by Michael McCarthy
I finished watching the Korean zombie series Happiness today. It’s from 2021 but it only just arrived on Netflix. It wasn’t a very scary zombie series but one of the more realistic ones I’ve seen. I also liked the zombie origin part of the story, which is that it starts as a side effect from a big pharma drug but when infected people bite or scratch you, you can catch it that way, too. I would further explain it, but I suppose it’s more suspenseful if you learn about it gradually while watching it. Most of the series takes place in a 15 story apartment building that gets quarantined. In some ways, it focuses more on how a crisis brings out people’s true colors than the actual zombie element. Some people who aren’t zombies behave worse than zombies.
If you like zombie stuff, I would highly recommend it. Great writing, acting and directing. But it is very much a Kdrama so if you generally don’t like the style of those for some reason then I guess it might rub you the wrong way. Just don’t expect it to be super scary. It’s more like a regular thriller than horror. If you want to see an extremely terrifying Korean zombie series, check out All of Us Are Dead, which is also on Netflix. That was one of the most suspenseful and scary things I’ve ever seen. The Walking Dead didn’t even scare me as much as that one. (Side note: I loved the first several seasons of The Walking Dead but halfway through the series my favorite character committed suicide in an elevator shaft and that was it for me. I think I watched three more episodes after that but I was too annoyed with them killing off my favorite characters while others that really annoyed me lived and I just was not enjoying it anymore so I stopped watching it. And I very rarely don’t watch a series until it ends.)
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