“One moment you’re in class, and the next, the campus is under lockdown - and no one is telling you why.”

Dead Semester

Every college student has thought about it at least once - what if something wild happened on campus and we were stuck inside? For me, that question became an obsession. Dead Semester is my answer - a slow‑burn horror‑thriller set in an Indian college where a routine blood drive spirals into a viral outbreak. It doesn’t play by the usual zombie rules. It’s about control, corporate lies, and how a group of students unravels a conspiracy they were never supposed to see.

“Click here to check out the early draft of Dead Semester”

The Spark

Dead Semester started in the middle of a C programming class. I was half‑listening, half‑tinkering on my laptop when the thought hit me - what if something wild happened on campus and we were trapped inside? It was vague at first, just “college + outbreak” floating in my head.

Then exams hit, and the idea sat untouched for over a month. Once they were over, I spent a solid week obsessing over the story flow - mapping scenarios, exploring possibilities, and trying to stitch the concept together. I even asked the mighty LLMs for help, but the suggestions were garbage. That’s when I decided to trust myself completely.

I dug deep, pulling on every bit of creativity I had. I thought and rethought, taking inspiration from The Walking Dead, Resident Evil, and All of Us Are Dead - not to copy, but to learn from their pacing, tension, and world‑building.

By the end, I had the scripts for the first three episodes and a rough outline for all three planned seasons. What started as a random classroom daydream had grown into a fully‑formed, slow‑burn zombie survival epic set in an Indian college.

The Drive

I’ve always been drawn to slow‑burn horror - the kind that starts as something small and ordinary, then warps into a reality you can’t escape. I wasn’t interested in mindless zombies or cheap gore. I wanted a controlled outbreak - a virus engineered by a corporation, SynGenix, to quietly shape the future. But perfect systems don’t stay perfect. They fracture. And when they do, they take everything down with them.

An Indian college campus was the perfect ingredient. The hostel politics, the cliques, the jugaad survival hacks - all the messy, unspoken dynamics of student life - became fuel for the story. Every character would be a product of that environment: flawed, resourceful, and forced to adapt as the very system that shaped them begins to kill them.

From Idea to Structure

Once I had the core concept, I broke it into three arcs: Campus Outbreak, Campus Collapse, and Truth & Rebellion. Each season peels back another layer - starting with horror, moving into survival politics, and ending in full‑blown conspiracy sci‑fi.

Every character’s arc is designed to fracture differently. No clean hero’s journey. No safety net. Every death matters. Every survivor is broken in a unique way.

“And like any good semester, you don’t get to drop out.”