Recommended by Another Zombie Person, Which Is Usually How Trouble Starts
A fellow zombie film enthusiast recommended Highschool of the Dead to me, which is the sort of thing that always sounds harmless until you remember that zombie people have a fairly elastic definition of “fun”. We recommend things to each other that involve barricades, bite wounds, bad group decisions, improvised weapons, collapsing civilisation, and someone inevitably saying, “We’ll be safe here,” shortly before everyone is very much not safe there.
So I went in expecting zombies. I did not expect the show to be quite so juvenile in places, which is probably the politest way to put it. There are shots in Highschool of the Dead where the camera behaves less like a director and more like a teenage boy who has been left unsupervised with animation software. At times, the fan service is not just present; it is practically wearing a high-vis jacket and waving both arms.
And yet I loved this. That is the irritating thing. I can sit here, as a supposedly sensible adult with decades of horror films, genre television, comics, design work, media memory, and accumulated scepticism behind me, and still say that Highschool of the Dead got me. The personalities work together. The survival premise is clean. The story keeps moving. It turns a school outbreak into a rolling disaster movie and assembles its group quickly without making them feel arbitrary. It is ridiculous, excessive and often embarrassing, but it is also properly engaging.
The story is easy to follow in the best way. Not simplistic exactly, but uncluttered. The world goes bad. A small group survives the first impact. They move. They fight. They argue. They look for family. They test each other’s usefulness. They discover very quickly that the dead are only one of the problems.
That is zombie storytelling doing its basic job well.
A Gate, a Bite, and the End of Normal Life
The official introduction sets the story at Fujimi Academy, where a single infected intruder turns the school into hell. The dead, referred to by the survivors as “Them”, attack, eat, and multiply through the campus until Takashi Komuro, Rei Miyamoto, and Hisashi Igou are forced onto the roof, where the first personal tragedy of the series arrives almost immediately. Hisashi is bitten protecting Rei, turns, and Takashi has to kill him. The remaining survivors later gather with Saya Takagi, Kohta Hirano, Saeko Busujima, and school nurse Shizuka Marikawa before trying to escape. (nbcuni.co.jp)
That first stretch is still the series at its cleanest and most efficient. It understands that the zombie apocalypse is not frightening because corpses are walking around. That is the decoration. The real horror is the speed with which ordinary assumptions fail.
School stops being school.
Teachers stop being authority.
Friendship stops being sentimental and becomes logistical.
A bite stops being an injury and becomes a timetable.
The death of Hisashi matters because it makes the apocalypse intimate before it becomes global. The series does not begin with a government briefing or a laboratory accident. It begins with a small group of teenagers watching someone they know become something else. That is zombie grammar going back to Romero: the end of the world is only convincing if the first loss is close enough to hurt.
The show then expands quickly. Corridors become battle routes. Classrooms become traps. The school bus becomes a rolling argument. The city outside is no safer than the campus inside. The official episode list moves from “Spring of the DEAD” through “Escape from the DEAD”, “Democracy under the DEAD”, “Streets of the DEAD”, and eventually “All DEAD’S attack”, which tells you something about the series’ pulpy, shameless commitment to its own naming convention. (nbcuni.co.jp)
It is not subtle, but subtlety is not what I came for.
The Manga Behind the Blood
Highschool of the Dead began as a manga written by Daisuke Sato and illustrated by Shouji Sato. Yen Press lists the series across seven volumes, with Daisuke Sato credited as author and Shouji Sato as artist. (yenpress.com) The anime adaptation is a twelve-episode Madhouse production, with Tetsurō Araki directing, Yōsuke Kuroda on series composition, Masayoshi Tanaka handling character design, Takafumi Wada composing the music, and the main cast including Junichi Suwabe as Takashi, Marina Inoue as Rei, Miyuki Sawashiro as Saeko, Eri Kitamura as Saya, Nobuyuki Hiyama as Kohta, and Yukari Fukui as Shizuka. (NBCUniversal Japan)
That production background explains some of why the anime works as well as it does. Madhouse gives it momentum. Araki, who would later become much more widely known for Attack on Titan, understands impact, speed, panic, and the visual pleasure of bodies moving through collapsing systems. The show often feels like it is cutting between comic panels, exploitation cinema, disaster film, and survival horror game logic.
