Zombies: My Lifelong Fear and Obsession

 My dad accidentally traumatized me when I was 12.

Growing up, one of my favorite activities was watching movies with my dad, often while helping him in the garage he would have on a movie that I had never seen before. Aliens, Terminator 2, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, The Chronicles of Riddick, The Professional, among many others. He never really asked me if it was something I wanted to watch, it was something he wanted to watch, and I’m very thankful for this. Because of these frequent viewings, I was exposed to various things that I likely wouldn’t have picked on my own. With the declining media literacy amongst Zoomers and Gen A, I think more parents should take my dad's approach: we’re watching this, not Frozen. Granted, I was probably exposed to things that I shouldn’t have seen; Young Frankenstein has a lot more sex jokes than I remembered. But one thing I will always remember is watching George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with my dad.

Made in 1978, Dawn of the Dead is certainly a product of its time. In many ways it expresses the social anxieties of the late 1970s in a very distinct form: a distrust of government power, stark ethnic tension, the banality of consumerism; the film gives voice to the Boomer aphorism “don’t trust anyone over thirty,” that is until the person saying that has a few birthdays. Indeed, the whole Dead trilogy has a visceral questioning of authority, especially Sarah’s line in Day of the Dead: “Yes Sir! Fuck you, sir!”[1]

What stands out most in my memory are the afros. Many of the undead in that film sport the hairstyle that did much to define the decade of disco; the afros and the purple paint on the zombies, combined with their shambling, for me, was comical. Indeed, there are several instances in the film when the zombies’ behavior is utilized for humor. Dawn of the Dead may be the definition of an independent film, with its limited production value (especially the vibrant, almost neon, red of the blood), its emphasis on in-camera practical effects, and its extremely loose story structure. All of this meant one thing to me as a kid: this is a fun movie! Perhaps this is partly why Dawn of the Dead has become a cult classic, it is very scary, but also a lot of fun to watch. Particularly its main setting, a shopping mall, with the main characters being able to do whatever they wanted with any of the consumer items without paying represented a kind of wish-fulfillment. I loved every moment of the movie, and I could tell that my dad loved that I loved the movie. Personally, the Red Neck Hunt near the beginning of the movie is my favorite scene. Consequently, I enjoyed Romero’s other zombie films, even though Day of the Dead had a much bleaker tone and Romero seemed to lose the thread of the genre he created in films like Diary of the Dead or Survival of the Dead. Regardless, Romero’s films have an anarchic quality and a sense of independent spirit that the major Hollywood studios can’t seem to match.

In 2005, soon after we moved to a new house, I was with my dad at Blockbluster (which today is now a Café Rio) when he spied one of the few movies that were for sale: the unrated director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. The 2004 remake took strong influence from the success of 28 Days Later and in many ways marked the resurgence of the zombie genre for the next decade. However, neither my dad nor I had seen the movie, let alone 28 Days Later. So we had no idea what awaited us in this contemporary reimagining.

My mom, younger brother, and younger sister were out of the house; my dad and I were tasked with unboxing the many picture frames and other knick-knacks for the living room. What a wonderful opportunity for some father-son bonding. My dad put the DVD in and together we watched some of the most graphic violence either of us had ever seen in a film. It takes about ten minutes for a title screen to appear, and every moment of those ten minutes is filled with blood, frantic screaming, panicked running, and the utter collapse of civilization. And it was all in broad daylight, it was not relegated to the darkened hours of night where terror usually resides. It was out in the open in a suburban neighborhood, much like the one we had just moved to. To me, what was the most frightening aspect of it all was that the zombies sprinted. These were not the zombies of the 1970s. There was no purpled paint or afros. There was no synthesizer music. These zombies, with the best prosthetics that Hollywood can buy, were vicious and hellbent on consuming the flesh of the living. The opening credits showing global news reports as the whole world devolved into chaos, played against Johnny Cash’s “When the Man Comes Around” not only evoked apocalypse but shook me to my 12-year-old core.

“I looked and behold a pale horse,” Johnny Cash’s voice said through intermittent static, “And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” At that moment, when the violent terror had reached a quivering climax, my dad hit the pause button and said to me, “Take these boxes out to the trashcan.” As I took the boxes out to the driveway, I anxiously observed my surroundings. I knew it was just a movie, just the first ten minutes of a movie, but I was utterly terrified. I rushed back inside, checking behind me and slamming the door, and my dad, none the wiser, hit play.

