Z is for Zombies

Damn! Really? Will they never let up? These undead creatures have been pounding at our tree trunks incessantly for days. They are worse than telemarketers! Just won't leave us alone. Something needs to be done about this, and fast because we need to be able to make a run into the city.

I always play as Nick. Always.
As both a video game and horror genre lover, zombie games are basically made for me. There's nothing quite like turning on the Playstation or 360 (or even the Wii, in the case of Dead Rising!) and mowing down horde after horde of shambling, moaning zombies.

One of my personal favorite games is Left 4 Dead 2. In it, you play as one character in a group of four survivors -- Nick the gambling con, Rochelle the TV newscaster, Coach the high school football coach, and Ellis the excitable mechanic -- and fight your way to the various safe houses scattered throughout the game. Ultimately, your goal is to escape the zombie apocalypse and try to find some sort of haven away from it all. Gameplay generally revolves around shooting everything in sight, though there are some melee weapons and things that go boom.

I will be real with you guys: I absolutely suck at shooters. Suck, suck, suck. When I get startled by something, I tend to just spray bullets in every direction, or absolutely murder my teammate on accident. I sometimes wonder how I got through Resident Evil 4 with all the bullets I wasted, but perhaps the game was far too generous with poor me and my twitchy trigger finger.

Yet L4D2 isn't just a shooter, and the zombies aren't just zombies. While the fast, swarming hordes on their own can cause enough trouble (god forbid you set off a car alarm), there are a set of mutated, specialized zombies that evolved specifically in the best ways possible to kill you dead.





Holy shit, right? These aren't your Average Joe Zombies, and the four survivors will actually call out the names of these horrific beasts to let you know when there's trouble afoot. From the disgustingly boil-faced Smoker to the spitting...Spitter, each one of these foes has their own special method of murder.

But can they still be called zombies?

We've talked a lot about the idea of affect, and how in most of our zombie media, zombies are lacking this crucial human trait: they don't feel anything anymore and all they want to do is devour and consume human (or hot dog) flesh. If you look at the image above, you'll see a rather small zombie next to the giant, hulking mound of pink flesh called the Tank. With her lanky hair, pale skin, suspiciously non-rotting flesh, and skinny limbs, she looks less than threatening. This particular zombie is known as the Witch, and she is quite possibly the most dangerous member of the specialized zombies.

Sweet Jesus!

While the Tank will rip you to shreds with its bare hands and also throw a bus at you for good measure, the Witch has a much more subtle approach. You know when a Witch is nearby when you hear the crying: yes, she is indeed a zombie who cries. Endless, horrible, echoing sobbing that is, quite frankly, terrifying. Witches tend to hide away in areas where hapless survivors are most likely to run right into them while trying to avoid them at all costs. And once you've startled the Witch, the fun starts. Either you stay and fight and scream a lot, or you run like hell, but whatever you do, you'll probably die, as each of her hands are tipped with claws about as long as your forearm.


Once you've gotten a Witch's attention, the game even tells you that you've startled her. You, the normal human, have startled the crying zombie. The crying zombie who was hiding away instead of searching for flesh to devour. What kind of zombie is she, really? She doesn't even attack you in order to eat you, she attacks you because you frightened her. The Witch, then, seems to have affect.


The bulbous Boomer up there is made only to explode. Boomer bile attracts zombie hordes, and if any survivor gets too closer to a Boomer when it erupts, they become the unlucky target of the horde. Spitters spew acid puddles, Smokers lash out their freakishly long tongues to wrap up a survivor and drag them away from the group, Hunters pin survivors to the ground...you get the picture. And Tanks are essentially the Hulk in zombie form.


I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about L4D2 with an emphasis on the specialized zombies; she told me that they didn't sound like zombies anymore, just monsters. Would you agree with this? In what way are they zombies, but in what way are they not? In the same vein as our 28 Days Later conversation, should zombies always be the same sort of uniform, shambling horde that consumes people like locusts? What are your opinions on zombies evolving like any living creature?

Most importantly, would you play L4D2 with me?

