KU contributor to new book lays out rules of 'The Rise of the K-Superzombie'

LAWRENCE  Who says televised fantastic dramas are merely sound and fury, signifying nothing? A University of Kansas professor and expert on zombie shows believes that the Korean genre’s themes likening martial law to zombie outbreaks undergirded the successful resistance to former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s 2024 attempted self-coup.

Paul Scott, KU professor of French, has penned a chapter titled “Neither Human nor Monster: The Rise of the K-Superzombie” in the new book “The Post-Zombie: Essays on the Evolving Undead” (McFarland).

Scott writes that many of the Korean thrillers are driven by plots in which nominally sentient super-zombies take revenge on bullies, cyber and physical.

“For me, the huge thing that these shows deal with is the prospect of a government in South Korea actually taking on emergency powers and imposing martial law,” Scott said. “All of the shows I analyze have this prospect of the imposition of martial law, and often this is worse than the zombie outbreak. It is portrayed as if politicians would use this as a pretext to roll out martial law, and the military would take over. And this has particular resonance in South Korea, which had a brutal military regime that took different forms and only ended in the late 1990s. It was a dictatorship until relatively recently, like Greece and Spain. We forget this quite easily, and there are effects to be seen.

“But what is interesting for me is that when martial law actually was imposed ... the country rose up and resisted, and it was led by young people with no memory of martial law.

“I really believe it's the martial-law effect from these shows; that in these shows it's presented as being so horrific and so scary and so debilitating for the country that I think it's a real case of art influencing people. ... I'm absolutely convinced. I don't think it can be explained any other way.”

Scott says this is another example of the infinite malleability of the zombie figure, which he traces to the Epic of Gilgamesh, with significant recent canonical updates by “Dawn of the Dead” movie director George Romero. Korean creators, Scott said, have welded the zombie to their country’s venerable ghost-story tradition as well as its present anxieties.

“We're living in a golden age of TV zombies,” Scott said. “There are really two places in the world that are producing the most amazing television, and it's the United States and South Korea. In both places, there's investment in it. But in both places, they're tapping into things that impact and provoke and touch the audience.”

In his book chapter, Scott analyzes the South Korean shows/directors “Sweet Home” (Lee Eung-bok), “Dark Hole” (Kim Bok-joo) and “All of Us Are Dead” (Lee Jae-kyoo). He’s working on a book about television shows featuring intelligent zombies, too.

“My research focuses on the fact that in the past eight years or so, around the world, quite independently of each other, you have different countries producing shows that feature rational zombies,” Scott said. “And it really reconfigures the whole genre. Because if zombies are meant to be brain dead, having zombies with agency and able to think and decide changes the whole premise, just as contagion did with Romero.”