I don’t blame my dad whatsoever, he thought I could handle it, I had pleaded with him to watch the movie, and of course, I could’ve stopped at any time, I could’ve gone elsewhere, or I could’ve told him that the movie was too scary and I didn’t want to watch it anymore. But I didn’t. So we kept watching. Thankfully, mom returned home about an hour later, so we turned off the movie, lest my brother and sister be scarred. Never before had I appreciated my mother telling us to turn off a movie, but that time her return was a joyous moment for me. I didn’t have to watch anymore of that movie. Later that night, when I went to bed, my dad started the movie again. And though he had it at a low volume and he thought I was asleep, I could hear the shrieks of the dead and could only lie there, my imagination running wild with what new horrors were transpiring in the living room. I seriously contemplated what I would do if I were trapped in my bedroom while the snarling dead smashed their corpses into my door.

After that, I was a wreck. I couldn’t stand to be alone in the house. Waiting for my parents to come home after school, I couldn’t help but imagine that the apocalypse was raging outside. I vividly remember once I was lying on the couch when I heard footsteps on the front porch. I lay there in utter terror, I couldn’t bear to get off the couch lest the ghoul on the front porch see me. We had so many windows in our house, they could break in so easily. I couldn’t afford for them to see me. It was just a deliveryman of course, and they couldn’t possibly have known what pure dread they had invoked in a pre-teen by just doing their job. Another time, my extended family was going to go out for dinner, they asked if I wanted to go with them, expecting me to say “no.” What 12-year-old would turn down the chance of being home alone? When I emphatically said “yes” to going to dinner, my family was very surprised. The whole time at dinner, I was terrified that the apocalypse would start while we were away from the safety of our home.

I didn’t really know how to tell anyone what I was feeling. Aren’t 12-year-olds not supposed to be scared of just a movie? Shouldn’t a 12-year-old know that zombies are impossible, just a figment of the imagination and a story-telling tool to invoke societal commentary? Then again, even today I have trouble telling people how I feel. All that summer I felt trapped, I skirted around the house, double-checking that the doors were shut and locked, listening with dread to the sound of every police siren that ever went by in the distance. I was totally convinced that the apocalypse was going to come any day.

I don’t remember exactly when, but eventually I did tell my family how scared I was. They of course reassured me that the end of the world wasn’t going to happen, that zombies were not only completely made up but totally impossible. They told me in so many different ways that I had nothing to be scared of. Yet, the fear persisted. Could it be, upon reflection, that this is the source of my undiagnosed anxiety?

The only thing that really helped was that one day I stumbled upon The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. In much the same way that the undead consume the flesh of the living, I devoured that book. I read every page and when I finished, I read it all again. Brooks goes into painstaking detail of different methods and strategies for survival in different locales. He gives threat assessments of outbreaks at varying scales, instructions on physical fitness and how to secure different dwellings, details on how to set up an emergency generator and what tools to procure to prepare oneself for the coming rise of the dead. I think what appealed to me, what helped me, was that Brooks took my fear seriously. Likely because he himself felt a similar fear. But after reading that book, the stone weight that had been on my heart eased. I was no longer just a victim. I had knowledge, I had tools, I was prepared. I started making plans of what I would do and where I would go when the outbreak happened. I put control back in my life. A strange thing about human psychology, or perhaps just my psychology, what had been a crippling fear, transformed itself into a near-obsessive interest. Then again, I know I’m not the only one. There are millions of us, silently preparing for the zombie apocalypse. After reading the Survival Guide I picked up Brooks’ other book, World War Z. Tales from the Survivors of the Global Outbreak, Brooks explores how societies collapsed and adapted to the hordes of the dead. And even though he described thousands of people being devoured on a highway and the mega-swarms of hundreds of millions of zombies in Asia, even though every aspect of it mirrored that credit sequence in Dawn of the Dead but in more blood-stained detail, it did not cause the same crippling dread.