It is very 2010, and that is not an insult. The late 2000s and early 2010s were full of zombie resurgence. 28 Days Later had already accelerated the corpse. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake had made the shopping-mall apocalypse sprint. The Walking Dead television series arrived in 2010 as well, turning zombie survival into weekly appointment television. Gaming had already made zombies interactive through Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, and a hundred other groaning corridors of ammunition anxiety. Highschool of the Dead arrives right inside that cultural weather.
But it also carries a distinctly anime mixture of heightened bodies, extreme reactions, stylised weapon use, and emotional directness. It is not trying to be documentary horror. It is melodrama with blood spray. It is teenage apocalypse theatre.
And, occasionally, a physics-defying underwear catalogue.
The Survivors: Archetypes That Should Be Flatter Than They Are
The main cast looks, at first glance, like a box of genre pieces tipped onto the table.
Takashi is the ordinary boy forced into leadership. Rei is the childhood friend with unresolved emotional history. Saeko is the beautiful sword expert with a frightening calm around violence. Saya is the rich, sharp-tongued genius who sees patterns before everyone else. Kohta is the overweight gun obsessive who turns out to be wildly useful once civilisation collapses. Shizuka is the ditzy nurse whose incompetence is, thankfully, softened by access to transport, adult connections, and the fact that she is not quite as useless as the show first pretends.
Then the series does the useful genre thing: it lets function become personality.
Takashi is not a great leader because he has a grand destiny. He becomes leader because he keeps moving when others freeze. That is a different quality. He is not especially charismatic in a polished way. He is reactive, bruised, occasionally stupid, but he can make a decision under pressure. In a zombie story, that matters more than being clever at the right dinner parties.
Rei is more complicated than she first appears, partly because she carries grief, jealousy, loyalty, and anger in a way that is rarely tidy. Her relationship with Takashi is messy from the beginning because Hisashi’s death sits between them like an accusation. The show does not always give her enough emotional space, but when it does, she feels like someone trying to process loss while the world refuses to stop moving.
Saeko Busujima is probably the character who lingers most. She is the series’ coolest visual idea: the kendo captain turned apocalypse blade, composed, graceful, and quietly terrifying. But what makes her more than the obvious “sword girl” is the revelation that she has a darker relationship with violence than the group understands. She is not merely good at killing Them. Some part of her enjoys the clarity of it. That is an uncomfortable admission for a show that otherwise often treats combat as spectacle. Saeko gives the violence a shadow.
Saya Takagi could easily have been unbearable: rich, loud, clever, furious, and convinced she is usually surrounded by idiots. To be fair, she often is. But Saya works because her irritation is useful. She sees how quickly group behaviour breaks down. She understands that intelligence is not always welcomed in an emergency, especially when it comes from a teenage girl with no patience for male nonsense. Her scenes with Kohta are some of the show’s best character pairing because they let competence arrive from two socially awkward directions.
Kohta Hirano is one of the series’ more interesting contradictions. On paper, he is the fanboy with guns. In another version, he would be a joke and nothing more. Here, the collapse of civilisation reveals that his knowledge, obsession, and emotional awkwardness suddenly have real survival value. That does not make him uncomplicated. There is something deliberately uncomfortable about watching a schoolboy become giddy around firearms. But within the story’s pressure cooker, he becomes indispensable.
Shizuka Marikawa is the hardest major character to defend because the show often treats her as walking fan service first and a person second. Still, she has a practical function: she is an adult, a medic, a driver, and the link to Rika Minami’s apartment, weapons, and vehicle. She is also part of the series’ tonal imbalance. Whenever the show wants absurdity, she is usually dragged in, bouncing and confused. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes it is just tiresome.
