Many have pondered if they’d survive a zombie apocalypse, but none have gotten the opportunity to find out. Now’s their chance. In the comedy-horror reality series Zombieverse, a bunch of internet-famous people — like actor Lee Si-young (No Mercy) and comedian Park Na-rae (Park Na-rae: Glamour Warning) — attempt to film a reality dating show called Love Hunter. It turns out, however, that they’re the ones being hunted: This is a game of survival in a universe riddled with zombies.
When all hell breaks loose after a pallid woman sinks her teeth into her date, the cast bands together and fights their way out of the building. Created by Park Jin-kyung and Moon Sang-don, the series follows the “survivors” as they get into increasingly hairy situations — called quests — with infected crew and zombified civilians across real-world locations: downtown Seoul, rural villages, abandoned theme parks. With real people facing swarms of the undead, Zombieverse may be your best approximation of finding out if you’d make it through a zombie infestation.
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No, the series is unscripted. It’s a Korean “real-variety” series, which means it’s part reality show, part variety show, and part competition show a la Siren: Survive the Island. While the production crew has teed up many elaborate and dangerous quests for the cast to navigate, none of the cast knows exactly what’s about to happen to them.
After a group of people gather at a dating reality show shoot, all hell breaks loose when zombies start attacking. Everyone scrambles, and those who survive escape to the streets of Seoul with zombies at their backs. Each new location they end up in presents a new quest and different set of challenges — filling up on gas while trying to evade zombies, traversing a supermarket without getting bit, hiding out at an amusement park. As the cast slowly learns how these zombies work (Can they hear? How long until people turn into zombies? Will one of the uninfected betray the others?), they take greater and greater risks to keep each other safe. Can they make it out alive?
The series takes place across South Korea, in and around cities like Seoul and Incheon.
