I watch all the zombie shit.
The serious ones about frailties of decency and infrastructure. The funny ones about class complacency and failing to escape. The ones meant to make you feel trapped enough to feel alive and free enough to want to kill. The movies, the series, the games, the books: all of it. I look at it all, staring deadpan at the screen.
Why?
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The first movie I picked to rent was Night of the Living Dead.
I pointed at the tape encased in hard plastic, face-out with forty other movies on thin metal racks in a long narrow corridor hidden behind the pharmacy in the Albertson's.
I was five.
My mom grabbed the tape off the shelf. She paid for us to take it home. We watched it that night. I was horribly stimulated by its slow procession of bodies. They'd consume me; I knew it.
I had nightmares for weeks.
I wanted more.
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The first time I thought methodically about why I want stuff, I was in a Buddhist freakout. Every day I wanted to walk out of my life and into a Zen monastery but I kept driving around, playing poker, and trying to get laid.
I was 16. My years-long love for a girl had evaporated, with me breaking up with her on the phone in a bad way. Being with myself was intolerable, so I sunk into the internet. I read about Zen. I thought about the internet as a drug peddled to people ill with an addiction to the promise of being not what you really are. I thought this while Photoshopping pictures of myself then posting them to MySpace. Eventually I started sitting and walking while meditating. In bits and pieces, flashes and whispers, I learned the world wasn't about me because I wasn't about me. I wasn't about anything. Yet I lived.
I stopped meditating. A spiritual coward, I returned to jobs' crude wages.
I kept watching the zombie shit. I loved Shaun of the Dead, watching it three times in theaters. I loved seeing tropes ratified with jokes. I loved the prospect of being a normal sad person who's also a hero. I watched Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and smiled snidely at mall shopper bodies with mall cop souls. The movie said that getting out was going nowhere, which felt correct.
I worked, fucked, worried. Time shambled on.
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The first zombie thing my wife and I watched together was 28 Days Later. It's about people learning to trust. Its style is grainy, metallic, quick like a constant montage; it fits a world wherein love requires violence. It's a miserable movie—constantly stressful—punctuated with frivolous joys like shopping without money or driving without laws. The joy is shown in commercials' lingo. And importantly, its zombies are fast (a revelation).
It took us so long to see zombies less like hulks and more like rabid dogs. Watching the movie made me miss the the plodding and inevitable terror promised by zombies past. When death looks more like mountain lions than mangled moms, what might happen to this fear—my fear—which I so frequently sought to feel?
With 28 Days Later and its imitators, zombie shit began to pull us in with panic, not dread. Gone were the dead who slowly and insistently abraded the ground of your comforts. Here were acrid nights, angry bellows, and shadows moving faster than you. 28 Days Later made zombies vectors of rage, a guerrilla army, one strong-limbed example of the animal chaos our global order parades as. This movie's zombies wreck shit and infect, unbounded; they represent no force or interest, yet are products of a zeal for technology and a reaction against it. Whereas George Romero's zombies are slow thudding beef-eaters, a mass rolling boulder-like against whoever dares living amid supremacies. In the fast movie, one drop of blood from a bird ruins the family; viruses use you and strangers hate you. In the slow movie, a little girl eating her father is the movie's paramount scare; the family is shown to be temporary, weak, a product of easily-dismissed taboos—like calling someone a citizen who can take it upon themselves to shoot you.
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Years later, The Walking Dead revived my interest.
We watched a few seasons, jumping ship when a town run by theater kids got featured. (As former actors, that was too cringe.) I admired how the series showed so patiently how quickly a dude could come to love to murder. Killing in the name of preserving life is good business; I'm not surprised the show which shows that is a big success. I learned to love Rick's big ugly cop heart and the predictable depravities of edgelord communes.
I also appreciated the rural loneliness the program detailed. That soft hot light of Georgia's forests made all buildings look already gone, abandoned even if they were full of inhabitants. I liked the show's corny Villain of the Month plots. Of course the show like most shows fell into Who's Fucking Whom, that pattern from rooms full of well-paid writers who're just running out of ideas. That's okay. They built a slow-zombie world, and the pace of that world implies the moral and social drudgery of life lived at home.