Then there is Alice Maresato and Zeke, the little girl and the dog, who arrive after one of the cruellest small scenes in the series: Alice’s father is rejected by survivors inside a house and killed, leaving her outside with the dead. It is not the biggest action scene, but it does what zombie stories need to do. It shows that the apocalypse does not only create monsters. It reveals people who were already willing to become smaller.
And hovering over the early episodes is Koichi Shido, the teacher who turns crisis into cultish self-importance. Every apocalypse needs a man who discovers, with horrifying speed, that he has been waiting his whole life for rules to loosen.
Very healthy behaviour, obviously.
Scenes That Still Bite
The show’s best scenes are the ones where action, character, and moral pressure arrive at the same time.
The rooftop death of Hisashi is the first. It establishes the rules brutally. This is not a world where bitten friends can be reasoned with, saved through love, or hidden in a spare room until someone finds a cure. Once someone turns, the old person is gone, and anyone who refuses to accept that becomes dangerous.
The bus sequence is another key early piece. The survivors escape the school, but the bus immediately becomes a miniature society with wheels. Shido begins manipulating frightened students. People cling to authority because it is familiar, even when the authority figure is clearly rancid. Takashi’s group splits away because they understand something important: survival is partly about choosing who gets to stand near you.
Then there is the river crossing and the city chaos, where the scale opens up. The show is good at movement through ruined urban space: roads blocked by abandoned vehicles, bridges overwhelmed, police lines breaking, public announcements becoming background noise to private panic. It does not pause for deep geopolitical explanation because, frankly, the characters would not have one. They are not in the war room. They are in the street.
The apartment sequence is where the show’s strengths and weaknesses sit right next to each other, possibly sharing a bath. On the one hand, Rika’s apartment gives the group a temporary shelter, weapons, a vehicle, and a chance to breathe. On the other hand, the show leans very hard into fan service. It becomes almost a dare: how much tonal whiplash can one episode contain before the zombies lodge a formal complaint?
And yet it still works more than it should, because the downtime matters. Zombie stories need pauses. Without pauses, the action becomes wallpaper. The apartment lets the characters eat, bathe, argue, flirt, feel awkward, and remember that they are still teenagers. The problem is not that the show gives them bodies and desire. The problem is that the camera often has the emotional maturity of a boy hiding behind a vending machine.
The rescue of Alice is one of the strongest moral scenes. Kohta shooting from the balcony to protect a child is not just action spectacle; it is a choice. It gives his skill a human purpose. Takashi’s group risks movement for someone outside their immediate circle, and that matters because apocalypse stories are always asking the same question: are we surviving, or are we only delaying the moment when we become worse?
Saeko and Takashi separated from the group is another strong stretch. Their movement through the city, the bike shop, the amphibious vehicle, the combat, and Saeko’s confession about violence gives the show its most interesting psychological material. Saeko is frightening because she is honest about something most action stories avoid: sometimes violence feels clean when the rest of the world is filthy and confused.
The Takagi estate episodes then widen the social world. Saya’s parents bring in wealth, militarised order, political hierarchy, and the uneasy comfort of people who already had resources before everything collapsed. The estate is safe, but only in the temporary, heavily armed sense. It is not salvation. It is a pause with gates.
Then the missiles come, and the final episodes push the collapse beyond local survival. An electromagnetic pulse hits. Vehicles fail. The comfortable fortress becomes vulnerable. The group has to move again. The series ends with the survivors leaving the estate and heading towards the next possible safe zone, still searching for family, answers, and somewhere that is not already compromised.
Which is to say, it does not really end. It stops.
The Fan Service Problem, Because We May As Well Look Directly at It
There is no honest way to write about Highschool of the Dead without dealing with the fan service. It is not a small decorative issue. It is built into the show’s visual identity. The manga and anime are rated and categorised as mature action, horror, drama, and romance material by Yen Press, and the anime database listings place it firmly in the ecchi/horror/action space. (yenpress.com) (anidb.net)
My reaction is mixed. Some of it is just juvenile. Not “dangerous to civilisation” juvenile. Just boring juvenile. The kind that makes you sigh slightly and wait for the grown-ups in the room to return, even though the grown-ups are mostly dead or useless. There are scenes where the camera placement undercuts the danger. A character is swinging a sword, zombies are closing in, survival is on the line, and the shot is suddenly more interested in anatomy than impact.