After our recent class debate over the "Zombality" of the 28 Week Later zombies, I pondered the qualifications of being a Zombie, a member of the "living dead". After much thought, I'd like to make the case that although these 28s (pre-"turn") do not consistently experience the animation of death, they do undeniably "turn"; losing their agency and only "existing" in our physical world to eat. They no longer occupy a mental state where they recognize a self due to chemical reactions suffered in their brains which destroy "the mental". This is to say that someone who is infected in the 28s lore, does die.

So I'm saying,

LIVING DEAD!!!

...

But more importantly, what do you think? 

So far, we have read/played two Choose Your Own Adventure books/game: Zombocalypse Now, Can You Survive, and "Choice of Zombies". Both books and the game emphasize the importance of choosing the right path for surviving the Zombocalypse. However, compared to Zombocalypse Now, there was a moment that caught me off guard while playing the "Choice of Zombies" game.

     Our discussion of "Choose Your Zombie" in class on Tuesday reminded me of the recent videogame adaption of The Walking Dead. It's an adventure game, where you play as Lee Everett, a convict who was being escorted out of Atlanta when the zombie apocalypse struck, and who then, with his newfound freedom, must face the desolate reality of life post-zombie apocalypse.

   
     Both "Choose Your Zombie" and The Walking Dead game involve myriad choices which test your morality and force you to choose whether to save yourself or whether to risk your life to help others. When my fellow Muir Survivors Defense Council members and I were playing through "Choose Your Zombie" and came to face one of these tests, we would discuss the pros and cons of each choice, making sure we thought each one through and came to a reasonable consensus before moving on. But when you play The Walking Dead game, every decision has a time limit, which will vary unpredictably from situation to situation. For instance, you're safe in your camp when zombies swarm out of nowhere and you're immediately forced to consider whether or not you have any limbs to spare. Or, in Episode One (there are five in total; they came out staggered over a period of six months, similar to a TV show), when you're on a farm with a group of survivors and zombies attack over your barricades, you have to choose whether to save Shawn, the adult son of the farm's owner, or Duck, the young son of another survivor in the camp.
   
     When I faced this challenge, my morality held sway and I chose to save Duck. I did save him, but the zombies killed Shawn and then Hershel, his father (and owner of the farm) kicked me out. However, I had won Duck's father's trust, and so I was invited to travel with the family in their car.  I wondered if Hershel would have let me stay if I had tried to save Shawn, but before I could really even consider other possibilities or paths, the game whisked me on to the next decision. I had no time to weigh options or to reason.
     In the real zombie apocalypse, we wouldn't be able to put our fingers in the pages of the book in order to flip back if we messed up. We would have to make spur of the moment decisions on which our lives and the lives of others may depend. We would be forced to consider what the real goal of a defense council is: is it to save yourself? Is it to save as many humans as possible? Is it to kill as many zombies as possible? Is it simply to survive at any cost?

A few weeks ago when the semester started back up, I told my friend Ryan about this class and how much I was looking forward to it. He replied, "damn you! I wanted to get into that course but it filled up too quickly!" Then, while we were still on the topic of zombies, he suggested that I watch the movie Dead Snow. I had never seen it before and immediately became interested when he said that the zombies in the movie were Nazi zombies. I happen to be a huge fan of the game mode in Call of Duty, Nazi Zombies. If you have never played this game before, it's pretty simple. It's you VS Nazi zombies. As you progress through the levels, the zombies become increasingly faster and more aggressive. Last semester, I spent many afternoons with my roommate Andy, strapped to the teeth, mowing down the increasingly wild horde of undead Nazi's as they came barreling towards us. This game literally consumed way too many hours of my life last semester, I probably would have made the dean's list if i wasn't so hooked on it, well probably not, but my GPA definitely would've been a little higher. Getting back on topic, killing zombies (or watching them get killed), especially when they're Nazi zombies, is pretty damn satisfying. So, when I found the time, I watched Dead Snow, hoping it was as good as Ryan had described it. First things first, he failed to mention that this movie was in Norwegian. There were subtitles, which aren't that bad, but still...kind of a big detail to leave out, right? Well the movie wasn't very good, wasn't bad, but definitely wasn't good. I did, however, enjoy the final fight scene between the last three survivors and a TON of Nazi zombies. I'll save you the description, here is a the final scene:

WARNING: If you don't like seeing blood, don't watch this, but since your already in this class, I'm guessing it doesn't bother you that much. Just thought I'd warn ya, it's a bloodbath...



