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.