That can weaken the horror because horror depends on attention. If the viewer is being constantly nudged to ogle, the dread leaks out. You cannot build panic and leer at the same time forever. Eventually one of them wins.
But there is also something strangely honest about the show’s excess. Highschool of the Dead is not pretending to be tasteful. It is not smuggling fan service under a layer of prestige seriousness. It is upfront about being a trashy, violent, horny, emotionally sincere zombie anime. That does not excuse every choice, but it does make the viewing contract clear.
The question becomes whether the good stuff survives the nonsense. For me, it does. The fan service is the price of entry, and sometimes that price is higher than I would like. But the group dynamic, action staging, apocalyptic momentum, character chemistry, and zombie pressure kept pulling me back in. I never felt lost. I never felt bored. I occasionally felt embarrassed on behalf of everyone involved, which is not ideal, but boredom is worse.
Design, Movement, and the Sound of a World Coming Apart
Visually, the series has that polished, late-2000s anime sheen: sharp character silhouettes, glossy colour, strong contrast, clean action lines, and a certain digital smoothness that now carries its own nostalgia. It is recent enough not to feel antique, old enough to feel like something from a specific streaming-and-DVD era.
As a designer, I notice how clearly the characters read. Takashi’s ordinary schoolboy build. Rei’s spear-user athleticism. Saeko’s long hair and blade silhouette. Saya’s twin tails, glasses, and permanent expression of intellectual exhaustion. Kohta’s bulk, glasses, and tactical gear. Shizuka’s medical uniform and exaggerated softness. These are not subtle designs, but they are readable designs. In a fast survival story, readability matters.
The zombies are less individually memorable, but that is partly the point. They are mass, pressure, movement, appetite. They do not need personality. They need to fill space.
The opening theme, “Highschool of the Dead” by Kishida Kyoudan & The Akeboshi Rockets, gives the series the right jolt of rock energy, while Maon Kurosaki performed multiple ending songs across the series. (anidb.net) The music gives the show a slightly strange aftertaste: adrenaline up front, melancholy in the credits. That helps more than it gets credit for. After all the screaming, slicing, shooting, and bouncing camera decisions, the ending songs often give the episodes a breath of sadness.
That sadness is important because underneath the noise, Highschool of the Dead is about children who have lost the adult world. Some of them enjoy the new freedom too much. Some cope by becoming useful. Some collapse into ideology, lust, denial, or cruelty. But the old world is gone almost instantly, and the show is at its best when it remembers that this is not just cool. It is bereavement with weapons.
The OVA I Somehow Missed
I only recently found out about Drifters of the Dead, the bonus OVA that is sometimes treated informally as a thirteenth episode. It was released in 2011 after the twelve-episode television run and packaged with the limited edition of the seventh manga volume in Japan. It is a short side story rather than the missing continuation of the main plot, which is probably the more useful way to think about it. (IMDb)
I have not watched it yet, so I do not want to pretend it has shaped my reading of the series. From what is available about it, it sounds less like a missing dramatic chapter and more like the series pushing its fan service instincts into beach-episode form. That may be enjoyable in the right mood. It may also be the sort of thing I watch with one eyebrow permanently raised.
The funny thing is that discovering it now feels very fitting for Highschool of the Dead. Of course there is a stray OVA. Of course it is apparently more indulgent than essential. Of course I somehow missed it while waiting for a second season that kept not arriving.
That is the modern media afterlife in miniature: a main series left hanging, an OVA tucked away like a rumour, fans still asking questions years later, and the internet periodically kicking the corpse to see if it groans.
The Second Season That Never Arrived
This is the part that makes the whole thing feel unfinished in a more serious way.