Awesome, right?! As a member of the Defense Council in the Meir Survivors, this is exactly how I imagine my last stand going, except for the whole my friend getting stabbed repeatedly and then getting his limbs torn off detail. When it comes down to it like it did here, your going to either turn and run in the opposite direction or stand and fight with everything you've got. Me, I'd fight it out to the death like these guys did. If your gonna go down, do it in style.

As a side note, I didn't do a very good job surviving in Can You Survive A Zombie Apocalypse? Maybe I need to come at my apocalypse survival strategy from a better angle...

   Perhaps one of the most chilling and memorable moments (not to mention downright awesome) in George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the point at which Helen (wife to Harry and mother to Karen), having just narrowly escaped being pulled through a farmhouse window and eaten by zombies, stumbles down into the cellar to find the reanimated corpse of her recently-deceased daughter feasting upon her father, Harry (who -- let's face it -- we have all been wishing a gruesome death upon since his first five minutes in the film). Karen, who arrived at the farmhouse alongside her parents, the Coopers, with a previously sustained zombie bite, has spent almost the entirety of the movie down in the cellar in a more or less comatose state. While Helen and Harry were fairly adamant early on about having at least one of them by her side throughout the night, things upstairs get a little...well, hectic. Attentions and energies were needed elsewhere. The need for information eventually draws them both upstairs. And while Judy (another farmhouse refugee) kindly offers to stand guard for a time so that the Mr. and Mrs. Cooper can see what's happening on the radio and television, sooner or later little Karen is left all alone in the cellar. It is at this point that Karen, the incarnation of that sacred figure of the Child, dies. Following the altercation between Harry and Ben after the plan to fuel the truck goes up in flames (literally), Harry, having just sustained a gunshot wound from Ben, stumbles down the cellar stairs and collapses next to his daughter Karen's corpse, she finally having died from what we presume to be some kind of infection. The camera then cuts to the mayhem upstairs, where zombies have begun to break through the boards on the windows and doors. Barely evading becoming food for the legion of living dead whose arms we see protruding through the gaps in the houses fortifications, Helen makes a break for the cellar only to be confronted with the deliciously eerie and abject sight of her daughter mauling Harry's corpse. In a move rather out of the ordinary for a zombie, young Karen wastes no time in making short work of her mother with a gardening spade.
       
             Zombified Karen Cooper                                     Hungry freaks, Daddy

                                                            Mommy, I'm... HUNGRY.

I believe it is significant that it is the close-up image of Karen's face as she lurches towards her mother with the spade that has served as the signifying image of the film, having effectively functioned as the icon of the original Night since its release in October of 1968. For what I see in this iconic image of the undead child is not so much a demand as an accusation--less the typical "braaaaaaiinnns" than "how could you have forgotten (to look out for) me" (so now I'm going to eat your brains). In his book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman introduces the notion of the (capital C) Child as a way of thinking about contemporary politics and ideology and their recapitulation of heteronormativity. For Edelman, the vast majority of our social configurations, political strategies, and ideologies can be aligned with what he identifies as "reproductive futurism." At its core, the idea of reproductive futurism turns around the basic idea that, without reproduction, there is no future. Within this framework, the capital C Child figures centrally insofar as it serves as the imaginary figure around which the entire constellation of reproductive futurism is structured and in whose name countless subjects can be mobilized. For of course, when we say that "there is no future without reproduction," what we are really saying is that, without reproduction, there is no future for humanity. The future, the logic goes, must be protected for the Child; we must do all we can to protect the Child, to ensure that the Child, as subject of the future, can thrive. Within the logic of reproductive futurism, the Child, Edelman writes, "remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention" (3) insofar as it is the Child who is the subject of that future which we cannot bear to imagine never coming to fruition. It is the Child, we imagine, who will at long last -- in a properly Lacanian fashion -- be able to enjoy. The fantasmatic figure of the Child enables us to imagine a world in which things really will be better tomorrow, where the meaning -- my meaning, my society's meaning, my life's meaning --always deferred in the present, might actually be realized.

