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 assemble the ruling counsel. What do we do? No one is immune to the icy grasp of undeath. Not

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

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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.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again, I am not fast, I’m not strong and I have no hand-eye coordination to speak of. This being said, the idea of me wielding a firearm is laughable. Basically a Zombie apocalypse would be the end of me. Looking on the bright side, I do always look behind me so at least I know that the sneaky rogue zombie won’t kill me… it will be the rest of them

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.  

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

   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

Let's throw it back for a minute or two.  You're sitting with a group of your friends at recess back in the good old days of nap time and Saturday morning cartoons when one of the young tykes next to you suggests that the group should pass the time with a rousing game of tag.  Without hesitation you hear a booming round of "NOT IT"s and to your utter disappointment, as you

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 survi

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the Zombie is the emotional pain it engenders in those it encounters.  Two examples that stuck me were both from The Walking Dead. These would be the wife and mother encountered in the first episode, as well as the little girl met at the abandoned gas station.  The special sort of fear that zombies instill in the living is also interesting,

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,

As an English minor I needed to fulfill 100 level classes and when I saw Z is for Zombies, I thought it was a good way to fulfill that requirement and also take a class that was extremely unique. Academia is so often molded by what is accepted and expected and a course on Zombies isn’t either of those things and is rare to find.  With that said, a class on Zombies allows us to look

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.

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

I have encountered zombies in films, such as Wild Zero (1999), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Død snø (Dead Snow, 2009), and, of course, the franchise of The Evil Dead (1981, 1987, 1992, and we'll pretend that the 2013 one doesn't really exist for the sake of everyone's happiness).  I have also run into, controlled, and slain many zombies in video games, such as in Silent Hill, Diablo