The manga did not reach a proper ending. Daisuke Sato died in March 2017, and reporting on comments from Shouji Sato and the editor of Triage X indicates that continuing Highschool of the Dead without him was considered deeply difficult; the editor reportedly stressed that Daisuke Sato was central to the work and that nobody else could easily write it. (ComicBook.com)
That changes how I think about the lack of a second season.
As a viewer, part of me still wants one. Of course I do. The anime ends with the group still in motion. Parents are still missing. The outbreak is unexplained. The world has only begun collapsing. The characters have not finished changing. Saeko’s darkness, Rei and Takashi’s emotional mess, Saya’s family position, Kohta’s transformation, Shizuka’s links through Rika — all of it feels like material waiting to develop.
But wanting more is not the same as believing more should be made at any cost.
There is always a temptation, especially now, for unfinished properties to be revived, rebooted, continued, repackaged, game-adapted, nostalgia-mined, and generally sent back into the marketplace wearing a slightly different jacket. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it feels like someone has found an old sketchbook and started colouring in someone else’s unfinished drawing.
The most substantial official movement around the franchise in years has not been a second anime season but HIGH SCHOOL OF THE DEAD DAY 0. CTW launched the browser game through G123 on 28 April 2026, using the 2010 anime as its foundation and putting the player in Takashi’s role in a roguelike tower-defence version of the outbreak. The current G123 page describes newly drawn character art, base-building and party-based defence battles. (G123 launch announcement)
That is interesting, and it proves there is still enough recognition in the property to bring it back in another form. It is not closure. A game can keep the name alive, feed nostalgia and remind people that Highschool of the Dead still has recognisable characters and commercial pulse. It cannot replace the missing road.
Why It Still Matters, Despite Being Ridiculous
The cultural relevance of Highschool of the Dead lies partly in its timing. It arrived when zombie media was everywhere, but it did not simply copy the Western survival template. It filtered the zombie apocalypse through anime bodies, school hierarchies, ecchi excess, action choreography, and a very Japanese sense of social order suddenly failing.
The school setting matters. Schools are built on timetable, hierarchy, routine, uniform, bells, authority, and deferred adulthood. A zombie outbreak in that environment is not just horror; it is the collapse of structure in its most symbolic form. The students are supposed to be preparing for life. Instead, life ends before graduation.
There is something grimly funny about that.
For Gen X viewers, or anyone with a long memory of zombie cinema, Highschool of the Dead also has the pleasure of recognition. The barricades. The small group. The dangerous outsider. The argument over leadership. The child rescue. The temporary shelter. The rich people’s fortress. The government response happening somewhere offscreen. The growing suspicion that no institution is coming to save anyone.
These are familiar parts, but the show assembles them with enough velocity to make them feel alive.
It also has a strange nostalgia now. Not childhood nostalgia, at least not for me, but media-era nostalgia. It belongs to a time when anime discovery still felt slightly less frictionless than it does now. You might hear about a title from a friend, hunt it down, check episode lists, realise later there was an OVA, wait for a continuation, read forum arguments, and slowly understand that the story might never finish. It was searchable, yes, but not always neatly available in the way platforms now pretend everything is.
There is a kind of analogue frustration to that. A missing second season can eventually become part of the object itself.
What Worked
What worked best for me was the group.
Not every character is deep, and not every performance is subtle, but the combination of personalities is genuinely engaging. Takashi moves the story. Rei gives it emotional friction. Saeko gives it danger and elegance. Saya gives it intelligence and irritation. Kohta gives it tactical absurdity and surprising heart. Shizuka gives it adult access, comic softness, and, yes, an awful lot of the show’s most questionable framing.
Together, they form a strong survival unit because they do not all solve the same problem. That is one of the quiet pleasures of good ensemble genre storytelling. You need different kinds of usefulness. Strength, knowledge, nerve, transport, weapons, medical care, improvisation, emotional loyalty. Nobody survives alone, but not everyone should be trusted in a group.
