Final Project Topic Proposal - #Alive

1. The effects of a virus/pandemic and the withdrawals from not having direct, physical human contact during a crisis.

2. I will be showing #Alive, a zombie film made this year, and I will record the conversation with a group of Discord friends

3. Fanwork Sources

• Reddit comments on the movie-
  https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/ipaofy/opinions_on_alive_2020/
• Overclockers UK forum -
  https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/alive-netflix-korean.18897302/
•        SYFY Wire Review (Talks extensively about relations to Covid-19) – https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/netflix-alive-zombie-movies-coronavirus-pandemic

4. I want to argue how this movie strongly resemble and mimics what society was like when the initial pandemic of Covid-19 incurred and how it even still relates to society now that we have experienced the pandemic for months now. The protagonist suffers from withdrawals from not having direct, physical human contact and feels extremely alone when he is cut off from the world around him even on social media. Food, medicine, and even the virus were not what made him upset until a little while into the movie as we se the protagonist first suffer from being cut off from the rest of the world. This almost copycats what people went through during this pandemic as we first experienced a fear of what the virus could do, but the loss of human contact was we severely missed once the pandemic actually occurred and then the worry for food and supplies came after once people started to ravage the stores for their own selfish desires.

That is my main argument, but I might also touch upon how people directly compare this to other Korean pieces of work like Train to Busan. While this is understandable as Train to Busan is also a zombie film, it is strange to me personally that this movie is not compared to any other zombie movie or even media outside of Korean pieces of media. There seems to be some sort of fetishization for categorizing Korean pieces of media as “other” as if it is exotic and needs to be kept in a box where it can not be compared to other pieces of media outside of Korean media. Simply categorizing Korean movies in a lump is misguided as there are different directors, producers, etc just like there is for movies made in places like America, yet any zombie movie made in Korea must meet the level of Train to Busan or else it is not good. This is different from how we could compare War World Z, 28 Days Later, Zombieland, Warm Bodies, Shaun of the Dead, etc in their own rights and while we can compare them with each other, we do it without necessarily putting one on a pedestal because we understand that while they are all zombie movies, they are different genre-wise and were not made by the same people.