From there, I consumed every bit of zombie content I could get my hands on. Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Quarantine, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Land of the Dead, I Am Legend, 30 Days of Night, Zombieland, The Walking Dead, etc. The journey also gave birth to a growing interest in the dystopian and post-apocalypse genres: 1984, Brave New World, Children of Men, Blindness, District 9, V for Vendetta, The Book of Eli, Fallout New Vegas, etc. It also opened a door for a growing appreciation of the horror genre in its many facets. I even attempted to write my own zombie apocalypse story, admittedly it was not very good at all, but I think in retrospect it was a way for me to cope. Much in the same way this essay itself is a way to cope.

Once zombies had been the thing of nightmares for me, something that made me feel dread every single day for months; it grew into something new: a lifelong interest. Years later, I finally took the plunge and watched Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead in its entirety. And….It was okay. Maybe just a bit average as far as zombie movies go. I still love zombies, I love them to the point that for a few years, I became bored of them. From utter terror to boredom.

Such was my boredom with zombies that when The Last of Us came out on HBO in 2023 I paid it very little attention. On one hand, I had been an Xbox 360 kid, so I never had the chance to play the game; on the other hand, zombies are old hat. Perhaps whenever someone makes a romantic comedy about a monster, that is when you know it has been played out. When Call of Duty removes its single-player campaign but keeps the zombie mode, that’s when you know when something has become so mainstream as to be banal.

The same month the TV show aired; my father-in-law passed away. He had a sudden heart attack while driving his semi-truck, thankfully in his last act on this earth, he prevented his truck from crashing. It was so sudden and unexpected and the very next week my wife flew to Wyoming with our 7-month-old baby, leaving me to watch our 3-year-old by myself. At the same time, I was starting the last year of grad school, getting my master’s degree in history. At the same time, we were hit with one of the worst snowstorms in our town’s history; with 9-foot berms on either side of our driveway, we had to shovel and snow-blow for 8 hours every day just to break even. We got stuck in our driveway several times and the snow made our road one-lane for two months. I can’t remember how many times I nearly slid off the road. The school I work for used twelve snow days of our allotted two. With all of these factors, when my friend came over one evening to help me out, and he suggested we watch this new zombie show, I had no idea what I was in for.

The first hour of The Last of Us may be the greatest zombie apocalypse ever put to film. Not so much in terms of the violence or the gore or the prosthetics. This first hour excels in building this mounting dread, something is not quite right; things are happening in the background that the main characters are missing or are just not paying attention to due to modernist complacency. Reflecting on it now, I think the greatest part of this dread is that the perspective we follow is a 14-year-old girl named Sarah. As we watched the chaos unfold, as neighbors turned on neighbors, as the police impotently tried to help, as military jets flew by, as the traffic was backed up on the highway, as jetliners fell out of the sky, as mobs of people ran through the street and our characters could not tell who was infected and who wasn’t. As all of this unfolded, I felt something that I hadn’t felt in 18 years, something that I had thought I had banished long ago. I felt the same dread I had felt when I watched Dawn of the Dead with my dad all those years ago.

There were probably several reasons for this. For this sequence, our perspective character, Sarah, is a 14-year-old girl in 2003. I was 10 years old in 2003, and though she is older than I was and though we have many differences (i.e. I have never been a teenage girl), I felt an affinity with her. She reminded me so much of myself at that time and age: uncertain of what was going on, fearful, dependent on her father to make the tough decisions, to protect her, and out of control of her fate. If there had been a zombie apocalypse in 2005, I would have been in her exact position. Probably the most important reason it terrified me was that I was now a husband and a father. I hadn’t really watched zombie movies since becoming a father, and this was one hell of a reintroduction.

When I was a teenager, thinking about the zombie apocalypse, I was mostly thinking about myself, and while I could pretend to be tough and independent, I knew that I could rely on my parents to make the tough decisions. But here I was now, at the cusp of 30, with two children of my own, watching society fall apart on the screen, and Joel making tough decisions that I knew I would have to make in the same position. Do you stop to help your neighbors? Do you stop to help another family on the road? Do you plow through a crowd of people? It would have to be me in the driver’s seat making those decisions now. I couldn’t just plan on how to save myself anymore, I had to save my three-year-old, my seven-month-old, and my wife. And then to see Joel, at the critical moment, fail and lose Sarah, not necessarily because of his own actions, but because of a situation he couldn’t control. Throughout that first hour of television, I identified deeply with both Joel and Sarah. It created one of the scariest pieces of media I had ever seen.