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Since then I've looked here and there at new stuff in the zombie genre. The Last of Us 1 & 2 were gorgeous kinetic puzzles animated by the useless because long-and-often answered question, "But what if violence has consequences?" Army of the Dead was a heist movie with fat budgets for set dressing and fake guns. Rec, the Spanish film, puzzles out contagion in old European hierarchies. The Dead Don't Die feels like a birthday party thrown for friends. Zombieland is big-budget weaponized neurotic energy. Train to Busan's a melodrama held together by the shockingly synchronous mix of horror and comedy that South Korean directors do so well. The best among them was Black Summer, a sparse, geometrical, and pitiless look at the constant motion required of not dying. Each episode feels like a lean-budget recreation of Children of Men, or like Gaspar Noé's dizzying camerawork (but painfully sober). The show's more choreography than narrative. It really works.
There are others whose details I've forgotten. Their prosthetics and splatters likely look identical. I don't need to remember them.
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So why do I watch zombie shit? Play it, read it, seek it out? What does it do to me, this relentless depiction of the return of the dead? Why do I care? Or: do I care at all?
The zombie story develops a historically masculine thus dead-end premise. It shows what people do when they think they're responsible only for their continuing to exist. This is why so many zombie stories rely on The Dad as the burdened protagonist: the dad feels the world is worthwhile only if it protects his child, and so his continuance. A dad, particularly a middle-class American dad, precisely represents this selfish future. The United States of America precisely represents this selfish future. Zombie stories—which show futures defined by greed and paranoid territorialism—are prolific in the USA for this reason; we're trying to show ourselves to ourselves. Zombie stories model catastrophized futures, which makes them our arch-genre.
A dead-end premise fits a dead-end mind, and I often have one. Capitalism's a prison whose only escape seems to be sucking up to the warden. Or exiting dead after a quick trip to the infirmary. Breaking out is nearly unimaginable. We don't have any practice imagining it. Plus painkillers are on tap and every cell's got a huge TV. So I watch zombie stories to relate to the feeling of being trapped in a barren place. As a sick person in the 21st century, I live daily the struggle of trying not to die in the hands of greedy hordes: extortionists called health insurance companies, salesmen called legislators, landlords who'd rather shit rise up through drains than fix their old pipes bleeding underground. Land of the free, home of the brave: a threshing floor. I feel in my bones the paucity of imagination which moves through zombie stories.
Zombie shit also titillates with the fantasy that violence is shelter. This is the not-so-secret dream of preppers who've loaded up on ammo: they crave the permission to use it. That permission looks like cars with doors hanging listless on their hinges, shops with blown-out windows, and ominously unlocked front doors. Preppers love a good riot because it portends a future in which they'll feel at home in a wasteland. They want to fill their lives with meaning and their apocalypses with blood. Making one's own justice with simple ingredients like the will to live and automatic firepower is a fantasy about control. And neither the Amazon Prime-wielding prepper nor the co-op-organizing anarchist have control. Our lives are run by massive far-away forces, despite us thinking our home-economic struggles influence us the most. Imagining that my life could narrow to finding canned beans and a door that locks is soothing, because fulfilling real needs is soothing. The zombie story strips the world of capitalism's false needs. Zombie stories give us this simple video game mission: find gun; protect space; make bad guys disappear. And there's no one around to judge. The extent to which this morality mirrors our own measures how fucked we are.
Lawlessness is a worthwhile fantasy, though, because laws are dumb illusions; they're the dogma of a kid’s tantrum. What zombie stories' empty streets and deathly crowds imply, though, is that laws will always be replaced by human nature. The hungry human will kill their neighbor; the stolid type will break down. In the face of zombies' infinite hunger, in our cloistered hopelessness, we'll become what we always were and always will be: uncaring animals. This is a cynical premise. Lucky for us it's bullshit. Humans don't have a nature; we're biologically babies. Barely a species, we're enigmas to ourselves. This is a good thing. Our newness begets promise. Yet most narratives imply that we can't be different from what we've been. Zombie stories perpetuate this myth, this fatalism. I watch them because in my darker hours I believe this enemy rumor. Zombie shit lets me look at my own hopelessness through a cartoonish lens of torn tendons and consumerist decay. The world collapses to smart headshots. "Destroy the brain." Every imperative an invitation to no longer need to be told.
