The comforting fantasy of the Zombie Apocalypse

Its chief feature is that there are survivors, and maybe you could be one of them!

With The Last of Us show occupying some space in the discourse-sphere, I figure that what is old is new again, and I can share a reckon about the Zombie without being a decade out of date.

One of the tropes of the last twenty years has been the “zombie [apocalypse] survival plan”. Many people, even outside of geek-dom, would know to what that refers and might even have one themselves; it is common enough that it could be a first-date icebreaker question.

And more than any other horror trope, the Zombie Apocalypse presupposes the hero’s initial survival, through some combination of luck and timely response. The story can’t start if they aren’t one of the lucky few.

One of horror’s functions is to make real, and therefore faceable, the nebulous and unlocalised fears that we have from living in the real world, with all its genuine threats, many of which are way beyond our control. Even when there’s a sting in the tail, a horror story inevitably ends, and even that distinction is a relief to us.

Occasionally, a writer will create a fictional threat that they want to demonstrate the defeat of, but their story “solution” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The most famous might be War of the Worlds, but my favourite example of this is The Body Snatchers (1954), which ends with the unlikely triumph of the locals when they succeed at attacking a local distribution centre and this sheer act of resistance convinces the aliens of the human moxy, and they mostly run away.

The ‘56 film is pretty faithful, and the studio bosses insisted on tacking on a happy ending, but even that version’s penultimate image of a desperate man running down the motorway from car to car trying to convince anyone to believe him, followed by his discovery of a truck full of pods destined for Los Angeles, leaves an impression strong enough to convince us that it is the Real ending. Most of its remakes have ended in similarly bleak ways.

Back to the Zombie Apocalypse, we are expected to nurse the fantasy that we made it. We saw the signs, we interpreted them correctly, and we saved ourselves and maybe our loved ones from joining the mob.

It is easy to watch this footage of British tourists reacting with bemusement to a sea that is clearly Acting Wrong and think “now is when you run, you fools”. We have the benefit of hindsight, and many of my audience live in Aotearoa, where we semi-regularly have tsunami warnings, and so should recognise the warning signs.

We all have recent memories of early 2020, and what it turns out the start of a global pandemic looks like. I think I can claim with some confidence that I was ahead of most of my family and friends in terms of how quickly I took it seriously, and how closely I followed the developing knowledge of effective controls.

But mine was certainly not an immediate response. I remembered the 2002 SARS outbreak and how quickly it was contained, and the 2009 swine flu, and its lack of personal impact on my life. This “Coronavirus” was clearly serious, but whether it would make it to our shores, I couldn’t tell. I watched the daily headlines like a meerkat scanning for predators. I idly thought about getting some hand sanitizer, or some surgical masks.

If I’d been in Lombardy in February or March, though, this “slow-and-steady” watchfulness wouldn’t have saved me from infection. There was no way that I could have cleverly done the Right Things - nobody really knew what the right things to do were at that point. I would simply have gotten sick, and maybe I would have survived, or maybe I would have just died.

So many of the threats that we collectively face in life are like this: meteors, calderas, earthquakes, volcanoes, war, climate events. Perhaps it’s no wonder that even our nominally dark and scary fiction should try to provide an underlying comfort by inventing stories in which we make it, even if only for a little while.

I think this is why cosmic horror is my comfort blanket. Heavens knows one needs a little comfort sometimes.