Watching this episode, combined with the other stressors going on in my life, caused me to have a panic attack at church. A mounting dread came upon me, my thoughts were increasingly focused on my son and how I had to protect him and that with the snow and my wife being out of town, if I suddenly passed away like my father-in-law had there would be no one to check in on my son. Even after my wife came home, the dread did not fully abate, and in my mind I just knew a big part of it was a fear of zombies again. I wanted to put my theory to the test, so one night when everyone was asleep, I once again watched Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, and to my utter shock, once again I was filled with the fear I had felt at 12.

For a time, I was convinced that zombie movies were not for me any longer. I didn’t think that I could handle them any longer, the anxiety of thinking about what I would do to protect my family was too much. Even before I watched The Last of Us I remember walking in the woods with my eldest son and idly imagining if there were zombies what I would do. Our leisurely summer stroll suddenly became filled with anxiety.

A few months went by and by October I started my tradition of trying to watch a scary movie every day. I decided to try the waters of zombie horror again and rewatched 28 Days Later for the first time in years. I found, to my amazement, that I loved it. It was still very frightening, but it was not causing the existential dread that The Last of Us caused. I branched out and watched several zombie films and shows I had never seen before. Train to Busan is a masterful piece of storytelling, a father connecting to his estranged daughter while some of the best zombie horror ever produced befell them. All of Us Are Dead, a heartbreaking tale of teenagers abandoned by their elders to fend for themselves, a betrayal of the young for the sake of the older generation. Zom 100, a horror-comedy about a man feeling liberated by the zombie apocalypse because he no longer must go back to the job he hates so much. #Alive taps into the anxieties around the anonymity of urban living combined with the banality of social media. In the end, the young man must leave his computer to work with a young woman to find salvation. The Night Eats the World is a slower-paced reflection on isolation and loneliness, the zombies themselves almost act as a metaphor for the depression that can come from a break-up. Black Summer is a frenetic story whose focus keeps shifting as the camera follows different people. The first episode of the show is one of the best societal collapse depictions that uses a minimal number of zombies. The first season of Black Summer makes me want to play Left 4 Dead and the second season makes me want to play airsoft. While each one of them was pulse-pounding and Train to Busan did make me anxious as a father, I nevertheless deeply enjoyed them. I came to deeply appreciate East Asian depictions of zombies, for lack of a better term, those zombies tend to be “crunchy.” Furthermore, I noticed a persistent theme in Korean and Japanese zombie stories of men sacrificing themselves in order to protect women. Switching from these East Asian examples to Black Summer was a bit jarring as the first episode features a man physically threatening a woman.

All in all, I experienced a rejuvenation in my appreciation of zombies. Perhaps zombies actually were for me, perhaps the real reason I freaked out watching the first episode of The Last of Us was actually just everything else happening in my life at the time.

As my Grad program wound down in December of 2023; I had finished my oral defense and had turned in my last written essay. My free time (insofar as it existed) was finally my free time, no longer did I either have to use it to do homework or feel guilty for using it for something else. Two days before my graduation, I stayed up late as I usually do and decided to try The Last of Us once more. And, to my surprise, the first episode once again filled me with such dread that I could hardly bear it. The Last of Us is so terrifying that I think it may have traumatized me. That itself, is probably the best endorsement for a horror franchise. But this time I muscled through and watched every single episode and found it to not only be one of the best examples of zombie genre fiction but also one of the most thought-provoking and heartfelt stories I had ever had the pleasure of partaking in.

This long introduction exists because I feel that I need to lay out my bona fides, especially since the main point of this essay is to make a rather strong claim. While the first hour of The Last of Us may be the very best zombie chaos ever put to film, while the third episode of the show was a critical darling for many reviewers, while the hospital scene in the last episode was both a gut-punching moral dilemma as well as a cathartic vindication of Joel’s character; I would argue that a scene no one seems to be discussing is actually not only the linchpin of the entire show’s moral question but also may be the best scene in all of zombie genre horror. It is a scene that is easily summarized in one single line of dialogue: “Bomb.”

[1] George A. Romero, dir. Day of the Dead, (Laurel Entertainment, 1985), 100 min.