‘Black Summer’ Does Survival Better Than ‘The Walking Dead’

I always wanted to like The Walking Dead; I really did. Gritty dramas about complicated men and women working through their horrific problems describes 90 percent of my favorite shows. But when it comes to zombie epics, I just don’t care about long intimate talks about belonging and pain that will result in deeper characters and more fulfilling interpersonal relationships. I want zombies, and I want gore. I want to feel like these characters are a second away from death. That’s something The Walking Dead’s first season, which I watched before I dropped the series, never fully communicated to me. Sure, those characters were certainly in danger and they will never be able to go back to their old lives, but it rarely felt like they were one loud footstep away from death.

That’s what almost every minute of Black Summer is: the grim part of the movie where you’re absolutely sure the killer is behind the next corner but you can’t see him. It’s not about character development or meaningful relationships. It’s about survival. No episode shows that theme clearer than Episode 4, “Alone.”

Directed by Abram Cox and with cinematography by Spiro Grant and Yaron Levy, most of the 38-minute episode follows Lance (Kelsey Flower), Black Summer‘s vaguely dumb resident bro. After being abandoned by his friends in the elementary school from hell, Lance wakes up in this show’s zombie-filled nightmare completely alone. The beats of the episode are simple. Lance runs from one zombie, breaks into a car, breaks into a grocery store, runs from another zombie, and is finally saved by a uninfected stranger. However it’s the way this episode is constructed that makes it remarkable. Almost every decision Lance makes, from not arming himself with a weapon to shouting in the middle of the street, is idiotic. He’s a dum-dum who deserves to be killed in this horrible situation. Yet with every clear misfire, Black Summer forces the viewer to think about what they would do in Lance’s situation as they simultaneously will him to escape. By creating one of the most horrifically incompetent survivors in zombie history, Black Summer restructures “Alone” into its own what-would-you-do survival adventure.

More than any other ghoul, that’s what zombies inspire: self-evaluation in the face of fear. No one wastes their afternoons thinking about what they’d do if Godzilla attacked, but almost everyone has a zombie strategy at the ready. The best zombie shows, movies, novels, and games drill into terror about the masses, our secret fear that we could be overpowered at any point by the people we’ve come to trust. These stories are never about dashing, larger than life heroes. They’re about watching a group of everyday people using everything at their disposal to survive. There’s no time for Shakespearean, Walking Dead-style monologues in the middle because you are running for your life.

For me, zombie dramas have never been about individual characters or stories. They’re horror fantasy fulfillment, what-if machines covered in bile and blood that let you imagine yourself as the ultimate leader of the apocalypse. That’s what Black Summer delivers, one gut-wrenching vignette at a time.

Watch Black Summer on Netflix