Zombie movies always work better I think when filmmakers put them somewhere that isn’t the usual abandoned city, shopping centre or military facility, and Indian Institute of Zombies has gone for a pretty obvious but fun alternative – an engineering college.
When Exams Become the Least of Their Problems
Indian Institute of Zombies follows students at an elite engineering campus where academic competition is taken pretty seriously. The usual concerns are exams, rankings, friendships and trying to get ahead, but everything changes when a mysterious zombie outbreak begins spreading through the college.
The campus quickly becomes a completely different place as infected students and staff start taking over the buildings – classrooms, corridors and other familiar parts of college life become potential death traps, while the students who were previously competing against each other are forced to work together.
That change in the social hierarchy is one of the things I like about the premise, as someone’s exam results aren’t going to mean much when there are zombies running through the corridors, and the students who spent their time worrying about status and competition suddenly need the people they were competing against.
Trailer
The College Becomes the Battlefield
One thing that should work well here is how familiar the environment is supposed to be to the characters – these students know the campus, they know the classrooms, the corridors and the places where they normally spend their time, but once the outbreak starts, all those familiar locations become dangerous.
That’s a fairly simple way of making the zombie outbreak feel personal without needing to invent some huge post-apocalyptic world, as the students aren’t suddenly dropped into a completely unfamiliar environment, they’re trapped somewhere they thought they understood.
And the fact that they’re students rather than trained survivors should provide plenty of opportunities for things to go spectacularly wrong.
The film also uses the zombie outbreak to poke fun at the competitive nature of student life from what I have read – before everything goes wrong, the characters are concerned about grades, rankings and their place within the college, but once the zombies arrive, those divisions become much less important, and people who would normally be competing against one another have to cooperate.
That’s a pretty obvious piece of satire, but I think it fits the setting nicely.
There’s also something amusing about taking the pressure surrounding engineering education and turning it into an actual survival scenario – students already have a reputation for surviving ridiculous workloads and stressful exams, so apparently the next logical step is making them survive a zombie apocalypse as well, because, why not?
Indian horror comedies have often been willing to take familiar genre ideas and put them into very specific local settings, and Indian Institute of Zombies is certainly following that approach rather than simply copying the usual Western zombie formula.
I’m hoping the comedy doesn’t come entirely from zombies either, as the characters themselves, their relationships and the way they react to the collapse of the campus can provide much of the humour.
The film is also notable because it was produced for Kuku TV, with the company moving into theatrical filmmaking, which is an interesting step from digital entertainment into feature films, particularly with a genre movie like this.
Cast and Production
Indian Institute of Zombies is directed by Gaganjeet Singh and Alok Kumar Dwivedi, with Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal credited as writers – the cast includes Mohan Kapur, Anupriya Goenka, Jesse Lever, Ranjan Raj, Sachin Kavetham, Rose Sardana, Tanishq Chaudhary, Shivani Paliwal, Bidisha Ghosh Sharma and Ram Diwakar.
The film is produced by Kunj Sanghvi for Kuku TV and was released in India on May 15, 2026, with a reported runtime of around 137 minutes – that 137-minute runtime is quite long for a zombie comedy, and that’s probably the one thing I’d be slightly wary of – the premise is easy to understand, so the film needs enough characters, jokes and zombie mayhem to justify keeping things going for well over two hours.
On My Maybe Watch List
The main reason I’d probably give Indian Institute of Zombies a look at some point is simply that the college setting gives the zombie genre something different to play with, as we’ve seen zombies in hospitals, shopping centres, houses, military bases and pretty much every other location imaginable, but an Indian engineering college gives the filmmakers a very specific environment and a built-in source of comedy.
I’m also curious about how much actual zombie horror there is underneath the comedy, because a film like this can be hilarious when the balance works, but if everything becomes a joke then the zombies stop being threatening pretty quickly.
The 137-minute runtime makes me wonder whether there’s enough material here to sustain the idea, but the cast is fairly large and the college setting gives them plenty of space for different characters and situations.
At the very least, the image of engineering students abandoning their exams because they suddenly have an entire campus full of zombies to deal with is a pretty good starting point.
Check out some more Indian horror movies.
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