Iowa thunderstorm season always puts me in the mood for catching up on my horror reading. Call it Pavlovian conditioning from all the years watching mad scientists in castle laboratories working during a thunderstorm. So pawing through my bookshelf, it occurred to me that there’s one horror genre not born of literature, but film.
Zombies, to wit. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, serial killers, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, and Cthulhu, they all came from the pages of literature first, then got adapted to film second under the loving guidance of Universal, Hammer, Amicus, and company. But zombies formed on the silver screen, and they took a few decades to catch on there. And only then did they start showing up in literature in the same form.
Sure, technically speaking, the first zombie movie, 1932’s White Zombie, was based on William Seabrook’s 1929 novel The Magic Island. But these were early prototypes, still steeped in voodoo medicine (inaccurate, by the way). What we mean when we say “zombie” now is owed to George Romero, full stop, and then the genre had to drift into literature.
So, here’s a great reading list of zombie apocalypse novels over at Suggested Reads. Oh, yes, they’re all very modern. Quite a few of those have seen their own film adaptation, circulus vitae, including Patient Zero and The Girl With All The Gifts.
But this subject got me to wondering: What is it about zombie apocalypses that make them such a self-contained stock scenario? Their popularity stems from what TVTropes calls the “Cozy Catastrophe.” The apocalypse always just so happens to leave a few lucky middle-class folk who, in between fighting off the brain-hungry hordes, is having a smashing time having the world to loot to themselves.
No more boring office job for me! I’m going Mad-Maxing!
That’s what the fan base is smugly confident of: Everybody assumes they’ll be one of the select survivors who get the world mostly to themselves, while having an excuse to blow away nine tenths of the population willy-nilly and claim all the harems for oneself. Was there ever a more neckbeard fantasy?
You long-term readers see where this is going… I’m here to poke holes in your cozy post-zombie daydreams! Everybody makes wrong assumptions about zombie apocalypses, so here’s how I see it really going down. Here’s the things you think you know about a zombie apocalypse which are undead wrong:
#1: Everybody would be on the same page regarding the emergency.
We live in a world with…
- flat-Earthers
- Holocaust deniers
- vaccine deniers
- climate science deniers
- just plain deniers in general
…and you’re telling me that when news of a zombie plague breaks out, everybody will buy it at face value? Pull the other one! Here’s how the real world will react to the first news of a zombie breakout:
- Evangelical Christians will blame it on the gays.
- Bigots will blame it on anybody from any other country.
- Right-wing and left-wing will blame each other.
- Conspiracy theorists will point out “false flags.”
- A huge mass of zombie deniers will take to social media to mock the rest of us for spreading alarm.
- A smaller mass of Tumblr SJWs will demand equal rights for zombies. I’m sure they’ll make up a new name for human-centric anti-zombie prejudice.
- Corporations will try to figure out how to make a buck off exploiting both humans and zombies.
- FOX News will ignore the story until the zombies bash into the studio and eat the anchors right out of their chairs.
Come to that, maybe a zombie apocalypse wouldn’t make that big an impact? The daily news is already a litany of global crisis and nation-shattering disasters right now. Zombies would run somewhere between heightened tensions in the middle east and the latest measles outbreak, with everybody ignoring it.
Mayhem in the streets, constant gunfire, looting and mob rule: In America that would be an apocalypse, but in Syria that’s just called “Tuesday.” How much would it suck if the zombie apocalypse happens, and you still have to pay off your student loans and go to work anyway?
#2: The crazy survivalist prepper with the gun stockpile will be useful.
I’m not about to ask you to watch the whole Doomsday Preppers series – It’s out there if you want to watch it. Here’s a quick video examining a few apocalyptic bunkers:
Notice anything all these people have in common? They’re all spoiled, rotten rich. They’ve mostly never seen a day of combat in their lives, possibly never had to put in a day’s work, and are as out of touch with reality as if they’d been living under a rock, which most of them literally are. Just trek any survivalist website and you’ll see ads for Alex Jones products.
Yeah, if a real emergency goes down, these bubbleheads will be more likely to shoot themselves in the foot, set themselves on fire trying to start the gas generator, or be rendered helpless when they forget the combination on their shelter security system. The ones that are actually good at survival won’t be the least bit interested in helping anybody else.
#3: As long as you have basic necessities, you’re good to go.
When civilization really goes south, consider the things you’ll be forced to do without:
- Power – Most of the power plants will shut down in weeks.
- Fuel – Fuel goes bad in a month, tops. No Mad Max armored tanks driving after a month. The only fuel that will work is wood and coal.
- Medicine – Never mind first aid, what will you do when your medication for anxiety, depression, ADHD, or peanut allergies runs out?
- Technology – No power and no infrastructure means no cellular network. Now that’s we’ve all come to depend on it for everything, good luck finding your way around town without a GPS to guide you.
- Money – Without a governing body to set a monetary unit of account, kiss all ideas of wealth goodbye. The new wealthy: somebody with a stockpile of manuals and a tool chest. In other words, engineers.
Consider Puerto Rico – hey, remember them? They’re part of the United States, you know. In 2017, the island got virtually wiped off the face of the Earth by a hurricane. It’s been two years now, and despite being a territory managed by the US, they’re STILL recovering basic necessities like power, food, and clean water. Meanwhile if you show the slightest concern for Puerto Rico in America, you get labeled a bleeding-heart liberal. There’s actually a wave of denialists about this! Yeah, never mind zombies, all you need for an apocalypse is good old mommy nature.
Everybody is so confident that they’ll be able to handle an apocalypse. But I’ve seen you people at a four-way intersection when the stoplight goes out. You’re helpless until an usher comes along.
#4: It would spread worldwide.
At least this is one piece of good news: Chances are if zombies happen from the classic disease outbreak scenario, the outbreak will be contained to a local area.
We overestimate how mobile zombies would be. Unless they get on planes, they’re not hopping continents. In the real world, wars, riots, and protests break out all the time, and yet the chaos doesn’t spread that far. Despite a world population of 7.5 billion, there’s still plenty of space left in the world. A whole zombie plague could come and go without half the people even knowing about it.
#5: The affected area would survive more than a week without getting nuked.
Attached to the above good news, now here’s the bad news: If the zombie plague is localized, expect that place to get nuked. The rest of the world may not unite on other crisis points, but when it comes to bombing the motherloving daylights out of something, that’s one easy problem to solve.
You want to see the US, EU, Russia, and the pan Pacific to come together? Have a zombie outbreak. You’ll have volunteers round the clock launching missiles. Everybody loves a good fireworks show!
We already know that that’s the official plan, by the way, because officials have published studies about what they would do. The US Pentagon has a plan of action ready to go. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) also has a plan on record. You want to train up? There’s a Zombie Apocalypse Survival Camp. And people say there’s no place fun to go on dates anymore.
Pleasant dreams!