I watch zombie shit to imagine a future based on the present. Zombie stories imagine a near future premised on what we've got to work with: tools designed to break, atomized people with few communities, militaries only good at blowing stuff up. Zombie stories are sincere extrapolations of the present, and this sincerity is rare. These stories offer us a clearer and more precise picture of the next century than any politician has offered. Climate crises will kill more people than all the zombie movies' CGI farms could render; we're already in the part where the clueless news anchors tell us to stay inside, as if that's a viable longterm strategy. The fact of impending mass death is untouchable by any political establishment, because any practical (that is: effectual) response would be revolutionary.
Yet zombie stories evince two kinds of revival. The first is the revival of chosen bonds: of kin by commitment, not blood. Even in these cannibalistic futures, the loners who hole up are regarded as crazy, dangerous, too weird for their own good. Even in total infrastructural and political collapse, the sense remains that people should be with other people. In zombie stories these bonds are often simply necessary (it helps to keep the strong around), but these stories are also known for their characters attempting to protect the vulnerable. Kids, the old parents across town whose phones are down, meager nerds who can't do a single life-or-death pull-up, pregnant women, diabetics. The obvious lesson here is that life clings to life in a sea of death. This, the zombie stories tell us, is the basic human condition. Zombie stories show us people choosing freely to be with others, regardless of the supposedly measurable worth of another human being. They show us people suffering and risking death to help each other. This is a revival of choice, of ends, among the direst options and most desperate means.
Zombie stories' second revival is the obvious one: it is simply that the dead still live. One needn't be a Christian to know this. Memories bring the dead to our door again: the lingering sadness of a friend's sudden absence, the full-body sensation of a lost lover's smell, the inherited phrase or tic picked up from a departed brother. Sometimes we do the emotional equivalent of hammering 2x4's across the doorframe, barring those memories from entering our lives. Sometimes we hide from the dead. Other times we hear that knock and swing the door wide, wanting that old love or frustration or fellow-feeling to shape our days again. Whether or not the knock comes, we know it may. The dead don't die. Perhaps because we won't let them.
The zombie story, then, splays the fact of memory across the surface of the earth. The zombie embodies nostalgia, with all its hunger and teeth. The zombie is the past rising up from the earth to confront and trap the living. To hew us in to our ugly chosen present. We can either confront the past by becoming numb to it ("You have to destroy the head.") or by letting it overcome us. The third way—to exist peaceably with our pasts—is elided in most zombie stories. Even in long stories like The Walking Dead people establish old routines that stand in for meaning; eventually this performance melts away in the face of the wide-awake thrill of fight-or-flight. The zombie story, then, is a caution against an easy relationship with memory. The zombie story wants us to always be aware of the burdens of the past, because this vigilance keeps alive the possibility of real commitments. That is: the possibility of a future.
And I watch zombie stories to feel alone. In these tales you watch the slow struggle to escape what chases you, knowing and feeling the depth of your isolation. You know yourself because you know your screaming desire to live. Even the folks in these stories who die by their own hands most often die with their loved ones beside them, in touch or in mind—or to save others from their destructiveness. Zombie stories illuminate life's yearning for another gulp of air, another dark room, another scrap of scrounged food—for whatever will tether it to shared ground. Even if someone were the last person on Earth with a pulse, we can imagine them looking for the next safe place. The zombie story implicates us in this strange, private, and ultimately mysterious commitment to life. I watch zombie shit to feel myself feeling how to be alone—and to practice being okay in that feeling.
Lastly, I watch and read and play zombie stories because zombies ate my neighbors. I mean that zombies eat my conception of my neighbors as people just as alive—as full of profuse and contrary desires—as me. Being surrounded by zombies is the feeling in which unfeeling people self-entomb; as an American it's more and more fashionable to believe those around you aren't real, aren't legitimate. Because if this is true you can regard their wishes as nonexistent. They, the others, simply stumble around you, press towards you, and cramp your ability to move. Neighbors believed to be zombies have a scary need to end your life by turning you into grist for their living.
I'd like to imagine I don't think of my neighbors this way, but I do. More often than I'd like to admit—at least in my tireder hours. In this way the zombie story represents those cravings which fit me so neatly into the patterns established by fascist institutions. I watch zombie shit to be an unthinking part of the crowd of the angry and disenchanted. In this way I can walk slowly and unceasingly away from the central truth of my life: that need and love are inseparable.
“You're coming to get you, Barbara.”
