There’s no safe place in Black Summer. Not really. Not in the burning skeletons of suburban homes, not in abandoned schools crawling with fear, not even in your own mind, especially not there.
Karl Schaefer and John Hyams didn’t just make another zombie apocalypse yarn. They peeled open the rotting cortex of human panic and made us crawl inside.
We meet Rose (Jaime King), Spears (Justin Chu Cary), Sun (Christine Lee), Lance (Kelsey Flower), Julius James (Edsson Morales), and the unlucky horde of gasping, desperate survivors clinging to the raw meat of hope. But hope in Black Summer is a maggot. It wiggles away the more you try to hold it.
What sets Black Summer apart from the neon-barfed carnage of other undead shows is its unflinching, psychotic pace. The camera never lets you breathe. We’re hurled into the panic — no big exposition dumps, no military command centers, no politicians in suits to reassure you that someone’s in charge. There’s no one at the wheel. Society’s id takes over, a murderous free-for-all that reveals how thin the skin of civilization really is.
Freud would have loved Black Summer. Or maybe it would have driven him to join the mob, teeth bared, ego torn away. The zombies aren’t the monsters — the survivors are. Watch Spears strip away his name and history. Watch Rose’s transformation into an iron-willed death mother. Watch Sun, the outsider, learn to navigate language and violence in equal measure. This isn’t about survival. It’s about losing every piece of yourself that made you worth saving in the first place.
Every empty street in Black Summer is an echo chamber for unprocessed trauma. The longer they run, the more the characters splinter into shards of primal need — food, shelter, the gun that buys you one more day. It’s telling that the show’s most brutal moments aren’t the zombies devouring flesh, but the living devouring each other. Spears and Rose’s bond curdles under suspicion and self-preservation. Children turn feral. Parents become executioners. Your morality is a corpse on the pavement.
In the end, Black Summer is less a zombie series than an unhinged social Rorschach test. It asks you: Who would you be with no witness, no rulebook, no future? What do you cling to when the only thing left is your own animal heartbeat? For most of us, that answer is the real horror — far worse than the undead pounding on the door.
So you can keep your fortresses and your band of plucky survivors. In Black Summer, there is no fortress. There is no band. There’s only the next gasp of breath, the next shot fired in the dark, and the next rotting thing that wants to rip you apart — from the outside in, or the inside out.
