctors and engineers who volunteered with starving refugees on the weekends. It’s just that in Barney’s memory, they will forever be the bullies who threw his lunch into the bin, shoved him into the locker and, for five years, generally made his life a misery. Of course, this was all before he turned 18 and suddenly turned into a six-foot-two wall of gym-hardened flesh, but as my mother will tell you, no one ever really grows up.

School’s out: Meet the cast of ‘All of Us Are Dead’ — (back row) Park Ji-Hoo; (middle row, from left) Lomon, Yoo In-Soo; (front row, from left) Jo Yi-Hyun, Yoon Chan-Young and Lee Yoo-Mi.

Meanwhile, Saffy's new obsession occupies her waking days and she can hardly wait for her Zoom meetings to be over just so she can watch another episode. For reasons that completely escape any of us, she is invariably joined by Amanda.

“How are you watching this?” I asked her at one stage as we watched, from between our fingers which partially covered our eyes, a student shove a broom handle straight into the mouth of a zombie student.

“I think it helps that I can’t tell who’s who! I’m so confused. They all look the same to me with their same haircuts and uniforms and pouty faces. So I’m not forming any emotional attachments! Oh, God!” She suddenly yelped as a horde of zombies poured down a corridor.

“Isn’t this so good?” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of popcorn. “And can I just say how cute that Su-Hyeok is? If I’d been in high school with him, I would have dated him in a second!”

Amanda and I turned to look at Saffy. Over the sound of students screaming and growling blood-smeared zombies, she felt our judgment and swivelled her eyes towards us. “What?”

“He’s 17!” Amanda said.

Saffy pursed her lips, her eyes returning to the screen. “Well, I’m not saying I would date him now! But if I was 17 again, then sure!”

“Wait, which one is Su-Hyeok?” Amanda asked.

“That one!” Saffy pointed to the kid standing on the window ledge.

Amanda exhaled. “Oh, yes, ok. Yes, he’s cute. Objectively,” she added quickly. She noticed me staring at her. “Don’t judge me!”

And on the screen, one after the other, the students turned. Just the day before, they’d been earnest students thinking of a dull career with, perhaps, Samsung or Hyundai. And now, they were red-eyed zombies who couldn’t walk in a straight line and with not much in their future except human sashimi.

As Saffy pointed out, “If that doesn’t put you off high school, I don’t know what does!”