British viewers coming cold to Zombieverse, Netflix’s new Korean “reality” series, will have a blissful few minutes where they are not sure what they are watching. Well, it’s not that blissful, or I wouldn’t be about to spoil it by explaining, but there is a moderately pleasurable period of dizzy confusion as five people meet in what seems to be the green room of a dating show. On set, the “host” explains the premise, which involves men and women meeting in a bar and immediately getting off with one another – but one of the women is behaving oddly. As our five new pals watch on a monitor, wide-eyed, this singleton starts behaving very oddly indeed, biting her date until his jugular spurts. Bloody hell.
She’s a zombie! It’s a zombie apocalypse! The five are stooges, contestants not on a dating show but in an immersive horror-reality series that elaborately convinces them they are the survivors of an outbreak of flesh-munching undead-ery in Seoul, then corrals them into various life-or-death scenarios as they scream and scheme in an effort to remain alive.
Episode one sees them make it out of the TV studio and into one of the production team’s people carriers, in which they escape to the suburbs. But the car runs out of fuel! Soon they are trapped inside it on an infested petrol station forecourt, with the driver dead and the quintet of terrified, unwitting contestants having to plan how to pump gas without being chewed.
By this point, all but the dimmest viewers will have worked out that the folk inside the car know full well that the lurching, bloody people outside are actors, not the undead. You might be tipped off by the sheer scale of the production that would be required to actually con people into believing zombies have taken over – shutting roads, blocking phone signals and so on. The way the five have conveniently stuck together, rather than running in all directions, might also give it away. Another clue is that they keep making each other laugh when death by mastication is supposedly inches away. Plus, of course, one of the first things you would do if you thought a zombie was really running at you would be to try to smash its skull in: the health and safety and insurance implications of risking this happening to an innocent actor are a clear dealbreaker.
The Korean audience will have known all this from the start, however, because they will recognise the contestants: they’re not random wannabe applicants to a dating show. There’s an actor, a rapper and a K-pop singer among them. One was on the Korean version of The Masked Singer; another hosts Talents for Sale, a popular variety show in which celebrities raise money for charities.
So if we’re picky about exactly what kind of tricksy, semi-ironic, clever-clever meta-format we’re dealing with here, Zombieverse is not a reality show but an unscripted celebrity horror-comedy. We in the UK may not know the individuals involved, but we can see exactly what kind of star they are: ubiquitous, breezily inoffensive and either famous for no talent in particular or more famous now for turning up in stuff like this than for the thing they used to be reasonably good at. Tell them there’s a camera and an appearance fee involved and they will cheerfully participate in any old bobbins. If they were British, all of them would once have finished sixth on a non-classic season of I’m a Celebrity …
Zombieverse’s closest western cousin is Murder in Successville, in that the celebs are left to fill the gaps once each situation has been set up – but there’s no Tom Davis figure to guide them through with scripted lines. Instead, a lot of the laughs come from playing with the trademarks of Korean reality TV: any notable moment is rapidly replayed from five different angles, and the excitable on-screen captions keep shouting at us to reinforce what we can see perfectly well for ourselves. “HE RAN OFF WITHOUT LOOKING BACK,” the text says, when someone legs it. “THEY MUST KEEP IN MIND THAT THE ROPE COULD SNAP,” it bellows, during a weird Crystal Maze-y bit where a YouTuber and a TV host become trapped in a candlelit dungeon and must untie themselves before a zombie pensioner eats them. At times the captions can be laugh-out-loud funny, as in episode two when new cast members are introduced, complete with a fictional reason for them having joined the band of survivors: “YOO HEE-KWAN, FORMER BASEBALL PLAYER. STRANDED WHILE BUYING FRUIT FOR A FRIEND’S HOUSEWARMING PARTY.”
Loads of the show, however, really is just celebs playing along with a daft idea – once you stop analysing the mechanics of the show, there’s not much funny or horrific stuff to get your teeth into. It’s several hours of chummy, game-for-a-laugh, pointless messing about. Even the apocalyptic version of celebrity reality is playing it safe.
• Zombieverse is on Netflix
