Overlord (2018) is a World War 2 movie with a paranormal twist. In its parallel universe, Nazis were experimenting on a serum which has the ability to reanimate people. Nazis were trying to create super soldiers with that. But how does that serum work? What does it do to people?
If you are like me, you may have totally missed the explanation about the serum. In the movie there are three dialogues which explain how Nazis were creating the serum. I only caught one on my first watch trough. To be fair though, it is easier to miss details when you are listening to French or German accented dialogues without using subtitles. Then I watched the bonus content of the movie where the producer Lindsey Weber explains it further. Let’s try to understand about the serum, what it does and some other unexplained things.
Contents
What is this mysterious serum?
First I thought the Nazi doctor, Dr. Schmidt had discovered a secret to the life, so he could keep people alive without their vital organs. I came to this conclusion because of the talking head of a woman and other womb like contraptions in the secret Nazi lab. However, Nazis did not create this resurrection power. That power came from a mysterious tar like substance which flows through the ground of Cielblanc village.
First clue came from the French girl, Chloe Laurent (played by Mathilde Ollivier). All paratroopers heard the terrifying sound that came from a room in Chloe’s home. It sounded like someone was being possessed by a demon. Chloe said that was her aunt and she was sick. Later, Private Ed Boyce (played by Jovan Adepo) went snooping around and saw the badly disfigured aunt of Chloe. After that Chloe explained to Boyce what’s really going on the Cielblanc village and how Nazis have been abducting villagers for the Nazi doctor’s experiments.
Chloe said “Our father first. A few weeks later they come for our mother. The German doctor, he believes the tar in the ground has some kind of a power. He calls it his science. But it’s just an excuse to kill us.”
Second information comes from Private Ed Boyce. He sneaked in to the Ciel Blanc Church and found out that the church contains more secrets than a radio signal jamming tower. He saw observational cells where the doctor keeps an eye on his test subjects aka poor villagers. Then he saw the actual secret Nazi lab where the Dr. Schmidt was experimenting on live and dead subjects. Boyce actually saw the tar pits and witnessed how Nazis were pumping the tar into people. He saw trays of syringes which were filled with red/ orange liquid and decided to grab a one out of curiosity. He saw the doctor injecting similar looking syringe into a dead soldier to animate that corpse. Ed found one of his friends and a fellow paratrooper, Private Jacob Rosenfeld in the lab. Jacob was being kept as a test subject by the Nazis. Boyce rescued Rosenfeld and they both escaped via a sewer tunnel.
Boyce took Rosenfeld to Cloe’s house and started to frantically ramble about his experience. He said to Ford “Listen to me. They’re doing experiments on them in there. They’re doing experiments on the villagers! Just like her aunt. They are burning people with these flamethrowers, and they’re still moving, the bodies… And they’re pumping tar from the ground into these cocoon things… She doesn’t have a body and she’s still talking.”
Third and only one I caught on my first watch through came from the Nazi officer, Captain Wafner. During a shootout, Corporal Lewis Ford (played by Wyatt Russell) shot and wounded Captain Wafner (played by Pilou Asbæk). Wafner lost a chunk of his face. In order to heal himself, Wafner took at least two syringes of serum. It mutated him and his wounds began to slowly close up. When the allied paratroopers infiltrated the Cielblanc church, Wafner managed to capture Corporal Ford.
During that time Captain Wafner gloated “You know, Corporal, all that power in the tar running beneath French feet for centuries, it just needed to be refined by their bodies. But they lacked the vision to do it.”
Forth one isn’t in the movie. It is in the bonus contents. Movie producer, Lindsey Weber describes the importance of the Cielblanc Church and its architecture like this, “So our idea was that this church had been there for a long time, built on this site where this tar was oozing up out of the ground, and that it would go back centuries. Maybe originally Celtic ruins are there, and the church was built on top of that and, over the years, had been appropriated by different groups in this area. And then, of course, in the present of the movie, the Nazis have taken it over and built their lab there.”
In summary, there was a mysterious tar like substance oozing out from the ground in Ciel Blanc village. Local people had known about it for centuries. Nazi doctor found out about the tar and realized its potential. So he was trying to refine it by injecting the tar into villagers and extracting the serum from their bodies.
How does the serum work?
These quotes are from Captain Wafner;
“A Thousand-Year Reich needs thousand-year soldiers.”
“Germany will have an invincible army. This Reich, Hitler’s Thousand-Year Empire, is going to take over the world.”
