All of Us Are Dead director explains the provocative bullying scene and apologizes for the same

Lee Jae-kyu, director of the current hot sensation All of Us Are Dead, apologized to viewers and explained his stance on the provocative bullying scene in the drama through video interviews on February 7.

The excessive bullying showed senior students forcing and filming a female student to sit on her knees without any clothes on her upper body.

The scenes were deemed problematic by viewers. Many believed that the scene s**ualized minors and was unnecessarily provocative. However, the director stepped up and revealed his stance, saying that he wanted people to “know how cruel the perpetrators were.”

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Director Lee Jae-kyu explains the decision behind controversial scenes in All of Us Are Dead

All of Us Are Dead, which topped Netflix’s ranking for a couple of days, remains a fan-favorite. The drama focused on a group of high school students trying to survive a zombie outbreak in their school.

The show’s gore and violent content remains a recurring factor, but the terrifying school bullying made viewers extremely uncomfortable.

(Disclaimer: The article contains spoilers.)

Viewers previously slammed Netflix for not including the school bullying trigger warning for the first episode. In the beginning of the same narrative, the drama showed a female student, Eun-ji (Oh Hae-soo), getting excessively bullied by male seniors who snapped open her uniform shirt and filmed her without any clothes on her upper body.

Director Lee Jae-kyu, via Insight, revealed that he wanted to showcase the cruelty of the bullies and did not incorporate the scenes just to gain views.

“There are many tragedies that happen in our society, our intention for showing such provocative scenes was not to just simply show those scenes to gain the attention of the viewers. If you watch further into the drama, you can see that Eun-ji was afraid of having what happened to her be exposed to the public, more than losing her life. I wanted people to see how cruel the bullies, the perpetrators, were to her."

The bullies, Gwi-nam (Yoo In-soo) being one of them, forced her helpless friend to record her and even threatened to post the clip online. The arrogance and depravity of the scenes were shocking to many. The director also apologized if the scenes were too much for some viewers.

“As a director, I apologize if the scenes were depicted as being too excessive than what I intended and also apologize for giving discomfort to anyone.”

The scene also became Eun-ji's villain origin story, as her strong willpower to delete the video led her to be immune to the virus.

Another scene deemed controversial in All of Us Are Dead was a female student giving birth in a public bathroom all by herself. She abandoned the baby in the bathroom. However, after seeing the zombie outbreak, she ran in to save her baby and locked it inside a restaurant, before chaining herself to the door as she was bitten.

The director explained that he wanted to show the story of the young, single mothers that citizens usually hear in the news.

“In the case of Hee-soo (Lee Chae-eun), it is a character that tells the story of young single mothers who are reported in real life. I thought that Hee-soo who abandoned the child but returned to the responsibility to protect the baby was in line with the overall theme of the drama.”

The provocative scenes in All of Us Are Dead led to a bigger discussion of netizens voicing out the extreme school bullying culture in South Korea. Citing real-life terrifying cases of school bullying, it remains a sensitive topic in the country.

The All of Us Are Dead director’s decision to include uncomfortable and provocative bullying scenes was meant to mirror society and to pass on a message that seems to have worked, considering many people are calling it out to be extreme.

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