Leaving the queer politics elaborated in Edelman's polemic text aside, I believe this idea of the Child as subject of the future is a compelling one, particularly when put to use in thinking about zombie narratives. While earlier texts like White Zombie (1932), largely considered to be the first feature-length zombie film, and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) both implicitly pit the zombie threat as a threat to reproductive family futurity -- insofar as the zombies in either film (and their masters) stand in the way of the happy heterosexual marriage and the child whom we may safely assume, given the time period, would (or at least "ought to") come out of it -- beginning with Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the idea of the future begins to emerge as an increasingly more pressing concern in the zombie infested universe. While in Night the concern seems to be for a more immediate future -- whether or not they will indeed survive the night -- films like Romero's follow up feature, Dawn of the Dead (1978), along with 1985's Day of the Dead, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), and AMC's Walking Dead series all delve more and more into the question of a long-term future. What will happen to humanity, they ask, in lieu of the zombie apocalypse?

Night seems to offer little hope in the way of reproductive futurism: the haunting face of an undead Karen carrying with it all the force of a return of the repressed, the inevitable return of the traumatic Real let loose in her zombified gaze. All of the real and potential couples we are presented with in the film are killed or infected by its conclusion, enacting a total destruction of the family in the Coopers and the foreclosure of any possibility of future family formations in Ben and Barbara and Tom and Judy. (It is worth noting alongside these observations that while we are made aware of other survivors in the world within the film -- posses of men roaming the countryside, killing off the living dead -- it seems significant that there is no mention of any female survivors; they are conspicuously absent from the film following the deaths of Helen and Barbara). In Dawn, we learn that Francine, the sole female survivor in the film, is carrying a child. Yet in many ways the film seems similarly pessimistic about the future and the future that (presumably Roger) and Francine's child would inherit. The fact that an abortion is even suggested to her as a viable option -- one which she indeed appears to take into serious consideration -- seems telling. While no decisive answer is ever reached, it seems safe to assume  that, despite her excessive smoking throughout the film, she is still with child as she and Peter fly away from the zombie-infested mall with little idea of where they are going or what the future has in store. In this regard, the film ends on a decidedly ambiguous note.

What is crucial for us to remember here is that this notion of reproductive futurity as invoked by Edelman as a political strategy; it is a way of organizing ourselves and our societies. Such a posture, he argues, uses the imagined figure of the Child as subject of the future in such a way that it effectively (re)structures the field of the political -- it renders any alternative to reproductive futurism unthinkable, misanthropic, anti-human. What I believe Edelman's critique of reproductive futurism is aiming at (or at least what I get out of it) is a critique of this mandate implicit in reproductive futurist politics, the imperative to carry on the human line and thereby sustain the fantasy of the Child as subject who is to realize our always-already deferred meaning. Is the ultimate good to simply continue "investing" in the future in the form of the Child (both real and imagined)? Or is there a more ethical attitude we might take towards reproduction? There is perhaps no better (and more disturbing) depiction of the obscene character of the mandates of reproductive futurity than in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, in which the ostensibly safe and protected space of the military compound is revealed in fact to be a horrific, nightmarish chauvinist space in which a kind of reproductive futuristic marshal law has been implemented with the coming of the Jim, Selena, and Hannah. In this perverse twist on the seemingly endless repetitions of reproductive futurism in film, rather than merely alluding to the promise of reproduction and the continuation of the family (and consequently humanity) vis-à-vis the union of the (fertile, heterosexual) couple, the bones of the matter here are laid bare: there is no happy embrace, no allusion, no ambiguity. Instead, what we are confronted with in the military compound in 28 Days Later is the obscene nature of the reproductive imperative, in which any kind of ethical concerns are subsumed to the mandates of reproduction. (The irony here, of course, being that by the film's conclusion we see precisely the kind of reproductive futuristic narrative tendencies from which it appeared we had escaped, symbolically solidified in the now-domesticated mother-father-daughter triad pictured in the final scene. Everything about it seeming to suggest that this is, indeed, the New Family.)

