The undead in Kingdom don't just rise from the grave—they emerge from the rot at the heart of the Joseon dynasty.
The series is a historical epic wearing the skin of a horror drama. It's set during one of the most tumultuous periods of Korea’s history: the late Joseon era, a time when famine, dynastic instability, and the looming shadow of foreign invasion threatened to unravel the kingdom.
But make no mistake—while the zombies gnaw at flesh, it’s the humans, with their unbridled greed and corruption, who are the real monsters. Kingdom is not simply a narrative of survival against the undead. It’s a story about how political rot eats away at the very fabric of a nation long before the undead begin their feast.
In the once mighty Joseon dynasty, a series of unnatural events begin to unfold. They start innocently enough, starting when rumors of the king’s mysterious illness spread through the capital. The monarch is hidden from view while the royal family is silent, offering no explanation. What begins as palace intrigue quickly spirals into something far more sinister, as the king’s death is concealed from the nation. But he’s not dead—at least, not in the traditional sense. He is undead, trapped in a state between life and death, reanimated by a mysterious plant that gives life to the dead but strips them of their humanity.
While the court grapples with how to maintain its grasp on power, the countryside begins to unravel. The people, already starved and neglected, face an even greater terror: an outbreak of the undead. The dead don’t stay dead—they rise, driven by an insatiable hunger, turning the once–beautiful kingdom into a hellish landscape of flesh–eating monsters. These zombies, or "gwisin" in Korean folklore, are not a supernatural anomaly, but rather the product of the very corruption that has infected the halls of power.
Crown Prince Lee Chang (Ju Ji-hoon), the son of the undead king, embarks on a desperate quest to uncover the truth behind the plague and save his people. What he confronts is not just an army of the ravenous undead but the political rot that allowed this horror to fester.
To truly understand the world of Kingdom, one must first understand the historical era in which it is set. The Joseon period (1392–1910) was a time of immense turmoil for Korea, defined by internal strife, natural disasters, and the ever–present threat of foreign invasion. The rigid social structure of Confucian Korea was beginning to show its cracks. The aristocracy, called the "yangban," enjoyed unimaginable wealth and power and remained insulated from the hardships of everyday life, while the common folk suffered.
Korea’s geographic position, sandwiched between the might of China’s Ming and Qing dynasties and the ever–ambitious Japanese empire, made it a nation in constant defense. The Imjin War (1592–1598), when Japan attempted to invade Korea, had left deep scars on the land and its people. With each passing decade, the threat of foreign domination loomed larger, as the Korean elite, paralyzed by their own internal power struggles, failed to adequately defend the country.
It's in this atmosphere of decay, both political and moral, that Kingdom weaves its narrative. The undead plague is not a supernatural anomaly—it’s a direct result of the elite’s greed and short–sightedness. In many ways, the zombies serve as a metaphor for the rot at the heart of the Joseon dynasty, where the ruling class feeds on the bodies of the people just as the undead feast on the living. And like the real–life Joseon dynasty, the kingdom in Kingdom is not brought down by external forces alone—it's rotting from within.
The bodies of the dead rise up, but they are animated by the same forces that have always driven the elite—greed, hunger, and a blind grasp for control. The poor at Jiyulheon, a medical outpost on the edges of society, huddled together in a nightmare of starvation, but do not succumb to the plague; they succumb to their hunger. And that hunger, a hunger so profound it strips away humanity itself, pushes them to the unspeakable: they eat their dead. In a Confucian society where the body is a vessel for the soul, to desecrate it is to annihilate your own place in the world, your connection to your ancestors, your tether to anything that once gave life meaning.
The body, in Confucian thought, is more than flesh. It is sacred, a legacy handed down from generations past, a testament to filial piety. To harm it, to consume it, is a grotesque betrayal of this inheritance, spitting in the face of one’s bloodline. And yet, the starving peasants of Jiyulheon tear into flesh, their hands shaking with the madness of survival. This is no longer the body of a loved one, of a neighbor, or a friend—this is meat. This is the moment when the last fragile thread of their humanity snaps, and what rises from that moment is a question that will haunt the rest of the series: What are we, if we are willing to eat our own dead?
