Everybody's Dead Except Me

On loving zombie stories

I watch all the zombie shit. The serious ones about the collapse of civilization. The funny ones about class relations. The movies, the series, the games: all of it.

I stare at it all, consuming.

---

When I think about zombie stories, I think about desire.

The first movie I picked to rent was Night of the Living Dead. I was a five-year old pointing at a black monolith encased in hard plastic. It was surrounded by dozens of other movies, rows and rows of them on thin metal racks in a long corridor behind the pharmacy in a grocery store. (Tombstones.) My mom rented the movie and we watched it that night. I was horribly stimulated. Its slow procession of gray bodies would consume me; I knew it. I had zombie-inspired nightmares for years. I didn't know why, but I wanted more.

It took me eleven more years to think seriously about why I wanted stuff. I was in the midst of a teen Buddhist freakout. Every day I fantasized about walking out of my middle-class life and joining a Zen monastery. Being alone with myself was intolerable, so I sunk into the muck of others: I used the internet. I read about Zen on Wikipedia. I Photoshopped pictures of myself with Buddhist phrases and posted them on MySpace. Each day I tried to construct a self worthy of getting laid. Eventually, I actually tried meditating. I liked it. I kept doing it. In flashes and whispers, I learned the world wasn't about me—because not even I was about me. A year later I stopped meditating. A spiritual coward, I returned to craving.

And I returned to zombie shit. I particularly loved Shaun of the Dead and the Dawn of the Dead remake, each cynical and silly. The former said you can be a sad hero; the latter that mall shopper bodies have mall cop souls. Both said that getting out was going nowhere, which felt correct. Both fed teen me as I worked, fucked (finally), and worried. Time shambled on.

While working, I met the person I love most. Early in our relationship, we watched 28 Days Later. Appropriately, the movie is about learning how to trust. Though in its world, love requires violence. The movie's constant stress is punctuated with anarchic joys like shopping without money or driving without laws. Like young romance, the movie's grammar is often that of the commercial and music video. We watched it and clung to each other. 28 Days Later began to show me how horror foments desire.

But beyond its place in our early mythology, 28 Days Later is important to the zombie mythos at large. Why? Because its zombies are fast. I don't know why it took us so long to see zombies like rabid dogs, but cf. wheels on a suitcase. 28 Days Later invites us to see that plodding, inevitable scares are dumb and gentle; the movie wants us to think the horrors of the past outmoded. With 28 Days Later and its imitators, zombie shit began to rely more on panic than dread. Gone were the armies abrading away the foundation of your comfort. Here were shadows moving faster than you. 28 Days Later made zombies vectors of rage (a sound political prediction). They wreck shit and infect, rending the global order. Romero's zombies are slow-rolling beef-eaters; Boyle's are fast like a cell signal. In the old slow movie, the family and society are intact yet cannibalistic; in the new fast movie, you cling to your chosen few and fend off faceless hate. (How romantic!) Like love over time, the form of zombie stories had mutated. Domestic duties took over and I left zombie shit in the dust.

Years later, yearning for good TV, The Walking Dead revived my interest in the form. We watched and watched, its episodes endless. I admired the show for detailing the peculiar gravity of murder; The Walking Dead relentlessly showed how anybody can come to love solving problems with a gun. I loved and hated Rick's ugly cop heart and the predictable depravities of edgelord communes. But none of these qualities were particularly new. The Walking Dead was unique in how it depicted rural loneliness. Georgia's soft hot light made its buildings look already gone, abandoned to the trees and kudzu and evening’s amber. Like a circumspect Southerner, the show was best when quiet. The Walking Dead depicts the drudgery of making and mending one's home. As responsibilities clawed at my door, the show felt gratifying.

Since then I've watched many bits of zombie shit. The Last of Us games and TV series are a billion dollar testament to the immortality of dumb questions (“But what if violence was bad?”). Army of the Dead is a heist movie in a cheap mask. Rec, the Spanish film, applies contagion to old hierarchies. The Dead Don't Die is a birthday party. Zombieland is bloody twee. Train To Busan melds horror and comedy better than most, a South Korean specialty. But the best among them is Black Summer, a sparse, geometrical, and pitiless series about the constant motion required of not dying. Each episode is like a lean-budget recreation of Children of Men's best sequences. Black Summer is more choreography than narrative. It's brutal and clear, like a boxing match's inaugural punch. It was—and is—nearly perfect.