Thousand-Year Reich was not a fictional thing that limited to the Overlord (2018) movie plot. In real world, Hitler was dreaming to create an empire which would last long a millennia. In movie’s fictional world Dr. Schmidt found a way to realize Hitler’s dream. Captain Wafner’s team and Dr. Schmidt were refining the serum to create zombie like super-soldiers.
The serum works on both dead and alive people
The German doctor injected the serum into a dead soldier, later that soldier can be seen walking out of a room. Private Boyce injected the serum into recently deceased private Morton Chase’s body and reanimated Chase.
I suspect Chloe’s Aunt got the serum while she was still alive. Private Boyce saw a young villager in an observation room inside the church. That young man was alive but screaming in pain. Then he got disfigured like Chloe’s Aunt. Captain Wafner and Corporal Ford were both alive when they took the serum.
Serum keeps people alive even after taking significant amount of damage to vital body parts
Private Boyce saw a head of a woman which was still alive and talking. That head was alive even without a beating heart. (How was she speaking without lungs? Guess we will never know.)
A zombie attacked Chloe and her little brother Paul. Chloe shot it three times at point blank and blew its brains off. It fell down, writhed for few seconds, got back up and started to chase after Chloe. Chloe had to incinerate it with a flame thrower in order to kill it.
When reanimated Private Morton Chase went berserk Corporal Ford shot Chase with an automatic rifle in order to stop him. Ford emptied multiple rounds into Chase’s torso at close range and managed to put him down. But under a 30 seconds, Chase got back on his feet. Private Boyce had to smash his head in order to permanently put him down.
Unlike typical zombies, these zombies do not die from head shots. If you want to kill them, you have to destroy their heads or completely torch them down with a flamethrower.
Healing power and regenerative power
Corporal Ford shot Captain Wafner and took out a significant chunk of flesh off of his face. With that kind of a wound, even modern medicine would have hard time to reconstruct the damage. However the serum slowly but surely was regenerating Captain Wafner’s facial muscles.
Later Wafner got hold of Corporal Ford and took revenge by torturing him. Severely injured Ford took the serum himself in order to fight Wafner. Private Boyce witnessed Ford’s wounds visibly closing up.
According to the show creators, the serum should not only heal wounds but also regenerate body parts. According to them the zombie who attacked Chloe did not have this regenerative ability, that’s why one of him arms was missing and had only protruding bones in its place. It was sort of a failed experiment, therefor show creators call that character as ‘the Mistake’ behind the scenes.
It gives superhuman strength
When Private Morten Chase got reanimated he had increased strength than a regular human. Chase unintentionally crushed a metal water bottle, head-butted a wooden pillar and broke it in two. When he suddenly got enraged and turned on his buddies, they could not subdue him physically.
Mutated Captain Wafner crushed a metallic explosives detonator with his bare hand. He easily beat down Corporal Ford and Private Boyce and threw them around effortlessly. Multiple times, Wafner grabbed Ford and raised him off the ground with a single hand. He threw Boyce across a room, through a window to another room.
Serum versions and their different results
Nazi doctor was still figuring out the best way to refine the serum. So, different iterations of the serum gave different results and caused different mutations in people
Villagers
The German Doctor had been using villagers in order to refine the serum, and he also had been experimenting on the villagers to observe the effect of the serum. When they ran out of their usefulness, Germen soldiers torched them down with flamethrowers. In all scenes, experimented villagers were badly disfigured and barely moving except Chloe’s aunt.
Chloe’s aunt
She is an odd one. She was clearly not well and badly disfigured, but unlike other villagers she hadn’t gone weak or berserk. When Private Boyce saw her, she was pacing around her room and when she looked directly at Boyce, her eyes had human intelligence behind them. That’s why I think she was alive when they injected her with the serum.
Private Morton Chase
Private Chase came back from the dead, but wasn’t stable. Within minutes of becoming undead, he started to get aggressive and attacked his colleagues. He got disfigured in a sense when he suddenly moved his head and broke some bones in his neck. We would not know the long time effect of the serum on Private Chase because Private Boyce promptly ended enraged Chase’s life.
The Mistake
The Mistake was a failed experiment. He wasn’t regenerating as expected. He was missing one arm and had unhealed stitched up scars on his torso. He was the most zombie like mutated person in the movie because he was clearly consuming human flesh. There was a half-eaten human body inside his cell and also he dragged in a Nazi solder in to his cell and ate him.