All of this is to bring up what I feel is a most compelling point raised in zombie fiction, one that frequently seems to be overlooked in discussions of the zombie. As a zombie (which indeed I am), I eat. All counter-arguments aside, this point seems to be something that everyone can agree upon. If food is not my only desire, it is at least my primary and most pressing need. Yet in eating, whether we can ascribe intentionality to it or not, I reproduce. At least, in a matter of speaking. Returning to the idea of zombies as signifying the horrors of a meaningless existence, we might note the way in which "breeding" or spreading the zombie population (even if it is unintentional) is inextricably bound up with the horrors of the ostensibly meaningless nature of the zombie's plight. While the zombie narrative frequently present us with a state of crisis in which the logic of reproductive futurism may indeed seem necessary, essential even, zombie scenarios also present us with an opportunity to rethink and reflect upon a politics centered around the unquestionable 'good' (or presumed eventual goodness) of the future and what it has in store. For as many zombie narratives have asked: who would want to inherit a world like this? Far from suggesting that all the survivors in these texts should simply give up, abandon hope in face of the pessimistic realization that, indeed, the future may not be better tomorrow, what I am suggesting is that the blind progenation of the zombie population in texts like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later presents us with a space in which we might begin to question or confront the tremendous implications of trying to bring new (human) life into such a world.

For Tuesday's class, as threatened, here is Heather Albano and Richard Jackson's game Choice of Zombies (playable online or on Android or iOS.

As with the CYOAs, play through this one at least two or three times to get a sense for the different paths and endings. Also, pay attention to the stats system and how that changes the experience from the print books.

Happy zombie apocalypse surviving!

A plethora of categories exist for the classification of undead abominations: infected, reanimated, slow & durable, fast & fragile, lone roaming, mobile horde- the list continues. They pose a variety of threats, from being the laughable subject of memes, to being relatively sinister and deadly.

The threat isn't so pressing if your zombie is a turn-based RPG zombie. In such circumstances, a Phoenix Down or Curaga is enough to neutralize the threat, as your turn undoubtedly comes first (unless your didn't raise your speed stat). Even if your characters are lazy and out of shape and they get turned into zombies, all hope is not lost. Your coup in the fantasy world can be revived from their undead status with a simple OTC med sold at every local vendor- the Holy Water. It seems the zombie apocalypse is even less likely in most RPGs than it is in the real world.

Consider a threat that is more immediate than the outdated ATB gauge zombie from the Final Fantasy series. Instead, you're facing an early Resident Evil 4 townie, at some undisclosed village in Spain, so recently exposed that the T-virus is still relatively undetectable (as is the Spanish). A well-aimed round from your handgun is sufficient to eliminate one target. But a single target is so rarely the case in a zombie apocalypse. Now there's a great shift in the locus of the threat; one mindless roamer with a pitchfork is much less intimidating than twenty (with pitchforks and torches!). Defeating this zombie horde requires something more along the lines of a shotgun or rocket launcher.

There are still many greater threats than the townie. Perhaps the most fearsome undead presence, even moreso than the nasties encountered in Left 4 Dead or Dead Space, is the level sixty Forsaken rogue. Stealth, evasiveness, speed, poison, and daggers, would be to name just a few of its combat utilities. The most valuable of its deadly traits, however, is ageny- the ability to reason. A veteran rogue's exemplary micro skills will make your death inevitable. The enemy can reason and ensure your demise by choosing to attack when the greatest opportunity presents itself. Regardless of your armor class, attack speed, or spell power, surviving a one-on-one encounter with any number of Forsaken rogues is impossible. The only chance to escape the ambush depends upon talented and reliable guild mates.

Fortunately, if your guild mates are mouse clickers and keyboard turners who can't be depended upon for challenging encounters, Forsaken don't turn you into a zombie when they kill you. Instead, you get to suffer the comparably horrifying and significantly more frustrating experience of being ganked. MMO gamers face the most terrifying form of zombie threat that is recognized.

This here class is going to be quite beneficial for me when the zombie apocalypse happens. Now you laugh, and you joke, but mutation is a part of Earth's evolution and what's to say that a real life outbreak isn't possible. Crazy? I'm not crazy. I'm a realist, who imagined that the preparation and research I will do here will be of the utmost importance when the brain munchers come for us all. Hopefully, I will be able to learn some valuable lessons along the way and keep my brains right where they should be.