Now I keep my eyes open for new zombie stories, scanning the horizon for bodies. I am vigilant.

---

Why do I watch all the zombie shit? What does it do to me? Why do I care?

The zombie story is based on a dead-end premise. The premise goes like this: by default, people are bad. That's Hobbesian bullshit disproven by anthropology and arithmetic. But this false premise is necessary for the zombie story to function. If we learned to be our best selves in apocalypse, the threat of death would lose its drama. For the zombie story to work, we must fend off greed and territorialism as much as the corpses at the door.

Zombie stories build on this premise a few different ways. Every zombie story is animated by a particular fantasy of lawlessness. In this fantasy's terms, when laws lose their force, we become once more uncaring animals. Luckily, that's bullshit. Our species is a baby on the timescale of biology. We're still enigmas to ourselves, and that rules. But this pessimistic fantasy of lawlessness serves two vital functions: it supports the kinetic structure of horror (hunt vs. hide, run vs. shelter), and it soothes us. It soothes us by presenting a simpler life in which finding a can of beans or a door with a deadbolt is all that matters. In other words, zombie stories depict people fulfilling real needs. The zombie story shreds the capitalist menagerie of infinite want. Instead, we live video game lives: find gun; protect space; disappear bad guy. Killing makes meaning; dispatch a ghoul to shore up your sense of self. Easy.

And watching zombie shit helps me feel at home in a dead future. In my lesser moments, I believe such a future is coming. The zombie story lets me examine my hopelessness through a cartoon lens of high ground and headshots. The zombie story is a sincere extrapolation of a present moment defined by shitty tools, atomized people, and dwindling resources. In this way, the zombie story is empirical. We're often already in the part of the movie where the news tells you to stay inside. Zombie stories tell us that mass death is coming. So do climate scientists. Maybe we love these stories primarily because they are honest.

Yet zombie stories are not hopeless. They revive two spiritual prospects.

The first is the use and goodness of chosen families. Even in zombie futures, loners who hole up are deemed dangerously weird. People need other people. In a sea of death, life is its own craft. The most morally praiseful moment in any zombie story is the one in which someone risks their life (and usually dies) for the most vulnerable member of their party. This is dumb, but it's also beautiful and necessary. It’s necessary because rejecting expedience is the only decision that defines our kind.

The second prospect is that the dead still live. This isn't a fantastical claim. Memories bring the dead to our door again. A sound, a smell, a joke: all bring back to life those we've lost, even fleetingly. Sometimes we hammer 2x4s across the doorframe, attempting to bar from the dead their inevitable return. Sometimes we try to hide from the stories in our head. But other times we swing the door wide and let them in. And yes: sometimes, like zombies, our memories eat us alive.

The zombie embodies need and memory. Another way to understand this: the zombie is the past rising up to confront the living. Our horde is history. It seems at first that we can either confront the force of the past by numbing ourselves ("You have to destroy the head.") or by letting it overcome us. The third way—to exist peacefully with our pasts; to live and reckon with it—is hard to imagine and harder to practice. The zombie story, then, is a caution against a facile relationship with our nature and with our deeds. The zombie story makes us healthily wary of ourselves.

---

At a simpler emotional level, I watch zombie stories to feel less alone. Zombie stories show people yearning so laboriously for more life. More starkly, the zombie story reflects the daily reality of sick people in America; we need to struggle daily to not die in the hands of greedy hordes (e.g. health insurance extortionists). The zombie story implicates us in each other's mysterious and turbulent commitment to being.

And, paradoxically, I watch zombie shit because zombies ate my neighbors. I mean that zombies destroy my conception of my neighbors as people just as real—just as alive and desirous and desperate—as me. It is fashionable among Americans to believe strangers aren't real, aren't legitimate, aren't deserving. We believe this because this lets us dismiss others' wishes, and thus their political and social demands. Other people are just the inarticulate mass that presses towards you, that cramps you, that stifles your ability to live. I try not to think of my neighbors this way, but sometimes I do, particularly when I’m tired (when "I'm a zombie"). I watch zombie shit to indulge this unthinking anger and disenchantment. In this way, I can run away from the central truth of life: that need and love are inseparable.

I stare at the convenient dead because it is terrible to imagine what I'm running toward.

---

this is a revised version of an older essay