Sean Parker
Blumhouse continues their Epix partnership in June by bringing us teen zombie thriller Unhuman, a movie that has a summer blockbuster feel while premiering on premium cable. The trailer is loaded with gory moments, blacklight neon sets, and humor. The film will feature I Know What You Did Last Summer’s (2020) Brianne Tju in the lead role accompanied by Deadly Class’ Benjamin Wadsworth, Halloween’s (2018) Drew Scheid, Freaky’s Uriah Shelton, and The Walking Dead’s Joshua Mikel. This looks like it’ll be a good time, like The Breakfast Club in Zombieland.
With an inauspicious start, The Unhuman trailer begins with a group of rowdy teens tearing out of a parking lot in a convertible. It may only be for a second, but it’s enough for even the most hardened horror fan to let their guard down. A momentary begrudging of the teenage horror genre was sighed as cliché characters boarded the bus for a field trip, but I was hooked from the second blood washes over the windshield. From there, after being told this is biological warfare, the kids’ teacher is chewed on like a cheeseburger. Students race to a nearby abandoned building, fleeing the scene of gruesome violence before they suffer the same fate. The surviving group must learn how to work together to survive, or they may kill each other in the process.
Marcus Dunstan, writer-director of The Collector series, brings his particular brand of scares to the zombie subgenre. One reason I feel Unhuman is worth the watch is because of its Zombieland style of using superlatives to define its characters. However, if there’s anything we know after watching the Dunstan penned Feast, the apex character we see at the start isn’t always the hero we see emerge at the end. Dunstan loves using that kind of irony to pull the rug out from under us, and I can’t wait to see what he has in store for us.
Another reason is that the Unhuman trailer shows characters using dialogue we’d see real people actually use. Just hearing a character reference zombies in the movie feels like a huge win because we won’t have the annoyance of someone saying, “What’s going on?” like they haven’t seen zeds in countless movies and video games over the last century. Since Unhuman won’t pander to its audience with the what (something I can’t believe is still a thing nearly sixty years after Night of the Living Dead), I’m confident we’ll see that time filled with excessively fun horror kills.
Unhuman will premiere on Epix and be available on VOD beginning June 3.
