What horror series speaks most to being vulnerable to decaying infrastructure?
It's also entertaining
By D. Menzies
It’s still a season of ghoulishness, and in spoiler-filled fashion I thought I’d highlight two TV series that offer reflective chills. Of the two of them, the 2022 South Korean drama series “All of Us Are Dead” speaks to modern society’s failure to help those whom it has neglected in such a precise way zombie genre forefather George Romero would be proud.
He’d probably also like Joko Anwar’s zombie-free “Nightmares and Daydreams” — a 2024 anthology horror and sci-fi series from Indonesia.
Anwar has been a figure in Indonesia’s film industry for more than two decades now, and over the last several years his horror films have been some of its most critically lauded exports. In “… Nightmares and Daydreams,” he writes four of the series’ seven episodes and directs the opener and closer.
One of the things that make Anwar’s work unique in Asian media is his casting of brown-skinned Indonesians and a realistically proud depiction of that. This isn’t unique to him in Indonesia. He’s an extension of a tendency already there, but it’s been relatively rare for homegrown Indonesian work to have an international platform.
The TV output of countries across Asia has often reflected the cultural hierarchies in the continent’s respective countries and Asia as a whole. They are a mix of Asian cultural biases and Western ones, and if you’ve watched enough of them, you see both the continent’s wealthy and less wealthy countries largely reflect a similar dynamic as many stories in Latin American media. Most narratives focus on people with light skin and moral attributes are portrayed in keeping with perceptions of race.
So when you see a woman talking about not using beauty products to better align with those standards — “So what if I’m dark? You fell in love and married me this way” (to paraphrase some dialogue from “The Orphan” — that speaks to a certain rebellious quality.