I love scary movies. I love movies that make me jump, twist and turn. I love movies that are predictable but I love movies that are unpredictable even more.

But I am NOT a fan of movies that include zombies. I am not a fan of movies that are unrealistic. If I can’t find a connection to “real life” in a movie, my longevity, with said movie, will be very short.

So I was skeptical when I kept hearing people talk about Train to Busan. I had never watched a movie with zombies in it and I never thought I would. Zombies are unrealistic and everything about them just makes me ask “now why would I sit and watch that?”

Late the other night, after completing my dorm parenting for the evening, I laid on the super thin bunk bed mattress and searched Netflix for a calm, soothing movie that would scaffold me into the land of Zzzzs.

I had heard of Train to Busan but had never watched it. And at the time, even though I had read the description, it did not occur to me that it was really a “zombie” movie.

So I scrolled, put the mouse on the movie, clicked on it and laid there.

What was to follow was massive jaw dropping from my part and the inability to “fall” completely to sleep without being interrupted by the visual of zombies biting each other’s necks and blood spatter.

***Spoiler Alert***

It was not a disorganized concept however.

And it was not a concept or theme that could be separated from this machine we call adoption.

In the movie, the main character comes up with some kind of agent that creates a disease. The experiment (from my understanding) was to see how far a disease could go. But the experiment backfires.

As the Zombies are taking over, they kill everyone in their path except three people.

1. A mother about to give birth.
2. A young child wanting to see her mother (it is not clear if the mother has been killed by the zombies)
3. The main character who is the father of the child in #2.

But I believe the zombies were all along trying to reach the main character, the one who (with a colleague) created this horrible disaster.

Throughout the movie you see people sacrificing for each other. The city is “lit” with zombies and their affects simulates a domino falling over.

If one person has the agent in their body, and bites someone else, they automatically acquire the agent and become like a zombie, only wanting to find their next victim.

But there is a time laps. The transformation does not begin immediately. They go through phases before they become fully indoctrinated and pulled into the lifestyle of a zombie.

There are a couple scenes that catch my eye:

First and foremost, like all children, this protagonist’s child sees the zombies first. The father is remotely aware, but the child sees there is something not right about the situation and tries to communicate this awareness to her father.

Her father, like many men in today’s world, is too busy making money and stepping on other people’s head to make it up the corporate ladder. Her father is also remotely aware of the spread of this so-called disease he and his coworker “created” but has no idea of the lasting effects.

Second, there is a scene where (I will guess) an older lesbian couple is on the train. The zombies grab a hold of one of the women and bites her. As she begins to transform, her lover reaches for her. Life with her is better than life without her so she opens the train door to be with her wife, knowing that she too will be infected, forever. But when opening the door, the zombies file out and don’t only get her but proceed to the main characters.

The sacrifice of one can be the detriment of many.

Next, there is a scene in which the pregnant woman’s husband is bitten. This means he will become a zombie and anyone he sees he will attempt to infect. So he makes sure his wife is in a safe place where he himself can’t get to once the disease runs its course and makes him into everything he was not.

At the end of this sad scene, he names the baby; something his wife had been teasing him about for some months.

His arms get weak from holding the door closed and he succumbs to the push and pull that would eventually take over his life.

There is a scene in which the person to notify the little girl of the zombies sacrifices his life for the pregnant lady, the little girl, and her father.

In one scene a baseball player watches his girlfriend be bit. Instead of getting up to run away, he holds her in his arms. She goes through the stages of becoming a zombie and bites him in return.

As the movie comes to an end, the main character is bitten. He had several hours to witness the changes that are made in the body before becoming a complete zombie so he is able to calculate how much time he has before he turns on his own kin.

As he undergoes transformation, his eyes turn white (a step before full zombieship) and during this time, he flashes back to when his daughter was a baby. He cherishes that ten second phase and then jumps off the train.

He commits suicide, in front of his daughter.

The tears were many for me and other viewers. This intimate time between a father and his daughter, the choice this father had to make.

The father had to trust that the pregnant woman would care for his child because he was not sure if the girl’s mother was alive.

This man sacrificed his life to save the lives of his family while being the creator of death to many. He created something that destroyed and killed many families, but seemed to be the only one who could stop the madness.

All throughout the movie, the main character is in contact with his colleague who appears very remorseful. The goal is to get to Busan where they know things are agent free. In Busan, no one can be hurt. That is the safe city. But then, as the disease spreads, not only are the non-infected people trying to get to Busan, but so are the zombies.

Overall I believe the movie is a sick joke that holds a lot of meaning. The main character acts as if he was innocent. A couple scenes in, you can see the father discovers that in the dark, zombies don’t know and can’t see. So for a period of time they are able to control them, and get to a safe place. But after dark there is always light, and mayhem ensues.

Adoption in many ways can be the disease that in fact infects the masses. Two people thought up a good idea to make everyone into zombies. The HOLTS, not only advertised adoption as the “best” thing for a child, but also became rich doing so. They not only wanted to transform the life of a so-called orphan, but they wanted that so-called orphan to be indoctrinated into Christianity so that they in turn could return to tell others about a god that would only allow Christians to live in heaven with him.

Adoption is the zombie and the people are the agents who are infected with this very damaging disease. Adoption in many ways can destroy the lives of many.

The agent in adoption is what we adoptees like to call the adoption koolaid. Once that is taken in, it is very hard to unlearn and relearn the realities of their affects. But there is a period before one becomes fully a zombie, and during that period adoptive parents have the chance to ask questions.

But they don’t.

They want to trust a system more than they want to trust the affects of their decision. They know something is not right, just like the child in the movie knows. Something is just not calculating. And yet, the child is left to suffer intense pain.