As soon as Black Summer , a zombie apocalypse series, showed up on Netflix, I wasted no time in devouring it. I sat through the eight-episode horror drama without feeling terrified a bit. It wasn’t my steely determination that protected me. The pathetic weightlessness of its stories and characters made me feel as though I were going through wrinkled pages of pulp fiction. What could I possibly be afraid of, then?
The father of American horror stories, Stephen King, tweeted on April 14, “BLACK SUMMER (Netflix): Just when you think there's no more scare left in zombies, THIS comes along. Existential hell in the suburbs, stripped to the bone.” The next day, he showered more praises on the show, on the same platform – “BLACK SUMMER: No long, fraught discussions. No endless flashbacks, because there's no back story. No grouchy teens. Dialogue is spare. Much shot with a single handheld camera, very fluid. Showrunners could learn a lot from this. If they could work, that is.”
I agree with every single line of his, except the tone. I’m not surprised that these things made King love the show. But these very details are what made my face look tired and bored by the time I reached the season finale. I’m not the one to ask for a back story regarding the outbreak; however, I was disappointed to see this beta version play on the small screen. Of course, the dialogues are limited – this is one of the staples of the genre, along with making the streets and skies appear greyer.
Black Summer opens with a family of three that’s getting ready to vacate their home. They want to go to the stadium (an infection-free area) but the government forces won’t take everybody there. Through a nasty and dehumanizing security-check, they separate the injured and the immigrants (there’s a Korean character, named Sun, who doesn’t speak English, and two Spanish characters). The exclusion of minorities under such trying times are a direct nod to the fascism that has taken center-stage in the US (well, it isn’t any different in India either).
That way, Black Summer can be watched as another take-down of the current American government though it offers an empty political statement. Maybe, the creators, Karl Schaefer and John Hyams, wanted to voice their opinions via an apocalyptic drama and somehow forgot to add flesh and freshness. Rose (Jaime King), who’s only goal is to reunite with her daughter, and Sun (Christine Lee) are amongst the dozen people we follow throughout the series. While most of them fall down like flies, some survive and turn against each other.
The initial vigour, with scenes like a man swearing to God, saying he’ll take an old woman to the stadium safely only to throw her out of the car the minute he makes himself comfortable in the driver’s seat, runs dry by the end of the first episode. The other place that heightened my senses was the one in the diner with Sun and William Velez (Sal Velez, Jr.) and three more people. The five of them are trapped inside with no escape plans in sight as two crazy zombies begin to circle the eatery with mad divination.
The weapons they get their hands on aren’t strong enough to put the dead down. Moreover, the abundance of lack of trust in the group enhances the chances of betrayal. “Who’s going to backstab whom,” is the question they’re constantly fighting against.
This is most definitely the highlight of the series, for me. If Black Summer had been filled to the brim with such morbid fears and frailties, it would have become a mini encyclopedia for future zombie shows. But, over the decades, America has produced several zombie movies and series.
So, whenever a new one comes out, a natural desire to dive into it arises. I thought Black Summer would pour more features into the trough containing the fates of the screen-zombies. But, here, they just run around with blood shooting off their mouths. They don’t look scary; they look stupid.