Captain Wafner and Corporal Ford
Doctor Schmidt warned Captain Wafner to not to take the serum since it wasn’t ready yet. Without heeding doctor’s warnings Wafner took the serum. He slowly started to regrow his wounded facial muscles. He did not go berserk. He was functioning normally with enhanced abilities. However, the serum was slowly mutating him. He had black veins and looked like a mess.
Enhanced Corporal Ford also looked like Wafner with black veins. He was also in a sound mental state after taking the serum. We will never know the long time effect of the serum on Ford and Wafner since they both died in an explosion.
Enhanced Soldiers
Private Boyce witnessed the German doctor injecting the serum into a body of a dead soldier. Then the doctor ordered to put the body into an incubation chamber like hole in a wall. Near all holes there were bottles filled with some kind of liquid and it seems like the doctor was drip-feeding the serum to the incubating bodies. Later Wafner opened those chambers while giving “Germany will have an invincible army.” Speech.
Right before Corporal Ford blow up an explosive, we could see a glimpse of two of undead soldiers walking towards Ford. Judging by the look of them, we can assume they are by far the most stable version of Thousand Year Soldiers. Fortunate for allied forces, Ford and Boyce took care of them by blowing up the Cielblanc Church.
Things that don’t make sense
We can understand the powers of the serum and its effect on people. It’s unrealistic, fictional and mystical but the in-universe explanation was good enough for me to accept it. There are however, few elements in the movie that no one ever explained and I cannot fully understand what really happened.
Cloe wandering around at night near the pile of animal bones
Allied paratrooper group found a pile of animal bones in a wooded area. It had a canine skull and a leg with a hoof. Private Tibbet and Private Chase argued what kind of animal was that. While Chase was suggesting that the bones were belong to a jackal, the Satan’s dogs, Private Boyce alerted the group to a sound of someone walking. They saw a lone girl wandering around in the woods. That was Chloe and she took off running after seeing the group of soldiers. She ran through a field of small pyramid like constructions. My guess is those pyramid like things are tombstones, so they were in a cemetery. Chloe had a rucksack filled with trinkets, so Tibbet assumed she was a scavenger and no one ever questioned or talked about it again.
What if Chloe had another reason to be in the woods at night defying Nazi curfew. Chloe’s aunt was mutated and Chloe was taking care of her. Later in the movie we see another mutated man, the Mistake feeding on flesh. What if Chloe’s aunt also needed raw meat to survive? What if the pile of bones was actually leftovers from Chloe’s aunt and Chloe was there to discard them? I know I am reaching with this theory, but it is something to think about.
Chloe’s mutated aunt living in the house
Apart from severe disfiguration, Chloe’s aunt seems to be in a stable mental condition without going berserk. So why wasn’t she under the German Doctor’s observation? Did she ran out of her usefulness to the doctor’s research? Then why didn’t Nazis kill her as they normally do? Why did they release her to Chloe’s custody? It was irresponsible and dangerous to let loose an experiment to live in the village since they have a track record of going berserk. Chloe wasn’t hiding her, Captain Wafner was aware of her aunt.
May be Wafner was the reason that Chloe got her aunt back. Wafner was having an affair with Chloe, or rather he was forcing Chloe to be with him. He even let Chloe go, after she got caught breaking the curfew. After Chloe betrayed Wafner by siding with allied group, she lost her protection from Wafner and Wafner’s subordinates killed her aunt.
What were they injecting into Private Rosenfeld?
Private Jacob Rosenfeld had survived the parachute jump, but before he could regroup with rest of the group he got abducted by the Nazis. Later Private Boyce found him inside the Cielblanc Church. Rosenfeld was being experimented on by Dr. Schmidt. He was strapped to a bed and there were big black tubes connected to his body. One tube was attached to his face via a face mask, another bigger tube was stitched to his abdomen. When Boyce ripped out the tube to Rosenfeld’s abdomen, it revealed a big scary looking needle which was penetrating deep into his body. His tube setup looks similar to the villagers inside cocoons, but he wasn’t in a cocoon.
After Boyce rescued him, no one bothered to ask him what the Nazis were doing to him. Did they inject anything or extract something? He got recovered pretty quickly and was battle ready like he never had a foot long spike stick into his belly. Personally I thought he got injected with a refined version of the serum and he is going to be a perfect super soldier. When Private Rosenfeld and Private Tibbet attacked the church entrance, Rosenfeld complained that it is hard to operate a two-man machinegun single handedly. At that moment I thought he was going to reveal his super powers. But alas, that expected twist never happened.
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