In a world so deeply tied to Confucian values, cannibalism is the final, irrevocable breach of social and divine order. The government, meant to be the guardian of the people, has turned its back, watching as those it abandoned tear into sacred flesh just to survive another night. The peasants have not only lost their connection to society but to their very humanity. When the living feed on their own dead, they cross a line from which there is no return. They are no longer just starving—they are forsaken, spiritually unmoored, lost in a world that no longer values them as human.
So what, then, separates the living from the undead in Kingdom? The answer is cruelly simple: nothing. The living, driven by starvation, consume flesh just as mindlessly as the zombies that hunt them. The only difference is that their hunger was created by the very people who were supposed to care for them. The elite have starved their people of resources, of dignity, of hope, until all that’s left is a hunger that can never be satisfied.
In Kingdom, the line between soldier and zombie blurs, becoming a chilling allegory for the militarization of society and the sacrifices it demands. The undead, once people with lives, families, and hopes, become mere weapons—dehumanized, stripped of agency, used and discarded at the whims of the ruling class.
Throughout Korea’s history, the specter of invasion has always loomed large. From the Mongol hordes that thundered across the land to the brutal Japanese invasions of the late 16th century, and finally, the suffocating grip of colonization in the 20th century, Korea has faced the threat of annihilation again and again.
This is the true horror of Kingdom’s militarization. It isn't just about the dead rising from their graves; it's about the living being reduced to the same fate. It’s the ultimate dehumanization, the final indignity—being reduced to flesh for the slaughter, both in life and death.
Kingdom asks a haunting question: What is left to protect when a nation devours its own people? What kingdom is worth saving when it has already been hollowed out from within? The ruling class, so focused on repelling external threats, fails to see that the real danger is the rot inside—the slow erosion of society that comes when the people are used as cannon fodder in the pursuit of power. It’s a cycle as old as war itself. Leaders mobilize their citizens for battles they never wanted to fight, using them as shields to protect their own privilege while the people are left to die in fields that they once called home.
In a culture where a daughter’s highest duty is submission, Queen Consort Cho (Kim Hye–jun), Lee Chang’s stepmother, transforms that bond into a nightmare. Her father, Cho Hak–ju (Ryu Seung–ryong), had taught her that power is seized, not bestowed. But Queen Cho is no dutiful extension of him—she is his downfall, the creation that surpasses and devours its creator. She doesn’t merely inherit his teachings; she weaponizes them, turning his legacy into a ladder she climbs to stand triumphant over the ashes of his ambition. Queen Cho embodies defiance, wielding her father’s lessons like a blade and aiming it at the man who forged her.
But Queen Cho’s betrayal of Confucianism runs deeper than just her defiance of filial piety. She desecrates the very idea of "sajik," the sacred bond between ruler and people. The king, in Confucian thought, is the father of the nation, the beating heart of the social order. Queen Cho corrupts even the king’s body, manipulating him even in death, turning his sacred vessel into a grotesque puppet. The king, who should symbolize the moral compass of the kingdom, becomes in her hands a decaying figurehead, a puppet ruler in the most literal sense—living death propped up for her own gain.
Queen Cho’s unbridled ambition and betrayal are not isolated acts. Instead, they are the reflection of a decaying order, a kingdom teetering on the edge of ruin. Her actions, steeped in defiance and moral corruption, embody the rot that festers beneath the surface of power. This collapse of values sets the stage for a more insidious threat.
In Kingdom, the undead plague is a metaphor for this fear of being overrun by forces beyond one’s control. Just as the zombies mindlessly tear through the living, stripping away their humanity, so too did foreign invaders threaten to strip Korea of its political and cultural soul. The undead are a physical manifestation of the historical anxieties that have haunted the nation for centuries—the fear that no matter how hard the people fight, they might one day be consumed by something larger, something unstoppable. They are the living nightmare of a country that has always fought to preserve its identity in the face of foreign domination.
The undead plague is, in a way, the ultimate representation of historical trauma. It is relentless, unstoppable, a force that consumes everything in its path, just as the tides of invasion and colonization threatened to consume Korea in centuries past. But survival in Kingdom is not just about escaping the clutches of the undead. It is about preserving something far more fragile: the cultural and political identity of a nation. The heart of that is the people who make up that nation. In the end, the living in Kingdom are no different from the zombies. They, too, are consumed by hunger. The true terror of the series is not the apocalypse—it’s the realization that the apocalypse was already here, long before the dead began to rise.