I would assume that all of us had some prior knowledge about zombies coming in to this course. I mean their presence and popularity are at an all time high. To be a zombie right now is like being a combination of Miles Davis and James Dean, they are about as cool as it gets. This can be seen with the overwhelming popularity of AMC's The Walking Dead, or many other mainstream media outlets including film and literature. I thought I knew quite a bit coming in, or at least the essential bits.

Five Things I Knew About Zombies Coming in:
1. Kill the brain, kill the zombie.
-Every zombie tale has this same theme. The only way to kill the carnivorous walking dead is to smash their brain till it no longer lusts for human flesh. Simple enough...
2.Guns are good, but not great.
-Knowing how to shoot a gun is helpful because it is a great way to kill a zombie, but ammo always seems to run out at the worst possible time...
3.Cities are bad, wilderness is good.
-More people = More Zombies = More likely to get eaten.
4. Someone, if not everyone, you love is going to die.
-While quite depressing, it is something that we will have to deal with during an apocalypse.
5. You clothes and shoes are going to be tarnished.
-If you are going to survive, you are going to have to get dirty. Whether it's blood and guts or dirt and sweat, don't think you're coming out of this looking like you're ready to go to prom. While this seems obvious I thought it was a good time to lighten the mood and also I realized I only knew four things coming in but I didn't want to change my heading.


Not really an extensive list but one that I thought could get me through the first couple days without being bitten. Already I feel like this class has given me some helpful tips. I read Zombopocalypse Now and now I feel tested, I feel more practiced and I feel like it is a good thing I took this course. Although humorous, this pick your own adventure story had me dying more often than surviving. I'm not sure whether it was due to my poor decision making skills or that the book has more dead endings (pun intended) than happy ones. I would say I tried about 20 different combinations and I am ashamed to say I perished in all but 2 of them.They were just disastrous results and it made me feel like I had a lot to learn. I realize I'm not a stuffed pink rabbit that can't tell that his date is a zombie, but this literature can still prove helpful.

Things I learned from Zombopocalypse: 
1. Don't go all Rambo on a heard of zombies just because you have a gun.
-Thinking you can take on the whole zombie population with a hunting rifle is an awful idea. You have to ignore the fact that they drew first blood and try to stay alive.
2. It is almost always better to have numbers on your side.
-As useless as someone may seem, another human can most always prove helpful. At the very least they can distract zombies with their "tasty" flesh as you make a run for it. Yes, I realize that was quite morbid but you have to have the...
3. Will to live.
-You aren't going to make it if you aren't prepared to make the calculated decisions that propel achievement.
4. You can still maintain some sense of humanity.
-I found that most of the times that I said "eff it" to other characters in the story I ended up meeting my demise. I'm sure this was something the author wanted to convey because every time I made inherently selfish decisions I paid the price. I guess if you're a jerk in a zombie apocalypse, you're going to die like a jerk in a zombie apocalypse.

I learned four things, which is clearly not as pretty a number as five, but it's what I took from the story and I feel their is no need to fudge another token of learning.

We also looked at the first episode of The Walking Dead, which has enlightened me quite a bit. In fact I re-watched the whole first season for purely academic purposes. There is so much to learn from Rick Grimes and the gang. Some things went along with similar themes from the adventures of the stuffed rabbit, like maintaining our humanity and strength in numbers, but others were new to me and I feel they would hold some weight if the worst were to happen.


The Walking Dead and Me:
1. Comas can be a good thing.
-Rick was in a coma and a well placed gurney was all that was necessary to protect him. Dude didn't even have to be awake to survive
2. Riding a bike in a hospital gown is going to look funny no matter how dramatic the situation is
-I laughed even though the music was tense and their were dead bodies everywhere.
3. Zombies eat animals too.
-I had always wondered if it was only humans they desired or all living things. After I watched a group of zombies rip apart a horse I know for sure.

4. Stock up on deodorant
-Showers are going to be hard to come by so deodorant, non-scented of course, will be essential at least for me. Even though I will be fighting for my life, I don't want to be doing it while smelling like a heathen.