The action works because it is clear and kinetic. Saeko’s sword scenes have grace. Kohta’s shooting scenes give distance and precision. Takashi’s fights are rougher and more desperate. Rei’s spear work gives her a different rhythm. The characters do not all move the same way, which matters.
The pacing works because the show does not linger too long in any one safe place. School, bus, street, apartment, bridge, estate, road. Each location has a function, and each one fails or becomes temporary. That is survival horror structure done properly.
The design works because it is immediately readable. It may be exaggerated, but it knows how to silhouette a cast and sell a mood.
The music works because the opening kicks the door open and the endings give the aftermath a little more melancholy than the visuals sometimes earn.
Most of all, the show works because it is easy to keep watching. That sounds like faint praise, but it is not. Plenty of shows with better taste are harder to finish. Highschool of the Dead understands propulsion.
What Did Not Work
The obvious weakness is the fan service, not because fan service automatically ruins a series, but because here it sometimes interrupts tension rather than complicating it. There are moments where the show has built a strong action rhythm, then suddenly points the camera somewhere daft, and the danger loses pressure.
It is not prudishness. It is craft.
The show also does not have enough time to deepen some of its best ideas. Saeko’s relationship with violence deserves more space. Rei’s grief and resentment deserve more careful handling. Saya’s family background opens interesting class and power questions, then the story moves on. Kohta’s transformation from mocked gun nerd to useful marksman is fascinating, but the show does not fully interrogate the discomfort of that fantasy.
Shizuka is underwritten. She could have been a more interesting adult presence — a nurse forced to become responsible in a world where teenage competence is suddenly outpacing adult authority. Instead, the show too often reduces her to comic confusion and anatomy.
The outbreak itself remains unexplained, which is not automatically a problem. Some zombie stories are better when the cause remains vague. But because Highschool of the Dead ends unfinished, the mystery feels less like purposeful ambiguity and more like a door we never got to walk through.
And then there is the ending.
Or rather, the lack of one.
The Ending Is a Road, Not a Door
The final episode, “All DEAD’S attack”, does not resolve the story so much as push it forward. The group leaves the Takagi estate after the EMP and renewed zombie pressure, heading towards the next uncertain destination. Family remains missing. Society remains broken. The dead remain everywhere. The characters are alive, but their story is still in transit.
That can be exciting. It can also be frustrating.
As an ending to a season, it works. As an ending to the whole anime, it feels like being shoved out of a moving vehicle and told the rest of the route is in a book that may never be finished.
Still, I cannot pretend the unfinished nature erases what I enjoyed. It changes the aftertaste, yes. It makes the rewatch a little haunted. You watch the group form knowing they will not get the full animated journey they deserve. You watch the world expand knowing the map stops before the destination. You watch Saeko, Rei, Saya, Kohta, Shizuka, Alice, and Takashi survive one nightmare while the larger story waits beyond the frame.
Maybe that is why it still sticks.
Most zombie stories are about interrupted futures. Highschool of the Dead became one.
The Strange Comfort of a Flawed Apocalypse
I loved Highschool of the Dead in the way one sometimes loves flawed genre work: not by ignoring the problems, but by accepting that the problems are part of the weather. It is juvenile. It is excessive. It is occasionally ridiculous in ways that would test the patience of a saint with a fast-forward button.
But it is alive, and that matters. There is energy in it. There is chemistry. There is design. There is forward motion. There is a group of characters I wanted to keep watching, even when the camera was behaving badly. There are scenes that still carry impact. Hisashi on the roof. Shido on the bus. Alice at the gate. Saeko in motion. Kohta finding purpose through the very knowledge that once made him socially ridiculous. Saya realising that being clever does not mean being safe. Takashi leading because nobody else can quite do it quickly enough.
I still want the second season. I am not holding my breath.
In a way, that is fitting. Zombie stories are full of people waiting for rescue signals that never come. You check the radio. You scan the road. You hear something in the distance and wonder whether it is help, static, or just another groan in the dark.
For now, the group is still out there in my head, moving through a broken city.
The school bell rang.
Nobody got to go home.
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