There have been so many lessons learned already and I'm sure as we dive deeper into the subject I will become more educated and more prepared for what seems like a plausible future. 

The literature (and film) that we’ve read and seen so far all explore issues of human morality. It’s like Robert Kirkman has said, “Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society ...” Simply put, the Zombie apocalypse scenario rips our ideas about what it means to be a “good person” or indeed, what it means to be a person at all, to pieces. This is, in large part, what I find so fascinating about the zombie genre: it forces you to reflect on your own humanity, and further, what being human means.

These are questions that struck when I began watching The Walking Dead. It seems clear that the world into which Rick and his cohorts are thrust is not one in which it is easy, nor is it generally smart to uphold the kind of modern values that Western society usually praises. Values such as empathy, compassion and selflessness - arguably the best of humanity - seem, in a zombie apocalypse scenario, more likely to get you, and often times those around you, killed. This leaves us with a disconcerting truth – that characters who readily sacrifice these values, or perhaps never had them to begin with, seem almost to thrive in this “brave new world,” maybe even more-so than they did in their old lives. In a way, the zombie apocalypse creates conditions under which two kinds of monsters exist: the zombies, of course, but also one’s fellow humans. Those fellow humans, who are possessors of profound agency as the Derksen and Hick article put it, are often more threatening, and more deadly than the zombies themselves.

In all of the material we’ve reviewed thus far, from Spoiler, The Walking Dead, to Can You Survive morality becomes a precarious balancing act. Rick, for instance, is constantly making difficult decisions which often pit his own family and group against other humans who may, or may not be, a threat. In Spoiler the assembled team of police and the medical examiner, must make a decision about whether or not to essentially incinerate an entire family. Similarly, In Can You Survive, we are periodically asked to make moral decisions, such as whether or not to be proactive and save a stranger’s life even if it jeopardizes our own, whether or not to kill a fellow human being before they’ve “turned,” etc. And, spoiler alert, most of the time, if you choose to play the hero, you die.

Which raises the question: what is the point of morality if, when push comes to shove, saving someone means potentially getting your intestines eaten out of your still-living flesh, only to eventually become one of the very beasts that you fear? I mean… shit, that’s pretty bad.

It’s obvious that this ongoing internal conflict takes its toll. In Can You Survive, for instance, a Marine who is forced to kill his commander and his friends becomes a virtual killing machine, his sanity jeopardized by the weight of what he has had to do to survive. The changing, or rather, disintegrating morality of society is also illustrated in subtler details as well, such as during a scene on packed subway: “On board, people wave their phones around, trying to get a signal. A pregnant woman cries in the corner. No one offers her a seat” (Brallier, 9). Similarly, the contrast between the Rick we see in the first episode of The Walking Dead and the Rick of the more recent episodes is staggering. In Spoiler, it’s clear from the tone of the film, and the attitudes of the police and the main character towards the decision they are about to make that this weighs heavily on them. The entire film is quite dark, almost blue-tinted – the music is somber rather than the kind of rile-rousing, dramatic drums one expects to hear in a “zombie flick.”

But the alternative to the weight of maintaining morality in a zombie apocalypse scenario is to become one of the monsters – to resemble in some ways, the zombies more than a decent human being – single-minded. We see this, too, in the literature and film of the genre. In Can You Survive, for instance, we often run across characters whose morality seems to have faded, or at times, withered completely away. Sometimes we are even asked to make a choice about whether or not to stop them. I won’t spoil The Walking Dead for anyone, but similarly, there are characters who appear to walk the line between monster and man – apparently unable to cope with the gravity of the situation in any other way.

So...do desperate times really call for desperate measures? Does a situation like that of Can You Survive, or The Walking Dead, or Spoiler really mean we must put some of our humanity away for safe-keeping? Does survival in a zombie apocalypse scenario recommend or even require a new, or perhaps revised, moral code? These are all questions, that as someone whose role within the community is as part of a “defense squadron,” I feel are important to think about. Those who patrol and defend the community are quite literally on the front lines, and can expect to face a lot of conflict from both the zombie horde and not-so-nice humans. For me, it’s important to have a strong sense of moral “boundaries” if you like, so that you neither become like the monsters you’re fighting, nor do you fail to act with compassion when it is necessary.